The Sun.
London, England, 1865-04-29 00:00:00

quarters of 1844, amounting to £1,444, had never
been paid at all when this investigation commenced.
For the first two quarters of 1849 Mr. Ruscoe paid
in to Mr. Edmunds's " Patent-office account" at
Coutts's, £1,736 as the amount of the fees received,
but Mr. Edmunds paid over to the Exchequer only
£1,197, a sum not corresponding with the amount
of fees for either quarter. It seems impossible to
ascribe the withholding of such sums to any mistake.
In December last, months after the investigation
of Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Hindmarch commenced,
Mr. Edmunds rendered to the Treasury an account
of fees received by him in every year that he was in
office, and of the sums paid by him every year into
the Exchequer. This account shows that by his
own admission he had received up to August, 1852
(his receipts, say the two gentlemen just named,
were, in fact, larger), £51,245, and he had only
paid into the Exchequer £46,055, leaving a defi-
ciency of £5,190, and, this being after the date of
his last payment into the Exchequer, he has con-
tinued to withhold that sum from the Exchequer
for 12 years—namely, until after the discovery of
his defalcations. About the time of that last pay-
ment into the Exchequer the Patent Law Amend-
ment Act came into operation and abolished the
fees previously payable on patents for inventions.
But there were still fees received on other patents
and charters, which ought to have been paid into
the Exchequer as required by the Act of Parlia-
ment. At the commencement of this inquiry, how-
ever, Mr. Edmunds had not only failed to pay any
part of the £5,190 into the Exchequer, but had
allowed the subsequent fees payable by him into
the Exchequer to accumulate in his hands to the
extent of a further sum of £2,682, making together
£7,872. It was not till September, 1864, that he
paid over this sum.
The various sums thus detained from the Exche-
quer by Mr. Edmunds remained in his possession
unknown to every person but himself. It has been
mentioned that he was bound to verify his receipts
by affidavit every quarter, and Mr. Ruscoe regularly
prepared and transmitted or delivered to Mr. Ed-
munds' engrossments of affidavits to be sworn by
him verifying the sums to be paid into the Exche-
quer as the amount of fees really received. Mr.
Ruscoe knew that the affidavits would be false, but
he says that Mr. Edmunds also knew them to be
false ; so Mr. Ruscoe went on preparing them year
by year. But it was a mere farce ; Mr. Edmunds
allowed Mr. Ruscoe to believe that he actually made
the false affidavits year by year, but he did not in
fact swear to them ; he admits that he has them
stilt in his possession. He alleges that as he found
on the first occasion that the Controller of the Ex-
chequer would not receive the affidavit he never
made another. The fact is that the affidavits were
not required at the office of the Controller of the
Exchequer, but at the Treasury, and Mr. Edmunds
did make the proper affidavits on the first three
payments and transmitted them to the Treasury,
but he made none afterwards ; and the deductions
which he made from the public money explain why
he did not make the affidavits.
It has to be stated that some at least of the
moneys which Mr. Edmunds received from Mr.
Ruscoe for the fees of office never were paid into the
Patent-office account at Coutts's. A sum of
£433 for Patent-office fees was paid by Mr. Ruscoe
in 1845 to Mr. Edmunds, or to his private account
at Coutts's, but
.it never found its way into his
" Patent-office account " there. It also appears
that the sums withdrawn by Mr. Edmunds from
the " Patent-office account" at Coutts's, and trans-
ferred to his private banking account, in the
period between 1834 and 1857, amounted to
£5,869. Other sums appear to have been taken
from the Patent-office account for Mr. Edmunds's
private purposes. In 1840 and 1841 sums amount-
ing to £6OO were thus withdrawn from the Patent-
office account, and paid to Mr. Leman, who states
that they were received by him in repayment of
loans he had made to Mr. Edmunds. Mr. Edmunds
in August, 1852, had in his hands, according to his
account, £5,190, money that ought to have been
paid into the Exchequer, but the balance to the
credit of the Patent-office account at Coutts's at that
time was only £2,777, so that he must have misap-
propriated, by applying to his own use, £2,412 of
those fees. He admits that at the end of 1862 he
had detained £7,656 from the Exchequer, but the
balance standing to his credit in the Patent-office
account at Coutts's was only £3,230. He increased
the balance by £1,450, a few days after Mr. Green-
wood completed his report, in January,' 1863, on the
defalcations of Mr. Smith, a clerk in the Patent-
office. But, in fact, the sums which Mr. Edmunds
had withheld from the Exchequer were much larger
than his accounts show. Soon after his appointment
he authorised Mr. Roscoe to deduct from the fees
payable into the Exchequer small sums to defray
expenses of the office which Mr. Edmunds was bound
himself to discharge. In 1844 he allowed Mr.
Ruscoe to deduct from the public money a salary of
£l3O for himself. Of the misappropriation of the
discount for stamps it is unnecessary to repeat the
history,nor of the unjustifiable deduction of 125.10 d.
for every skin of parchment used. For severa
years Mr. Edmunds took upon himself unlawfully
to charge £lOO for Mr. Ruscoe's receipt of those
fees which belonged to the Clerk of the Hanaper,
the real object being to give Mr. Ruscoe remunera-
tion for his services out of somebody else's pocket
than that of Mr. Edmunds, which ought to have
borne it. Nor did Mr. Ruscoe fail to follow the
example set him. Year by year he continued to keep
back from the amount of fees to be paid into the
Patent-office banking account sums of money vary-
ing in amount, apparently at his own discretion.
When the fees for a year amounted to a large sum,
the sum abstracted was proportionally large, and
when the amount of fees to be paid was small, the
sum abstracted was small also. The largest sum ab-
stracted in this way by Mr. Ruscoe was £64, taken
in the year 1858 ; and it is curious to observe that
in 1862, the year in which Mr. Greenwood made an
inquiry into the defalcations of a clerk in the Patent-
office, as already mentioned, the abstractions by Mr.
Ruscoe from the fees payable to the Exchequer en-
tirely ceased. The manner in which these sums were
kept back by Mr. Ruscoe was, to say the least, very
disgraceful. Instead of entering the deductions in
the books so that the sums deducted would be ap-
parent, the entries of fees or the castings-up were
falsified in the fee-books or in the Patent-office ac-
count, and occasionally accurate entries made in
the first instance were afterwards erased in order to
insert false ones in lieu of them. The misconduct of
Mr. Ruscoe was clearly made out in his presence
from an inspection of the books, and he admitted
the facts. The abstraction of money in this way be
fore he became a salaried officer of the Commis
sioners of Patents would not have been so surpriS

ing, considering the wretched remuneration he had

'"or the performance of his duty ; and Mr. Green

wood and Mr. Hindrnarch are strongly inclined to
think that all the abstractions were effected with the

connivance, if not with the authority, of Mr. Ed•

.. ,
munds. But after the time when Mr. Ruscoe be-
came, in Oct., 1852, an officer of the Commissioners

of Patents, receiving a salary of £4OO a year, the
abstraction of money in the way just described was
without palliation, for he admits that he was aware
of the provisions of the statutes, in pursuance of
which the fees were to be paid into the Exchequer
and into the fee fund of the Court of Chancery, and
that he knew Mr. Edmunds could not authorise him
to take the money. Mr Ruscoe, however, contends
that Mr. Edmunds was master of the office, and had
the actual control of the money passing through the
old Patent-office, and that he, Mr. Ruscoe, was not
responsible for anything done by him in pursuance
of Mr. Edmunds's directions.

The result is as follows :—Mr. Edmunds paid into
the Exchequer in Sept. last the sum of £7,872,
as the balance due from him for fees that ought to
have been paid in long before. But that sum is

'ound by Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Hindmarch to

be £892 short of the true balance ' • and if to that
be added the £3,033, the amount of the sums of
12s. 10d. unlawfully deducted from the fees, the
balance of fees still payable to the Exchequer by
Mr. Edmunds amounts to £3,925. To this also
must be added £5,132 unlawfully kept back on the
purchase of stamps, and £560 for deficiency in the
payments to the Suitors' Fee Fund of fees he re-
ceived on account of it. The four sums amount
together to £9,617, which has been withheld by him
for years, and, if treated as a debt, ought to be
augmented by compound interest.