As it is, I fear, many go their way “disgusted at the whole thing,” because of the little scrap of it they have overheard.

But, pray, what is the essential difference between the call for “twopence to make up a shilling,” and the colossal call made in the name of some royal personage for “an additional ten thousand pounds” to make up the L25,000 needed for a new hospital wing?  Surely, a hospital, whose value and services commend it to the entire population should need no such spurs as subscription lists published in all the papers, or even the memory of a world benefactor to help it to get the needed funds.  But it does, and its energetic promoters, be they royal or not, deserve and get universal praise for “stooping”—­if it be stooping—­to any device of this kind needed to get the cash.  Do they get it? is the only question any sensible person asks.

And nobody questions that our “stooping” Officers and “begging Sisters” get the twopences and shillings and pounds needed to keep The Army going, in spite of all its critics—­whether of the blatant street-corner, or of the kid-gloved slanderer type.

If we reflect upon the subject we shall see how sound and valuable are the principles on which all our twopenny appeals are based.

From the very beginning The General always set up the standard of local self-support as one of the essentials of any real work.  Whilst labouring almost exclusively amongst the poorest of the poor, he wrote, in 1870:—­

[Illustration:  Emma Booth-Tucker

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

“The entire cost of carrying on the Mission at present is about L50 per week.  The offerings of the people themselves at the various stations are now about L17 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.