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

THE SUN, LONDON, SATURDAY EVENING, APRIL 29, 1865.

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, £1,78-6-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' engrossmeirts 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
still 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 fadt 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, Iyho states
that they were received by him in repayment of
loans he bad 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 feee
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 o]

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
for the performance of his duty ; and Mr. Green-
wood and Mr. Hindmarch are strongly inclined to
think that all the abstractions were effected with the

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

muuds.

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
found 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.

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—If anything could mitigate the distress
of the American people in their present affliction, it
might surely be the sympathy which is expressed by
the people of this country. We are not using the
language of hyperbole in describing the manifesta-
tion of feeling as unexampled. Nothing like it has
been witnessed in our generation, for we accept of
course those domestic visitations in which the afflic-
tion of a Sovereign is naturally the affliction of the
nation. But President Lincoln was only the chief of
a foreign State, and of a state with which we were
not unfrequently in diplomatic or political collision.
He might have been regarded as not much more to us
than the head of any friendly Government, and yet
his end has already stirred the feelings of the public
to their uttermost depths. It has been said that the
Papal Aggression created a more universal excite-
ment among us than had been produced by any
political event even for a whole generation, but that
excitement was of gradual and tardy growth. At
first the news fell flat upon the public mind, and was
treated with unconcern. It was not till later in the
day that the resentment of the nation found a voice.
But now a space of 24 hours has sufficed not only
to fill the country with grief and indignation, but to
evoke almost unprecedented expressions of feeling
from constituted bodies. It was but on Wednesday
that the intelligence of the murder reached us, and
on Thursday the House of Lords and Commons,
the Corporation of the city of London, and the
people of our chief manufacturing towns in public
meetings assembled, had recorded their sentiments
or expressed their views. In the House of Lords
the absence of precedent for such a manifesta-
tion was actually made the subject of remark.
That much of this extraordinary feeling is due to
the tragical character of the event and the horror
with which the crime is regarded is doubtless true,
nor need we dissemble the fact that the loss which
the Americans have sustained is also thought our
own loss in so far as one valuable guarantee for the
amity of the two nations may have been thus re-
moved. But, upon the whole, it is neither the pos-
sible embarrassment of international relations nor
the infamous wickedness of the act itself which has
determined public feeling. The preponderating sen-
timent is sincere and genuine sympathy—sorrow for
the chief of a great people struck down by an assas-
sin, and sympathy for that people in the trouble
which at a crisis of their destinies such a catastrophe
must bring. Abraham Lincoln was as little of a
tyrant as any man who ever lived. He could have
been a tyrant had he pleased, but he never uttered
so much as an ill-natured speech. The Civil War was
attended by all war's own horrors in too many in-
stances, but there was no cruelty at Washington or
New York—hardly any prolonged or unaccountable
severity. In the whole of this sanguinary strife,
notwithstanding the exasperation of popular feel-
ing, there has been no political bloodthirstiness.
Fanatical speakers have given .vent to their passions
on the platform, but violence never went beyond
words. If the people of the Seceding States were
rebels, as the people of the North chose to consider
them, never was rebellion, except on the field of
battle, more gently handled. The North put forth
its whole strength and exerted its whole energies to
conquer the insurrection and subdue the insurgents,
but, on the single condition of reunion, it would
promptly have made peace with them again. At
first, the South might have had almost its will even
in the matter of slavery, and to the very last, even
up to the meeting of President Lincoln with the
Southern Commissioners in Hampton Roads, he was
ready with amnesty, oblivion, and liberal considera-
tion for incidental difficulties. At any moment the
rebellion itself and all its terrible cost would have
been forgiven, and the South might have had its ven-
ture for independence at no charge but that of the
war itself. A melancholy interest will now attach
to the ceremony of inauguration on the 6th of last
March, and those who incline superstitiously to the
notion of prognostics or coincidences will probably
think with some emotion of the brief ar.d even
mournful speech in which the re-elected President
characterised the occasion. The grave and despon-
dent tone of his short address was so strongly con-
trasted with the usual oratory of his countrymen as
to create remark at the time, and it seemed as if
some insight into the future impressed him with
misgivings unknown to others. Except, indeed, for
such forecast or presentiment, there was nothing to
suggest distrust. The dreadful storm by which the
eve of the inauguration had been signalised, and
which frightened the members of Congress from
their seats in the dim grey of the dawn, had given
way to fairer weather, and a streak of ight in the
sky enlivened the day. We read now, with a strange
kind of sensation, of the popularity and security
which the President enjoyed, and which en-
abled him to drive unprotected and in an open
carriage through the streets of the capital At
the time the fact seemed hardly worth recording,
but we were reminded that four years before it had
not been so, and that when in 1861 Abraham Lin-
coln first took office his appearance in public was
thought not unattended with risk. With still deeper
interest may we observe that on this last occasion,
when all around the President seemed so hopeful,
and yet he himself seemed so depressed, his life did,
perhaps, hang by a thread. It appears not impro-
bable that the crime just perpetrated was originally
plotted for the day of inauguration. The mail of
that time informed us that a man was actually
arrested at Washington on suspicion of such a
design, and it is now said that papers belonging
to the assassin show that before the 4th of
March the conspiracy had really been matured.
In all America there was, perhaps, not one man
who less deserved to be the victim of this revolu-
tion than he who has just fallen. He did nothing
to aggravate the quarrel ; short of conceding the
independence demanded by the South, he did every-
thing to prevent or abbreviate it. He recognised it as
his onegreat duty to preserve the Union, and what-
ever opinions may be entertained in this country
about the war and its policy, nobody can say that
such a principle was otherwise than becoming in the
President of the Republic. He was doubtless glad at
last to see slavery perish, but his personal opinions
on that subject were not permitted to influence the
policy of the Government while there was a chance
of escaping the extremities of strife. Homely
kindness of feeling, his plain sense, and his in-
stinctive aversion from violence combined to keep
him in a course of clemency and to incline him to
conciliation whenever it might be practicable: He
was hardly a representative Republican so much
as a representative American. He did not express
the extreme opinions even of his own party. He
did worship the Union, but next to that he put peace.
These are the feelings which have prompted our
present manifestations, and if the Americans set as
much store by our English opinions as.they are said
to do, they may console themselves with the assur-
ance that no incident in the history of a foreign
State"could have excited more universal or more, ge-
nuine sensation. The addresses which they will re-
ceive from us are expressions of sincere and unaffected
sympathy. In its political aspect the event is mo-
mentous enough, but of that at the moment we do
not desire to take heed. We trust that the counsels
of the Republic may be guided by a spirit like that
of its late chief, but by our present proceedings we
design only to put on record and communicate to
Americans a feeling which can differ only in intensity
from that of Americans themselves.

-- •
HERALD.-It is true that our experience of the
last four years in America has not done much to pre-
possess us in favour of the Federal form of govern-
ment. It is not the less obvious that in presence of
the anarchy which prevails in the formerly United
States of North America, the general break-up of
whose unstable system is likely to be precipitated by
the crime committed in that Washington Theatre
on Good Friday, it is eminently desirable that
everything should be done which can be done, and
that quickly, to consolidate and establish on the
firmest foundation our British colonial empire be-
yond the Atlantic. - The area of these provinces,
which extend from the Lakes to the Pole, is at
least equal to that of the late United States. The
country is, however, in great part a desert, and
not capable of maintaining so dense a population
as that which is settled to the south of the 49th
parallel. The people of the British provinces are
increasing rapidly in numbers in spite of the
severities of the climate and the sterility of the
soil with which they have had to contend over a
large portion of the area inhabited by them. The
race is healthier and hardier, and partakes more
closely of the nature of its British sires than the

mixed' and more degenerate people of the lower
latitudes. If well disposed and well governed the
people of British America have a future before them.
The development of political events beyond their
boundary bids fair to leave the game in their hands
at no distant period. A few more years of this de-
structive civil war in the States • may leave British
America, Acadia, or whatever we call it, the domi-
nant nation on the great North American continent.
The three and a half millions may have the better
of the thirty millions when the latter are split up
into ten or a dozen discordant and counteracting
parts. But in order that she may take her place
as a nation beside any possible section or develop-
ment of the American Union, in order that she
may present a strong front against any aggression
or ambition from beyond the border, it does seem
necessary first that the 10 or 12 independentprovmces
should be united under some central Government,
bound together by some closer tie than their depen-
dence on England. We are not surprised that the
idea of a confederation of the provinces has for some

time past been favoured by leading minds in the
Canadas and other British possessions in North
America. A central parliament at Ottawa would
give that real unity of action which could not even
be attempted bythe distant influence of the Colonial
Minister in London. At the same time the weak-
ness which has been shown by experience to be in-
herent in a federal union of equal states would not
be dreaded in a combination of peoples who owned
a common allegiance to the central authority in
England. The confederation of our American
provinces would be a development of our colonial
system ; it would tend to simplify it, and reduce it
to working order. It need scarcely be feared that
it would lead for a long time to come to a separa-
tion of these dependencies from the mother country.
It is a far greater thing to form a part of a great
nation, whose subjects are numbered by several
hundred millions, who takes the lead in the van of
civilisation, whose power is felt everywhere, and
whose flag covers the seas, than to•be the mere citi-
zens of a puny republic whose weakness would leave
it a prey to the first aggressor who might turn his
attention that way. What is more important, perhaps,
is, that these provinces, looking to the mother coun-
try as a common centre and arbiter, would escape for
all future time that conflict of interests which has
led to this bloody civil war in the United States.
The heart and core of British America is in the
twin provinces of the Canadas. They are the
most thickly populated and most fertile of the
British possessions. There is Lower Canada, bor-
dering on the St. Lawrence, in which the French
element still predominates, in which the old respec-
tablility, the aristocracy of North America, is con-
centrated. There is Upper or Western Canada,
bordered by the great Lakes, peopled by British im-
migrants, very modern and progressive in character.
These two countries, historically antipathetic, and
far from having yet forgotten their century of
rivalry, are united in a sense of common danger and
a common aspiration. The danger lies in the well-
understood fact that in any invasion from the south
it would be their cities that would be aimed at, their
fertile fields that would be the first to be devastated,
their country that would be made the battle-ground
on which the quarrel between England and America
would have to be fought out. It is to their interest
that the surrounding states should make common
cause with them, and be ready to confront this
danger with a universal armament. Again, the
Canadas are inland countries, and, unlike other
inland countries, desire before all things a ready com-
munication with the outer world, as a means of de-
veloping their commerce and extending their in-
fluence. It is their ambition to gain a seaboard, by
at once establishing intimate relations with the mari-
time provinces. They offer to these provinces a fair
share and equal representation in the central Go-
vernment. But the chief advantage of the union
would be evidently theirs, and the maritime pro-
vinces, which have little to gain by it beyond the
gratification of a sentiment, are now pretty clearly
the master of the situation. Out of the total popu-
lation of British North America the Canadas con-
tain two millions and a half, the seaboard countries
about one million of people. Thus, on the eastern
coast, we have New Brunswick, with a population
of 250,000 ; the peninsula of Nova Scotia, with
350,000 ; Prince Edward's Island, with 80,000
souls ; and the island of Newfoundland, with
130,000. In the eastern maritime provinces
there are abOut 900,000 men. In the western
maritime countries, the newly settled re-
gions of British Columbia and Vancouver,
on the Pacific, with splendid harbours, and already
a vast trade, there are some 100,000 inhabitants.
The majority of these seaboard countries have con-
sented to a measure of which the practical effect
will be a considerably increased taxation and absorp-
tion in Canada. The principle of confederation on
which they have agreed has been cordially approved
by the central Government in London. Messrs.
Cartier and Galt, members of the Canadian Go-
vernment, have come over from Canada to confer
with our Government on the subject. There is,
however, an awkward fact, which is likely to operate
as a bar to this arrangement at the outset. New
Brunswick, with its population of a quarter of a
million, has been polled, and, by a small majority,
has refused to agree to the Federation. New
Brunswick is at present independent of the other
colonies,and we cannot fairly force her to consent to
an union of which she disapproves. It happens,
however, that St. John's, in the Bay of Fundy,
and Fredericton, and the capacious harbours in the
Gulf of St. Lawrence are regarded as of vital im-
portance to the projected Acadia. What is to be
done in this dilemma ? Perhaps the stalwart New
Brunswickers will change their minds, if they are
convinced that public opinion condemns them for
their mistaken policy of selfish isolation. If not it
may be possible to form an Acadian Confederation
without including this province, leaviro. New
Brunswick for the present out in the cold,'' in the
hope that on the first threatening of an American
invasion the little colony will be only too glad to
throw herself repentantly into the arms of her more
powerful cousins.