I have learned to know that people are ashamed to abuse a place they find cared for. They will add dirt to dirt till a place is pestilential, but the more they find done for it, the more they will respect it, till at last order and cleanliness prevail. It is this feeling of theirs, coupled with the fact that they do not like those whom they have learned to love, and whose standard is higher than their own, to see things which would grieve them, which has enabled us to accomplish nearly every reform of outward things that we have achieved; so that the surest way to have any place kept clean is to go through it often yourself. Amongst the many benefits which the possession of the houses enables us to confer on the people, perhaps one of the most important is our power of saving them from neighbours who would render their lives miserable. It is a most merciful thing to protect the poor from the pain of living in the next room to drunken, disorderly people. “I am dying,” said an old woman to me the other day; “I wish you would put me where I can’t hear S—— beating his wife. Her screams are awful. And B—— too, he do come in so drunk. Let me go over the way to No. 30.” Our success depends on duly arranging the inmates; not too many children in any one house, so as to overcrowd it; not too few, so as to overcrowd another; not two bad people side by side, or they drink together; not a terribly bad person beside a very respectable one. It appears to me, then, to be proved by practical experience that when we can induce the rich to undertake the duties of landlords in poor neighbourhoods, and ensure a sufficient amount of the wise, personal supervision of educated and sympathetic people acting as their representatives, we achieve results which are not attainable in any other way. I would call upon those who may possess cottage property in large towns to consider the immense power they thus hold in their hands and the large influence for good they may exercise by the wise use of that power. When they have to delegate it to others, let them take care to whom they commit it; and let them beware lest, through the widely prevailing system of subletting, this power ultimately abide with those who have neither the will nor the knowledge which would enable them to use it beneficially.