ABSTRACT
Major Powys has made more than one serious mistake in the management of the fund intrusted to the Central Association in Aid of the Wives and Families, Widows and Orphans, of Soldiers ordered to the East. Having originated it in great part by his own exertions, he seems to have conceived the idea that it is his own, and that he has a right to distribute the charity under his own interpretation of the rules. The question is raised principally by three cases, in which relief has been refused to wives left by private soldiers named M’Connell, Goodwin or Godwin, and Brightwell. In the two first cases the plea for refusing the charity consisted in the statement, that the wives had not been recognized by their regiments. But relief has subsequently been granted to Mrs. M’Connell, who had proved her marriage satisfactorily. Brightwell enlisted under a false name as a single man, and, as the plea for refusing relief to his widow or deserted wife, Major Powys argues that to relieve her would be to encourage desertion of wives, perjury, and falsehood. The Rev. H. Newland, in whose parish Mrs. Brightwell happens to be a resident, has sustained her case with great ability and moderation, showing Major Powys, in the first place, that punishment intended for the offence of Brightwell, who is a mauvais sujet, will not really reach him if it is inflicted upon his wife, who is a deserted woman; and secondly, that in subscribing to the fund, the public did not intend to draw distinctions between women who happen to be married to men of bad character and those who happen to be married to men of good character. The real ground for subscribing at all is, that the husbands are taken away on a public service, without any choice of their own, and that the women are, therefore, left without the means of subsistence. It is intended that the service of the country shall not entail calamity upon private families in humble circumstances. That is the sole intention of the fund; and when Major Powys distributes the money upon other grounds, he differs from the purposes for which the money was asked, and retrospectively constitutes the Central Association a body that has received money on false pretences. He acts as if he thought he had a right to “do what he likes with his own;” but as soon as the association comprised other persons it ceased to belong to Major Powys, and the large sum of money which was intrusted to him for specific purposes belongs to the original subscribers until it is devoted to the purposes that they intended. Evidently, if it is applied to any other purpose, the secretary and managers of the association are answerable to the subscribers for the amount thus diverted. Major Powys is able to bring forward, in corroboration of his judgment, that of the Woolwich committee, who have decided that William Goodwin’s widow cannot be relieved because he perjured himself in calling himself a single man—that is, the Woolwich committee go along with the Major in begging the question. The Woolwich committee perform the well-known part of the “plus sot qui l’admire [a greater fool to admire him];” and any man can always get committees to do that work for him. He has that one support against the burst of public feeling expressed by journals and protesting subscribers. His position, indeed, is so isolated that he has been obliged to ask favour of his most formidable opponent. After yielding to The Times, in granting the relief at first withheld from Mrs. M’Connell, after venting a natural, but not a creditable spleen against that journal, in calling it “the most disreputable newspaper in England,” Major Powys requests the editor to publish his Woolwich certificate! We have never been among those who have flattered our great contemporary; our fidelity to a Government whom we are bound conscientiously to sustain sometimes places us in antagonism with our independent friend; but in no case has the power of The Times been more justly or beneficially shown than in this, where it has succeeded in defending a great principle embodied in a few helpless women, and in exposing one of the greatest abuses to which justice can be exposed—the perversion of charity by those who are trustees, however volunteering and however honorary, in its administration, as much as if other people’s money were collected by the tax-gatherer instead of being freely given on the faith of a specific understanding.—Globe.
