[Emma Booth-Tucker]

Born January 8th. 1860. Died October 28th. 1903.

"The entire cost of carrying on the Mission at present is about £50 per week. The offerings of the people themselves at the various stations are now about £17 per week; indeed, nearly every Station is paying its own working expenses. Thus the poor people themselves do something. This they ought to do. It would be wrong to deprive them of the privilege of giving their mite, and if they prize the instrumentalities that have been blessed to them, and are rightly instructed, they will cheerfully give, however small their contribution may be."

It has only been by clinging to this plan that the little Society, begun in the East of London, has been able to spread itself throughout the world and yet remain independent, everywhere, of local magnates. And The General had the sorry satisfaction of seeing the structure tested by the most cruel winds of slander and suspicion, with the result that the total of contributions to its funds during the last years has been greater than ever before. Part, indeed, of our greatest difficulty with regard to money now is the large total yearly at our disposal, when all the totals in every country and locality are added together. Any one can understand that this must be so, and that it could not help us to publish the amount all together. If in a hundred places only a thousand pounds were raised, anybody can see that to cry aloud about the hundred thousand in any one of those places could not but make everybody in that place less capable of strenuous struggle such as is needed to get together each thousand.

Therefore, whilst publishing every year the properly audited balance-sheet referring to amounts received and spent in London, and similar balance-sheets, similarly audited, in each other capital, we have always refrained, and always shall refrain, from any such massing of totals, or glorying in any of them, as could help our enemies to check the flow of liberality anywhere.

When, in 1895, there seemed to be a general cry for some special investigation into the use made of the Fund raised as a result of The General's "Darkest England" Appeal, we were able to get a Commission of some of the most eminent men in the country, whose Report effectively disposed of any doubts at the time.

The Commission had for Chairman Earl Onslow, and its members were the Right Hon. Sir Henry James (afterwards Lord James), Messrs. Sydney Buxton, Walter Long, and Mr. Edwin Waterhouse, President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, the Right Hon. Hobhouse, M.P., acted as Secretary.

The Report of no Commission could, however, still any hostile tongue. The cry for "investigation" has always been simply the cry of enmity or envy, which no amount of investigation could ever satisfy. The General perfectly understood this at the time, and wrote to a friend of the discerning order:--

"How I feel generally with respect to the future is expressed in one word, or rather two, 'Go forward.' The Red Sea has to be crossed and the people rescued from Hell here and Hell hereafter. We must stick to our post.

"I am quite aware that I may now, probably shall be, more misunderstood than ever. But God and time will fight for me. I must wait, and my comrades must wait with me.

"I need not say that the subject has had, and still has, our fullest consideration; but I cannot say more until I see clearly what position the country will take up towards me during the next few days."

Need I say that this Report never checked for one day the ferocity of the attacks upon the General or his Army. Had public opinion been deluded by the babblings of our critics in any country we should not only have lost all support, but been consigned to jails as swindlers and robbers. But the fact that we get ever-increasing sums, and are ever more and more aided by grants from Governments and Corporations, or by permissions for street-collecting, is the clearest demonstration that we are notoriously upright in all our dealings.