rs into district conferences. For inexperienced workers, who
need leadership in their charity, there can be no better training than
the meetings of a well-organized conference under a capable chairman,
and even the most experienced, by keeping in close touch with such a
conference, can do more effective work.

The suggestions herein contained are not to be taken as all applicable
to the work of any one visitor. Friendly visitors that tried to adopt
them all would have to abandon their other interests, and their other
interests make them more useful friends to the poor. Like the words in
a dictionary, some suggestions will be of service to a few workers, and
others will be found applicable to the work of many.

In addition to the standard authorities mentioned under General
References, a list for supplementary reading will be found at the end
of each chapter. These lists are in no sense a bibliography of the
subject. A handbook such as this is chiefly useful in suggesting
further inquiry, and, for beginners, I have thought best to include a
number of references out of the {vii} beaten track to stories and
magazine articles that seemed illustrative of the matter in hand.

It will be seen that I have borrowed much in direct quotation in the
following pages from those who have preceded me in writing about the
poor, but my debt does not end here. Whatever I may be said to know
about charitable work--my whole point of view and inspiration in
fact--can be traced to certain definite sources. To some of the
leaders of the Charity Organization Society of London, to Miss Octavia
Hill, Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet, and Mr. C. S. Loch, it will be evident to
my readers that my obligation is great. It will be evident also that I
have been helped by Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell and other workers in New
York, who, against such odds, are making advances in the reform of
municipal abuses; and by that group too who, under the leadership of
Miss Jane Addams, have given us, at Hull House in Chicago, so admirable
an object lesson in the power of neighborliness. But more than to any
other teachers, perhaps, I am indebted to those members of the
Associated Charities who organized Boston's friendly visitors nineteen
years ago, and have {viii} led them since to increasing usefulness.
Their reports have been my most valuable source of information. If I
do not name also my friends and fellow-workers here in Baltimore, it is
not because I fail t