LETTER OF 1879.—I should like, in my letter this year, to note down what
it appears to me you are all feeling as to the difference between the
charge of a court where the people are your tenants and much other
visiting among the poor. The care of tenants calls out a sense of duty
founded on relationship; the work is permanent, and the definite
character of much of it makes its progress marked. Have you ever asked
yourselves why you have chosen the charge of courts, with all its
difficulties and ties? The burthen of the problems before you has been
heavy, and the regularity of the occupation has often demanded of you
great sacrifices. Why have you not chosen transitory connection with
hundreds of receivers of soup, or pleasant intercourse with little
Sunday scholars, or visiting among the aged and bedridden, who were sure
to greet you with a smile when you went to them and had no right to say
a word of reproach to you about your long absences in the country? Why
did you not take up district-visiting, where, if any family did not
welcome you, you could just stay away? Because you preferred a work
where duty was continuous and distinct and where it was mutual. Because,
also, the petty annoyances brought before you at such awkward moments,
with so little discretion or good-temper—the smoky chimneys, broken
water-pipes, tiresome neighbours, drunken husbands—as well as the great
sorrows caused by death, disease, poverty, sin, have called not only for
your sympathy but for your action. From the greatest to the least, the
problems have implied some duty on your part. You have each had to ask
yourself, “What ought I, in my relation to the tenants, to do for them
in this difficulty?” From the merest trifle of a cupboard key broken in
the lock to the future of some family desolated by death, or sunk in
misery through drink, _all_ has asked your sympathy, much has demanded
your action. I have said the charge of tenants has been valued by you
also because the duty is mutual: it implies your determination, not
simply to do kindnesses with liberal hand, popular as that would be, but
to meet the poor on grounds where they too have duties to you.