That's a bit of a sweeping statement Dick... I can only really speak for Lucy Broadwood,as the one that I know something about, but she certainly did pay some of her contributors. Samuel Willett for instance certainly received payments for songs that he passed on to her whereas Mrs Vaisey was paid in kind - she received a set of handkerchiefs which Lucy took round to her two days after she had collected songs from her; and Lucy forwarded on various gifts of soft furnishings for the house to the family that she had collected songs from in Arisaig. So the method of "payment" varied from actual cash to items in kind (and on a friendly basis) from one singer or contributor to another. The morals of that practice don't seem to be particularly dubious to me, and I'm sure that she can't have been alone in her method of dealing with things .