Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/212

 refuges for girls; while the wealthy employed as their almoners perfectly ladylike relatives who had to be supported, anyhow, and might as well be paid a salary.

The untrained, tactless missionaries accomplished little beyond making trouble for ambassadors and consuls in the foreign countries to which they were sent. The "genteel" superintendents of homes and refuges failed because they did not know how to organize and manage affairs.

Then a few men and women brave enough to face the storm of public outcry against salaried positions in charity work began their struggle to put philanthropy on a business basis. Rich men and women were asked to help the poor and needy only through these charity associations, whose members had the courage and the time and the working force to investigate claims.

Such was the quiet, unostentatious beginning of the associated charity work which is now found in every city of any size in the United States. So immediate were the results from this movement, so quick were business men and women to grasp the municipal or civic possibilities of such an association, that not only is organized charity receiving general support from the masses who can give small sums, but men and women of great wealth are organizing