The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

598
The Highland Monthly.
who meantime were sufifering ; the Treasurer being only
able to pay one-half of their usual small allowances to the
poor on his list, and having meantime borrowed i^i2o from
the bank to do even this. This meeting also requested the
Kirk-Session to communicate to its Committee of Management
a state of the funds it held ; and to concur with the
Committee in the best mode of applying the funds, and
moreover to communicate a state of the permanent claims,
for lunatics and orphans, and the fixed claims exigible from
the parish. It will be observed that the right of the Kirk-
Session to administer the Hospital funds was not now
contested.
Voluntary assessment proved a failure, and only led to
the incurring of debt by the Session. Their remonstrances
were again unreasonably met by the assertion that they
held unmortified monies, which ought to be first exhausted
in paying off debts and maintaining the poor, and also by
a proposal to use the Old Academy {i.e., Dunbar's Hospital]
and " fit it up as a workhouse for the maintenance and
employment of the poor." Such was the mode in which it
was now proposed to deal with Dunbar's Hospital, intended
for " poor persons to be placed therein by the Session," and
to be partly maintained out of the interest of the 2000
merks he left for the purpose, a preference to be given to
any of his own name. A proposal to the above effect was
sent to the Session for consideration as an intended motion.
The Session at their meeting on i6th May, 1842,,
expressed their decided opinion, only one member dis-
senting, that all the moneys entrusted to them, whether
destined to a particular purpose or not, were intended by
the respective donors to be a permanent fund for the relief
of the poor, except where the contrary was stated. They
also pointed out that these funds had been uniformly con-
sidered and preserved as such, and that, with one exception,,
no instance had occurred during one hundred and thirty
years of the capital being encroached on as proposed : the