METROPOLITAN ASSOCIATION FOR BEFRIENDING YOUNG SERVANTS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR." j
SIR,—You have allowed me at other times to plead in your columns the cause of this Society. The work of becoming friends to the young women who leave our Metropolitan District schools for service is one which the Londoners , have on the whole cordially taken up ; but we are in need of visitors. The necessity of the work is shown by the fact that it is provided by the Local Government Board that the girls shall be visited. With no wish to depreciate the value of the work of relieving-officers or other officials, it is evident that the visit of a lady is likely to be at least as useful, and that the leisure they have enables them to establish a friendship between themselves and their clients impossible in offioial visitation.
Results impress people most, though for myself I am very cautious in trusting results. But if do not see how one can get over such figures as these. Mrs. Nassau Senior, after a careful inquiry, classed the cases into which she examined as showing 47 per cent, good and fair, 53 per cent. unsatisfactory and bad.
Our returns for last year, excluding 21.4 per cent. (5.5 in homes and 3.8 lost sight of, the others with relations, married, emigrated, or dead), enable us to class the remaining 79.6 per cent. still under our care as,-71.4 per cent. good and fair (51.3 and 20.1), 7.2 per cent. unsatisfactory and bad (7.2 and 1.0). In one class there can be no doubt. Mrs. Nassau Senior classed as bad (i.e., those who have lost character) 15 per cent. Our returns show that this has been reduced to 1.0 per cent. I do not wish to claim for the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants the whole of the credit. Schools have improved very much since those days, and, despite the pessimists, we may believe that society has not gone back. At any rate, it is a satisfaction to know that the cases which are most terrible have been reduced by 14 per cent. All success is, however, only a retaining-fee for future exertion (I use words addressed to me on my ordination by Prince Lee, Bishop of Manchester). The society which has such testimony to the value of the work must not lose ground. More visitors are urgently needed to keep up and increase the standard of the work done. The work is not laborious or disagreeable. The number of visits refused is only 2.2 per cent. In fact, mis- tresses, without whose sanction a girl is never visited, as they come to know our work, welcome the visitors, for in the class of service in which our girls graduate, a visit from a kindly lady is sometimes as much an event to the mistress as to the girl. To take four to six girls under charge would not make a large demand on any one's time. They are not sick people requiring constant visitation. Such visitation is required as will make the half-yearly report a reality; and if the girls are allowed from time to time to call on their visitors, a good deal may be learnt as to their circumstances, without much exertion or sacrifice of time. Besides visitors, we are anxious in two districts—Ealing and Tottenham—to supply the places of ladies who have been obliged by removal and sickness to give up the post of secretary to the branches in these localities. It has been found before that the mention of our needs in a paper has brought us volunteers. Your columns are a guarantee that the work on which you have often commented is one worthy of support. To me it seems that any body of people who are trying to make service more honourable, to influence both mistresses and servants in a way which will set before them their responsibilities to each other, is deserving of more than ordinary support. It is doing something to make the foundations of society more stable, and to forward the Kingdom of Him whose motto was, "I am among you as he that servetb."—I am, Sir, &o., The Vicarage, Greenwich, June 7th. BROOKE LAMBERT.
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