The welfare of the house depends upon the “housemother,” whose opportunities and responsibilities are unbounded. To be able to keep a clean, well ordered, full house; to supply an ample amount of nourishing food; to receive enough board money from the girls to cover all expenses without dunning them is no easy matter. But in addition to this to be sympathetic without being partial or sentimental; to be able to care for the tired and sick; to be patient and firm with the hysterical; to understand and direct youth, gayety and extravagance; and to help the girls who are in danger of losing their “woman’s heritage,” a woman must give the best that is in her. The Eleanor Clubs in Chicago; the Ladies’ Christian Union Houses, the Chelsea House Association and the Virginia in New York; and the Girl’s Friendly Society Lodges in New York, Providence and Louisville are helping to solve the housing problem for girls. But why have we not hundreds, instead of tens of these houses? Can we not see the relationship between unsanitary, overcrowded homes, the loneliness and often vicious environment of many lodging houses, and human waste and immorality? “If, because of our privileges, because of our warm, comfortable clean homes, we can not say to these girls ‘My sister come home,’ surely it rests upon us to do it in some community way. And if we can not get the housing of girls taken up as a community duty, then all the more must we struggle by private enterprise to find out the way. We must say there shall be no town throughout the length and breadth of our land where the girl can not find safe shelter, a place which if her need is great, she may call home.” JERSEY HOUSING ASSOCIATION FORMED One hundred and seventy-four delegates attended the first state housing conference and participated in the organization of the New Jersey State Housing Association, in the City Hall, Newark, last month. The conference and the formal organization of the association had its inception at the National Housing Conference in Philadelphia in December, 1912, when William L. Kinkead of Paterson and Captain Charles J. Allen, secretary of the New Jersey Tenement House Department, gathered the New Jersey delegates and took the preliminary steps which led to the recent action. Among the speakers were John A. Campbell, president of the State Board of Tenement House Supervision; former Governor Franklin Murphy, James Ford of Harvard University and his brother George B. Ford of Columbia University, who had just completed an exhaustive survey of Newark, for the City Plan Commission; Judge Harry V. Osborne, of the Essex County Court of Common Pleas; Richard Stevens, Miles W. Beemer and others.