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tant as this personal work is, I do not think it the most important work to be done. The chief value, to my mind, of the colonizing of the more highly educated and, from a worldly standpoint, more favored individuals among those who live in densely crowded neighborhoods, and work hard for a good part of every twentyfour hours, is that they come to know them, to know their lives and to know their needs, and can report them to the people who have the power to supply what is needed.

Experts are required now in every field. Most people have not time to attend to more than their own immediate surroundings and So many things press for attention that much which is of business. the greatest importance is pushed aside, and therefore it is necessary that each part of the public weal should be especially studied by those who devote themselves to personal observation and the collection of facts; and such students and collectors of facts in sociology are, or ought to be, the men and women who take up their 'plain people," as Lincoln called them, and residence among the " observe their daily life near at hand and all day long and every day The reason "charity" (so called, although it is sad to degrade beautiful word) is so often discredited, and more often so discredi able, is that it has usually worked without any knowledge of th daily life.

It has kept out of the way of it, and has tried in a feeble and i effectual manner to deal with the broken fragments, the failur When men and women have broken down becau thrown out by it. of long hours of overwork and horribly bad surroundings to work "charity" has put them into hospitals, and has either never thou or said anything about the causes of the break-down, or it has c placently remarked that "it was a pity that such conditions w necessary for business reasons."

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charity" has taken 1 When "charity" has found men and women drunken and shift and unable to care for their children, children away from them, and has said, "That's the way poor pe are"; but it has not asked why they were so or tried to pre their being so.

When girls have gone wrong and boys have stolen, "charity' provided Refuges for the girls and has put the boys into prison has talked as if such ruin of lives, and what looks like ruin of even wondering what other outlet fo were inevitable, never

natural love of pleasure and adventure, so carefully provided for in the case of other boys and girls, there was for these boys and girls.

Now, that is all changed or is changing; and it is, I believe, because men and women are learning the actual life of the mass of workers who do not break down, but who only die; who are not drunken and shiftless, but who lead lives of such heroic self-sacrifice and devotion as we cannot lead because the demand is not made on us; and of the lives of the boys and girls, who grow up brave and pure through and in the midst of circumstances which, as I have said, seem to us fatal.

But, notwithstanding all the virtues and all the heroism of the mass of the people, they do need and ought to have a great many things they do not have, and the whole community ought to help them to get them; but the first step toward helping them to get them is to know exactly what they need, and this knowledge the "residents" in college settlements and the individual residents in tenement houses must get for us. They must report the neglect of the city government to do its duty, whether as street-cleaners, as police, or as educator. They must report the oppression of employers, whether the oppression be the result of individual carelessness or, as is often the case, the result of trade conditions. They must cry aloud for more air, more space, for a larger and better life in every way for the great masses of men and women in our cities.

Not only does self-interest require that we help to lift our fellowmen, to make them useful citizens, law-abiding, and industrious, but no one can escape the responsibility for the intellectual and moral development of the race. As Drummond says, "the directing of part of the course of evolution" has passed into the hands of man. "A spectator of the drama for ages, too ignorant to know that it was a drama, and too impotent to do more than play his little part, Nature meant him to become a partner in her task, and share the responsibility of the closing acts. It is not given him as yet to bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades or to unloose the bands of Orion. In part only can he make the winds and the waves obey him or control the falling rain. . . . But in a far grander sphere and in an infinitely profounder sense has the sovereignty passed to him. For he finds himself the guardian and the arbiter of his personal destiny and of that of his fellow-men. The moulding of his life and of that of his children's children in measure lies

having the energy or desire to settle in one of our smaller cities. And among all classes in such intimately associated and thrifty communities we do not find abject poverty and squalor nor degraded ignorance, except in sporadic cases. What might be called slums find little cause to exist in such cities, where there is room enough yet for growth and healthy expansion, and where the poor can find enough of fresh air and sunlight. The only serious reminder of hopeless poverty is to be found in the constant presence of the tramp, by far the most serious and subtle evil influence with which such cities have to deal, introducing into every community physical and moral contamination, the effects of which we can never fully know, and then, as quickly and mysteriously as he comes, passing out of all reach of locally organized charitable work.

To linger no longer in study of the field, I would impress upon you, if I may, the hopeful and high character of the work to be done there. Not in most cases is the struggle to keep body and soul together that which calls for our aid, as in so many of the larger cities, but the further elevation and development of minds and souls which are waiting to be developed in the ways of good citizenship and healthy home life.

What, now, are the instrumentalities at our command for this work? We have in one of our small cities a community with a comparatively short experience in the official administration of municipal charities, very probably with traditional ideas left over from its village and town stage of existence still clinging to it. We are likely, also, to find a large proportion of the citizens with limited means to bestow in charities, and many of those able to give with a deep-rooted prejudice against any systematic investigation of the causes of want in individual cases from a very natural attachment to the habits of open-handed neighborly sharing of a simpler time, when every one knew and trusted every one else. Add to this the strong feeling apt to exist in the various local churches and associations in regard to their own province and methods, and we have some at least of the drawbacks to be found.

Yet from the very same causes from which these disadvantages spring come corresponding advantages of great value. The comparative simplicity of life and freedom from absorption in many things; the pureness of the administration of the city's affairs; the more general and personal acquaintance of citizens one with

another, and one class with another; the fuller knowledge possible to be obtained of lineage and family traits and character; and, lastly, the absence of the vast and well-nigh insoluble problems which baffle and discourage larger communities, these are most helpful factors in the work of relief in our small cities.

Finally, we come to inquire as to the best method of applying these various public and private charitable forces to the needs of the town.

Professor F. G. Peabody has aptly said in this connection words which we shall do well to remember: "The problem of charity demands two elements, each perfectly distinct and each absolutely essential. One element is the method of charity: the other is its motive. The method must be the method of business. It must not conflict with economic principles. It must conform to them, and re-enforce them. The motive, on the other hand, must be that of ethics, the same sense of brotherhood which once satisfied itself in almsgiving, precisely as active in its influence, but disciplined in its use." It would be both presumptuous and unprofitable for one to offer arguments here to-night as to what might seem to him to be theoretically the best method of relief in the case we are considering.

There

The best method is that which is the most effective and the most feasible, and that method can only be found by experience. fore, I am here only to do what the work of all this Convention rightly called a Conference is intended to do,- bring together, as best I may, for your consideration, examples of the way in which each of us in our own little corner, and amid our own circumstances, has answered the question.

The method of relief falls into the two departments of organization and relief work. At first it would seem as if the mere formation of the societies had very little, if anything, to do with the relief to be given, and that one might adopt one form of organization and one another, and yet their work be the same. But in the name now gen erally adopted, that of "Charity Organization Society," we find th recognition of the need of a preliminary work to be done by the S ciety within itself before it enters on relief work. To quote from M A. G. Warner's valuable book on American Charities: "It should b observed that the charity organizationist, properly so called, is sentially a man who will not consent to be buried under detai