So many insinuations have been persistently thrown out, year after year, with regard to the integrity of The General's dealings with finance, that I have taken care not merely to consult with comrades, but to give opportunity to some who were said to "have left in disgust" with regard to these matters, to correct my own impression if they could.
Having been so little at Headquarters myself since I left for Germany, in 1890, I knew that my own personal knowledge might be disputed, and my accuracy questioned; therefore, I have been extra careful to ascertain, beyond all possibility of dispute, the correctness of the view I now give.
One who for many years had the direction of financial affairs at the International Headquarters, and who retired through failing health rather than become a burden upon the Army's ever-strained exchequer, wrote me on November 28, 1910:--
"The General has always taken the keenest interest in all questions bearing upon The Army's financial affairs, and has ever been alive to the necessity for their being so administered as to ensure the contributing public's having the utmost possible value for the money contributed, at the same time rendering a careful account from year to year of his stewardship.
"Carefully prepared budgets of income and expenditure are submitted to him year by year in connexion with all the central funds, reports are called for from time to time as to the extent to which such estimates have been realised.
"He was always keen and far-sighted in his consideration of the proposals put before him, and quick to find a flaw or weakness, or to point out any responsibilities which had not been sufficiently taken into account.
"Until recent years, when his world-wide journeyings made it necessary to pass the responsibility on to the Chief of the Staff, he largely initiated his own schemes for raising money, and wrote his own principal appeals.
"Those who refer to The General as 'a puppet in the hands of others,' or as anything but an unselfish, disinterested servant of humanity, only show their ignorance of their subject."
One of the schemes by which our finances have been greatly helped everywhere, and which is now imitated by many Churches and Societies all over the world--the Self-Denial Week, established in 1886--was The General's own invention. It was at a time when, as he writes:--
"In some Corps half, and in some more than half, of our Soldiers have been for months without any income at all, or at most with just a shilling or two. In addition, many of our regular contributors, as owners of land or of manufacturing houses, have suffered from the depression, and have not been able to assist us further.
"The rapid extension of The Army has necessitated an increased expenditure. Our friends will see that our position is really a serious one.
"What is to be done? Reduction, which means retreat, is impossible. To stand still is equally so.
"We propose that a week be set apart in which every Soldier and friend should deny himself of some article of food or clothing, or some indulgence which can be done without, and that the price gained by this self-denial shall be sent to help us in this emergency.
"Deny yourself of something which brings you pleasure or gratification, and so not only have the blessing of helping us, but the profit which this self-denial will bring to your own soul."
This effort, which in the year of its inauguration only produced 4,280, has in twenty-six years grown till it totalled in Great Britain in 1911, £67,161, and has so taken hold of the people's minds and hearts everywhere as to produce even in poor little Belgium last year 7,500 f.
Perhaps it need hardly be explained that the system of special effort and special begging near the entrance to railway stations, and in all the most prominent places of the cities, which has grown out of this week, with the approval of Governments and Press everywhere, has done more than any one could have dreamt of to increase interest in the needs of others, and holiness and self-denial in attending to them.
And it is, after all, upon that development of practical love for everybody that The Army's finance depends.
Merely to have interested so many rich people in The Army might have been a great credit to The General's influence, but to have raised up everywhere forces of voluntary mendicants who, at any rate, for weeks at a time are not ashamed to be seen begging in the streets for the good of people they have never seen, is an achievement simply boundless in its beneficent value to all mankind, and limitless in the guarantee it provides for the permanent maintenance and extension of our work.