We should ask ourselves fearlessly the object of all our charitable work. As Mrs. Bosanquet says: "We need to be quite sure that we really _want_ to cure poverty, to do away with it root and branch. Unless we are working with a whole-hearted and genuine desire toward this end, we shall get little satisfaction from our efforts; but those who share unreservedly in this desire are comparatively few at present. Only the other day I heard it said that it was a very doubtful policy to aim at curing poverty, for that in the absence of poverty the rich would have no one upon whom to exercise their faculty of benevolence; and I believe that this was but an outspoken {30} expression of a feeling which is still very prevalent, the feeling that there is something preordained and right in the social dependence of one class upon another. There is the lurking fear, also, that if the working classes get too independent the rich man may suffer for it. 'It won't do,' said one wise lady, 'to make them too independent; they go and join trade-unions, and a friend of mine lost quite a lot of money because his workmen joined a trade-union.' This is quite in the vein of the old Quarterly Reviewer, who summed up the current objections to the Owenite schemes of cooperation as 'the fear that the working classes might become so independent that the unworking classes would not have sufficient control over them, and would be ultimately obliged to work for themselves.'" [4] The ability of the friendly visitor to put behind him his own personal prejudices and selfish interests, and look at all questions of employment with reference to the best interests of the workers, is of the first importance. Such questions are often very complicated. {31} An inquiry was sent out in 1896 to the charity organization societies of the country, asking whether these societies approved of supplying workers to take the place of striking employees. The answers, as reported in the proceedings of the Twenty-third National Conference of Charities,[5] seem to take it for granted that either all strikes are equally justifiable or else equally unjustifiable; the fact being, of course, that some strikes are entirely justifiable, that others are quite the reverse, and that still others, which are justifiable at one stage, become unjustifiable at another stage, where the ground of contention has been shifted.