The War Fund, initiated and presided over by the young Queen, was perhaps the first charitable appeal ever issued direct from the Court to the nation, without the intervention of the Church. At first it was stated that applicants for relief from this Fund must bring certificates of birth, baptism, marriage, &c., from their parish priests.[11] But the _Heraldo_, one of the leading Liberal-Monarchist papers, pointed out that such a condition would deprive all those who had been married by the civil authority of participation in the Fund, and put in a further plea for the children of soldiers not born in wedlock. The Queen and her committee of ladies decided on the widest interpretation of the family limitation, and at an early stage in the war relief was given to a child whose father was at the front, although the mother did not bear his name. This broadly charitable decision commended the Fund warmly to the mass of the people, for, as already shown, the prohibitive cost of the marriage licence in many, if not all, the Spanish dioceses compels numbers of decent couples to use the civil rite or none. Thus the decided action taken by, the Queen and her committee, notwithstanding the recommendations of the Church, endeared Queen Victoria Eugénie to thousands of mothers who, if the first conditions proposed had been made obligatory, would have been without the pale. The interminable lists of subscribers, appearing day after day and week after week, and the innumerable small subscriptions, often not exceeding ten centimes, and sometimes falling as low as five, proved how whole-heartedly the poor gave of their penury, and various incidents which occurred showed a real spirit of self-sacrifice in the wage-earners. Such was the action of the cigarette-makers of Seville, the two thousand women of all ages whose fame has been so often sung in the opera of “Carmen.” They were ordered to make up several thousand boxes of cigarettes with the legend “For the Army at Melilla.” They immediately asked to be allowed to do the whole work gratis as a tribute to the Army; and on being informed that this could not be permitted, because the consignment was a gift to the troops from the Company which rents the tobacco rights from the Crown, the _cigarreras_ volunteered to forfeit a whole day’s pay, to be given to the Queen’s Fund for the Wounded. Numbers of these women are mothers of families, and many of them have only three or four days’ work weekly, at a wage ranging from 75 centimes to pesetas 1.50, so that a whole day’s pay was a serious consideration to them. Nor were they by any means alone in their generosity, for many industrial guilds, companies, trade unions, and civil servants, such as, _e.g._, the minor post-office officials and telegraph operators, also gave a day’s wage.