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.
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.