SOLDIERS' DEPENDANTS.
[To Tea Eonos or woo "Srsomoo."] Sia,—A general meeting of the Soldiers' and Sailors' Families Association was held last week in the Caxton Hall. The summons to the members of the Association to the meeting was worded as a request to uphold the action of the Executive Committee when it gave in to the demand of the Executive of the Prince of Wale* Fund that it should treat the cases of the unmarried women on the same footing as those legally married. I was told that the meeting would be " packed "—and that was so. Two excuses for the action of the Committee were put forth. Mr. Hayes Fisher said that the Government had collared all the money by means of the device of the Prince of Wales's Fund, and that the Committee of the S.S.F.A. bad no alternative but to allow its tail to be twisted. The Association found itself, in fact, in the same corner as Belgium as regards its continued existence and its soul, and an alternative choice. A young lady then said that she represented a county which I will not pillory here, and that recruiting would have been impossible in that county unless concubinage was subsidized. And this I conclude was the reason of the Government's own action in the matter, and I think that no greater insult to the working class of this country has ever been offered them. Events have shown that the percentage of left-handed connexions on the part of the men who have enlisted is extremely small—in London only two per cent. And my experience as S.S.F.A. secretary of a large town is that these men belong to what I will call the scallywag section of the community, and that the New Army has no use for them—they are being returned to civil life under the guise of "medically unfit." The S.S.F.A. might therefore have saved its soul without any effect on recruiting, and have retained tho respect of those who, like the present writer, consider that civilization has been built up on the increasing decency of family life, and who do not propose to budge from that position for all the dialectics in the world.—I
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