LETTER OF 1900.—I have been thinking a great deal about how responsible
bodies can, in the future, secure such management by trained ladies as
has been found helpful in the past. This has turned my attention much
more than heretofore to the thought of how to provide more responsible
professional workers, for I feel that, however much volunteers may help,
it is only to professional workers that responsible and continuous
duties can, as a rule, be entrusted, especially by large owners or
corporations.
Up to now my professional workers have been among my most zealous and
selfless colleagues, always ready to take onerous duties, to fill vacant
places, to slip out of the way and go to new fields when it seemed best,
always ready to help to train others for management in houses, whether
in London, the provincial towns, Scotland, Ireland, America, Holland, or
any other place from which work came, taking their holidays, when best
they could be spared, and in every way proving themselves true helpers
by their hearty recognition that what we had to do was to teach,
initiate and supplement as many earnest workers as we could. What I owe
to them in the past for the devoted help they have thus rendered for now
many years, no one will ever know.
But hitherto I or some tried and experienced volunteer have been the
responsible person to whom private owners, or men of business or
corporations have entrusted their houses; and it is we who have reported
upon all business. As a matter of fact, as you all know, we have put all
management on a business footing, and with few exceptions have charged
the owners the ordinary 5 per cent. on rental usually paid to
collectors.
Thinking over all this with regard to the further future and to the
larger areas that we can cover, it seemed to me that the present plan
had its limitations. Even if many more such leaders were found, how
would they be known? Could responsible bodies make plans dependent on
them? Then I realized that my best plan for the future would be not only
to train such volunteers as offered and the professional workers whom we
required, but to train more professional workers than we ourselves can
use, and, as occasion offers, to introduce them to owners wishing to
retain small tenements in their own hands and to be represented in them
by a kind of manager not hitherto existing. The ordinary collector is
not a man of education, with time to spare, nor does he estimate that
his duties comprise much beyond a call at the doors for rent brought
down to him and a certain supervision of repairs that are asked for. If
there existed a body of ladies trained to more thorough work, qualified
to supervise more minutely, likely to enter into such details as bear on
the comfort of home life, they might be entrusted by owners with house
property. We all can remember how the training of nurses and of teachers
has raised the standard of work required in both professions. The same
change might be hoped for in the character of the management of
dwellings let to the poor. Whether or no volunteers co-operated with
them would settle itself. At any rate, owners could have, as I have told
them they should have, besides their lawyer to advise them as to law,
their architect as to large questions of buildings, their auditor to
supervise their accounts, also a representative to see to their people
and to those details of repair and management on which the conduct of
courts or blocks inhabited by working people depends. Where people live
close together, share yards, washhouses and staircases, too often there
is no one whose business it is to supervise and govern the use of what
is used in common or to see how one tenant’s conduct affects others.