TAKING "TIPS" FROM CONTRACTORS.
AFTER lasting nine days, the very unpleasant Canteens Trial came to an end on Wednesday, when Colonel Whitaker was found guilty of receiving money as an
inducement to show favour, and to abstain from showing disfavour, to Messrs. Lipton, Limited, in respect of canteen contracts. He was sentenced to six months imprisonment in the second division. Minto and Cansfield, two of the civilian defendants, were fined £500 each for paying illicit commissions, and several other civilians were fined smaller sums for the same offence. The quartermasters and sergeants, who had pleaded guilty to receiving illicit commissions, were bound over in their own recognizances of £50 each to come up for judgment if called upon. The War Office are to be congratulated upon having procured a public prosecution without allowing themselves to be intimidated by the numerous superficial or plausible arguments of expediency which might easily have been brought forward against the policy of a public prosecu- tion. It is generally a fact that a duty is never more truly a duty than when it is disagreeable. We sincerely hope that it will be recognized throughout the Army that "the day of leniency," as Mr. Justice Darling said, " is past." It cannot be said and understood too plainly that illicit commissions are in the nature of theft. The money used for paying them does not come out of the central aether, thus doing harm to nobody, but literally out of somebody's pocket. It has, for the most part, to be deducted from the value obtained by the users of the canteens—that is to say, the bulk of private soldiers—and represents a deficit on the value which they ought to have received. The fact that the firms which pay illicit commissions profess to regard the payment of such commissions as an inevitable part of their working expenses does not alter the fact we have stated.
It may be held that the civilians who tempted Colonel Whitaker deserve to be in prison to-day even more than Colonel Whitaker himself. And the same argument would apply to the civilians who tempted the quarter- masters. They were the corrupters. But it might be replied that as much temptation comes from one side as from the other. Indeed, according to some accounts, many quartermasters, who, of course, have it in their power to foment or suppress dissatisfaction among the men, levy a regular blackmail on the con- tractors who supply canteens. At all events, in delivering his judgment Mr. Justice Darling made it very plain that those who are promoted to be quartermasters generally find themselves at once entangled in a system which has been long established, and which it would require a ram of force of character to break through. It may be that quartermasters would be aided to resist temptation if the canteens were managed on the co-opera- tive system, in which no outsiders would have any part, and under which the soldiers who use the canteens would benefit directly by their profits. Some regiments abroad— in South Africa, for instance—have a virtually co-operative system which is remarkably successful. It is impossible to rely upon finding the capacity for management on a large scale in every regiment, and some kind of central control (which exists in South Africa in the form of the Garrison Institute) would be necessary. Rather than have the present unsatisfactory compromise in the United Kingdom by which soldier-amateurs contract as they like with traders, some commanding officers would wish to have the canteens run entirely by outsiders who have special knowledge and training for the purpose. They believe that the men would then be much better served. But the vast majority of officers are prevented from taking this view because they object to the introduction of officials not amenable to military discipline. No doubt well- managed co-operative canteens would be the ideal system. We are not prepared, however, to dogmatize. There has been wide corruption, and the immediate need is that the law should be enforced rigorously whenever the restraints of public opinion are insufficient to prevent criminal offences.
Now we want to look at the matter from a much wider, and in our opinion a very much more important, stand- point. We have said that the law must be rigorously enforced ; but however stern the law may be, the absence of corruption must ultimately depend upon the moral atmosphere of the nation. Even if direct illicit commissions were stamped out by the law, there would still be evasions and circuitous courses by which the equivalents of illicit commissions would be paid. A merchant might make an apparently harmless present to A, a friend of B—B being
the person the merchant wished to benefit—and A, under an arrangement which could not easily be proved, might sell the motor-car, the wine, or whatever the present was, and offer a " Christmas present " in the form of a cheque to B. The law can never go more than half-way, if as far. The only cure in the last resort is a "chastity of honour" among those who hold positions of trust, and there is no hope whatever of reaching this condition unless those who are in the highest and most honourable positions in the land are not merely above reproach, but above suspicion. How necessary a sound public opinion is, and how far we are from having it, is shown in a curiously pitiful and dramatic way in the Canteens Trial. Take the personal defence of Colonel Whitaker, which he added to the defence put forward for him by his counsel. His words are worth examination. He said, according to the report in the Times :— " What he had been convicted here of committing he never looked upon as a crime. He had never committed a crime in his life. He had always been a man of honour. ... It was before the Act of. Parliament came in force. But, apart from that, what he did he did under the persuasion of the gentleman whose name had been brought into the case. He thought he was doing no wrong. He thought no wrong. He did it because be was in need of money at the time. He had two sons at Sandhurst and had to pay for their education. He had been thirty-eight years in the Army with nothing but his pay. He had now been eight years from the Army ; he had a small home where his wife was—that home would be broken up."
Mr. Justice Darling dismissed an excuse put forward by Colonel Whitaker, that he bad been led into his offence by a letter written by Lord Saye and Sele (then Colonel Geoffrey Fiennes), who had persuaded him to act as agent for a firm of brewers (contracting with a military canteen), and to accept a free journey to Crete while acting as their representative. Whereupon Colonel Whitaker continued :—
" He had never meant throughout this case to infer that this money was wholly received from the brewers. He received money from Mr. Ness, but be did not know whether it came from Lipton or whether it came from the brewers. He was working for Mr. Ness. The whole thing was a misunderstanding. He repeated that he was absolutely innocent, never in any way having betrayed his honour as Colonel of his regiment. There was not an iota of evidence that he had ever shown favour, or abstained from show- ing disfavour, to anyone. On the contrary, his regiment was one of the best in the Army, and his men respected him in every way. He was working outside as a poor man, and he could not uphold the tradition of a Colonel of his regiment without something out- aide. He was an injured man. He could look anybody in the face and say that he was as innocent as anyone in that Court. Ho asked the Judge to take into consideration that he had three sons, and that if he were sentenced to imprisonment two of them had already made up their minds to retire from the Army."
These are tragic words ; no one could read them without deep pity ; but they are not rational words. We ask whether, if there were the clear and unhesitating under- standing in the public mind which there ought to be as to what is corrupt and what is not corrupt, and as to what may be done honourably and what cannot be done without dishonour, it would have been possible for a man of Colonel Whitaker's experience to use such words seriously, even in a moment of intense emotion. We are sure that it would have been impossible. Colonel Whitaker, it ie said, derived as much as X300 a year from payments from the contractors. He could not have answered satis- factorily to himself the simple question : "Am I ready to declare to the War Office that this payment is being made to me ? " But if he was not ready to declare the truth openly, lie must have known that the very secrecy implied curruption. What he no doubt said to himself was some- thing of this sort : "This payment is not, of course, a thing that can be officially sanctioned. But as a matter of fact every one knows that such commissions are common. Business would not go on without them. Firms regularly allow so much a year in their accounts to pay them, and I am robbing nobody by accepting my share. If I did not take it, someone else would. Besides. who would put the money to a better and more patriotic use than I shall ? "
By far the greatest need in the fight against corruption is to create such a popular detestation of every kind of bribery that men guilty of it will know that they will suffer the same sort of ignominy as is suffered now by those who are caught stealing or cheating at cards. But we must begin at the top. How have we been helped from above in creating the desired atmosphere ? Have the Government encouraged or assisted the country to recog- nize that, in Mr. Justice Darling's words, to take a "tip" from a contractor admits of no excuse its law? Wbv, these words describe almost the very thing which three Ministers did in the Marconi business, and for which the House of Commons refused explicitly to condemn them. We do not, of course, say that their offence was literally com- parable with that of Colonel Whitaker. They accepted a different sort of " tip "—a Stock Exchange" tip," which was convertible into money. And it may be said that it reached them through intermediaries, and not direct from the contractor. Nevertheless, the principle in the two cases is the same. The Ministers knew that the information which was offered to them as pecuniarily valuable came from one who was in contractual relations with the Government. Although they were members of the Government, they accepted the information and acted on it. In other words, they consented to put them- selves under a pecuniary obligation to persons seeking to contract with the Government. If that sort of thing is allowed to pass without a definite repudiation and con- demnation by a resolution of the House of Commons, we are nut even making a beginning with the creation of a better atmosphere. The " small men " lower down will say : "Why shouldn't we make a bit? Look at the King's Ministers. They explain their acts away in a clever manner which we can't imitate, but it all comes to the same thing in the end. They are out for money, and so are we. Mr. Lloyd George told the Marconi Committee he was poor. Colonel Whitaker told the Judge he was poor. But we are poor too. It is all humbug to say there is any particular harm in what we are doing." Those who have not looked into the matter of public cor- ruption would not believe how rampant it is both in trade and in municipal life. We could not be more firmly con- vinced of anything than we are that the House of Commons will come to regret that a resolution was not passed point- ing out and condemning the want of delicacy and dis- cretion in the Ministers concerned. We have always admitted that they were innocent of corrupt intention. But their act was such as to create suspicion, and thus to debase the standard of conduct in public men and men in positions of trust. They expressed regret, it is true, but we cannot, after the economy of truth which they had practised in the House of Commons, consider that that was nearly enough. As though to show that it meant nothing to him, Mr. Lloyd George (who more than the others sinned against the light, since some years before he had formulated the best maxims for the financial conduct of public men that we have ever read) proceeded to make speeches throughout the country violently assailing his critics, as though he were an innocent martyr ands grossly injured person. His feelings were not fine enough to let even his slight apology stand.
There is one other point on which we wish to say some- thing. Lord Saye and Sale, when he was Colonel Fiennes, and before he became Comptroller of the Royal Household, wrote a letter to Colonel Whitaker which had nothing to do with the principal charge against Colonel Whitaker. It contained the proposal that Colonel Whitaker should recommend the beer of a particular firm to a regiment whose Colonel (as we understand Mr. Justice Darling) was not satisfied with that beer. Colonel Whitaker was to be paid his travelling expenses, and be accepted the offer. The proposal should neither have been made to an officer nor have been accepted by him. But we think Mr. Justice Darling in his contemptuous language about Lord Saye and Sole-expressed his indigna- tion partly on the wrong grounds. We cannot accept so exalted an estimate of the position of Lord Saye and Sele, or of anyone else, as to be horrified at his "cadging for orders for beer." Mr. Justice Darling said that if he himself belonged to Lord Saye and Sele's noble family he would "rather starve" than do such a thing. If Peers find that their peculiar ability lies in acting as agents or travellers for a firm of brewers, why should they not do it ? Surely our only concern should be that they should " cadge " scrupulously. We suppose that the plan was that Colonel Whitaker, in return for payment, should appear to offer an-independent opinion on the beer and induce the Colonel to continue to buy it. If so, that was a most improper proposer to make to him. But we do not profess to understand the details, and we hope that Lord Saye and Sale will make a personal statement on the subject in the House of Lords.
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