It was perfectly true, Buchman went on, that they had not succeeded with every young man, and that a handful had had to be asked to leave because they behaved ‘in an antagonistic spirit’, but every single one of them had asked if they could come back.

Why was it that they were not self-supporting? Well, replied Buchman, one of the young men earned only $4 a week in wages and paid all of it for his bed and board at the hospice. Another was paid $5 and he, too, handed over $4. In a third case, where both parents had died and two sisters were already in charitable institutions, a young man who earned only $3.50 a week had asked for a room. Should he have been turned away? He had since become confirmed.40

It was all to no avail. The conflict eventually came to a head in the summer of 1907. Buchman decided to make the matter an issue of confidence even at the risk of losing his job, though he seems to have felt there was very little danger of that.

First, he found a home for Mary Hemphill and her sons, with the future Mrs John Woodcock. Then, in October 1907, he submitted to the Board a seventeen-page handwritten document, signed by himself and Miss Ward. The hospice, he declared, was not a boarding house. ‘The boarding house woman cannot afford to give them a dinner at Christmas and Thanksgiving that they can remember to the end of their days. It would be extravagant on the part of the boarding house. It does not pay.

‘Out of my experience (I) consider these things necessary to ... make the home attractive. These things cost. The saloonkeeper in the corner does not hesitate for one moment to spend money to make his place inviting and attractive. Surely the church will not hesitate to do the same to win the man for the church.’

Buchman then compared the hospice with similar institutions in other cities and countries. Their experience, he argued, suggested that a hospice needed to own its own building to stand a chance of breaking even, and many of those which did so still made a loss. To insist that the hospice be self-supporting was short-sighted and would mean its down-fall. In any case, there was a much more important fact to be borne in mind. ‘The results of this work’, he declared, ‘are not to be weighed in the scales of mammon.’

The work had been called a failure, yet young men flocked to it-no less than 300 had come under its influence. The hospice was universally well spoken of. Was it a failure because $1,000 a year was needed to make the place attractive enough to hold the men? The issue resolved itself into a simple question: ‘What are you after?’

Then, there had been a number of occasions when his personal liberty had been interfered with and his actions questioned. If a man was old enough to be entrusted with such a work, he was also old enough to decide the minor details of his own conduct. ‘If you are to have a man at the head of this work to bear a man’s responsibilities, he must be treated as a man and not as a child.’

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