If the manager of house property is to give of her best, she must be trusted with ample responsibility and authority. If hampered by restrictions, if limited in authority, if not granted powers for selecting and dealing with tenants and the control of repairs, if she has to refer to superior authority, whether an employer or an official or a Committee, before action can be taken, there is not much hope, even under favourable conditions, of more than a bare success. Here lies one principal danger, equally of autocracy or democracy. It is not good business or sound sense to pay a person for duties and to relieve her of the real responsibility attached to them, including the risk of dismissal for failure. In dealing with slum property the lessons of Octavia Hill’s work are exceedingly encouraging. Weary years must pass before there can be extensive demolition and rebuilding of slum areas. Are we therefore to lie resigned and allow these grievous sores to fester in our cities and towns? In properly qualified management we have one at least of the keys to a temporary, if not a permanent, solution of the problem; and in this way we may effectively deal with the real evil. The ordinary method of clearance and rebuilding has often resulted too much in the shifting of the evil to another quarter, though it may be, happily, in a less concentrated form. One incidental gleam from the reading of the papers in this volume is of the great advances which have really been made in housing conditions. We are apt at times, not without reason, to gird at the slowness with which the manifest evils around us are being removed, but it is well occasionally, for a proper sense of proportion and for reform itself, to be reminded of the great improvements which have been achieved. It is important to bear in mind that the principles of trained management apply as much to privately owned as to public property. If the owners of properties in areas which are now classed as slums would but join together and employ for the common management of their property persons trained and with aptitude for the work, it is no exaggeration to say that within a few years a great transformation would be effected in the slum problem of London and of other towns, a transformation which would not only ease the manifold burdens of public authorities, but would be less irksome to the owners of the property and of untold benefit to its occupiers.