20 Years At Hull House......................................................................................................................................1

Every preface is, I imagine, written after the book has been completed and now that I have finished this

volume I will state several difficulties which may put the reader upon his guard unless he too postpones the

Many times during the writing of these reminiscences, I have become convinced that the task was undertaken

all too soon. One's fiftieth year is indeed an impressive milestone at which one may well pause to take an

accounting, but the people with whom I have so long journeyed have become so intimate a part of my lot that

they cannot be written of either in praise or blame; the public movements and causes with which I am still

identified have become so endeared, some of them through their very struggles and failures, that it is difficult

It has also been hard to determine what incidents and experiences should be selected for recital, and I have

found that I might give an accurate report of each isolated event and yet give a totally misleading impression

of the whole, solely by the selection of the incidents. For these reasons and many others I have found it

difficult to make a [Page viii] faithful record of the years since the autumn of 1889 when without any

preconceived social theories or economic views, I came to live in an industrial district of Chicago.

If the reader should inquire why the book was ever undertaken in the face of so many difficulties, in reply I

could instance two purposes, only one of which in the language of organized charity, is "worthy." Because

Settlements have multiplied so easily in the United States I hoped that a simple statement of an earlier effort,

including the stress and storm, might be of value in their interpretation and possibly clear them of a certain

charge of superficiality. The unworthy motive was a desire to start a "backfire," as it were, to extinquish two

biographies of myself, one of which had been submitted to me in outline, that made life in a Settlement all

The earlier chapters present influences and personal motives with a detail which will be quite unpardonable if

they fail to make clear the personality upon whom various social and industrial movements in Chicago

reacted during a period of twenty years. No effort is made in the recital to separate my own history from that

of HullHouse during the years in which I was "launched deep into the stormy intercourse of human life" for,

so far as a mind is pliant under the pressure of events and experiences, it becomes hard to detach it.

It has unfortunately been necessary to abandon [Page ix] the chronological order in favor of the topical, for

during the early years at HullHouse, time seemed to afford a mere framework for certain lines of activity

and I have found in writing this book, that after these activities have been recorded, I can scarcely recall the

More than a third of the material in the book has appeared in The American Magazine, one chapter of it in

McClure's Magazine, and earlier statements of the Settlement motive, published years ago, have been utilized

in chronological order because it seemed impossible to reproduce their enthusiasm.

It is a matter of gratification to me that the book is illustrated from drawings made by Miss Norah Hamilton

of HullHouse, and the cover designed by another resident, Mr. Frank Hazenplug. I am indebted for the

making of the index and for many other services to Miss Clara Landsberg, also of HullHouse.

If the conclusions of the whole matter are similar to those I have already published at intervals during the

twenty years at HullHouse, I can only make the defense that each of the earlier books was an attempt to set

forth a thesis supported by experience, whereas this volume endeavors to trace the experiences through which

On the theory that our genuine impulses may be connected with our childish experiences, that one's bent may

be tracked back to that "NoMan's Land" where character is formless but nevertheless settling into definite

lines of future development, I begin this record with some impressions of my childhood.

All of these are directly connected with my father, although of course I recall many experiences apart from

him. I was one of the younger members of a large family and an eager participant in the village life, but

because my father was so distinctly the dominant influence and because it is quite impossible to set forth all

of one's early impressions, it has seemed simpler to string these first memories on that single cord. Moreover,

it was this cord which not only held fast my supreme affections, but also first drew me into the moral

concerns of life, and later afforded a clew there to which I somewhat wistfully clung in the intricacy of its

It must have been from a very early period that I recall "horrid nights" when I tossed about in my bed because

I had told a lie. I was held in the grip of a miserable dread of death, a double fear, first, that I myself should

die in my sins and go straight to that fiery Hell which was never mentioned at home, but which I had heard all

about from other children, and, second, that my fatherrepresenting the entire adult world which I had

basely deceivedshould himself die before I had time to tell him. My only method of obtaining relief was to

go downstairs to my father's room and make full confession. The high resolve to do this would push me out

of bed and carry me down the stairs without a touch of fear. But at the foot of the stairs I would be faced by

the awful necessity of passing the front doorwhich my father, because of his Quaker tendencies, did not

lockand of crossing the wide and black expanse of the living room in order to reach his door. I would

invariably cling to the newel post while I contemplated the perils of the situation, complicated by the fact that

the literal first step meant putting my bare foot upon a piece of oilcloth in front of the door, only a few inches

wide, but lying straight in my path. I would finally reach my father's bedside perfectly breathless and having

panted out the history of my sin, invariable received the same assurance that if he "had a little girl who told

lies," he was very glad that she "felt too bad to go to sleep afterward." No absolution was asked for or

received, but apparently the sense that the knowledge of my wickedness was shared, or an obscure

understanding of the affection which underlay the grave statement, was sufficient, for I always went back to

bed as bold as a lion, and slept, if not the sleep of the just, at least that of the comforted.

I recall an incident which must have occurred before I was seven years old, for the mill in which my father

transacted his business that day was closed in 1867. The mill stood in the neighboring town adjacent to its

poorest quarter. Before then I had always seen the little city of ten thousand people with the admiring eyes of

a country child, and it had never occurred to me that all its streets were not as bewilderingly attractive as the

one which contained the glittering toyshop and the confectioner. On that day I had my first sight of the

poverty which implies squalor, and felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the country and

that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest streets. I remember launching at my father the pertinent

inquiry why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together, and that after receiving his explanation

I declared with much firmness when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house, but it would not be

built among the other large houses, but right in the midst of horrid little houses like those.

That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's affairs which little children often exhibit

because "the old man clogs our earliest years," I remember in myself in a very absurd manifestation. I

dreamed night after night that every one in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the

responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop

was "all there," even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary place near the door, but no

human being was within sight. They had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery, and I

alone remained alive in the deserted world. I always stood in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly

pondering as to how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully realized that the affairs of the

world could not be resumed until at least one wheel should be made and something started. Every victim of

nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a

fearful handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps never were the odds more heavily

against "a warder of the world" than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in equal parts

of a childish version of Robinson Crusoe and of the endoftheworld predictions of the Second Adventists,

a few of whom were found in the village. The next morning would often find me, a delicate little girl of six,

with the further disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the village blacksmith shop,

anxiously watching the burly, redshirted figure at work. I would store my mind with such details of the

process of making wheels as I could observe, and sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more. "Do you

always have to sizzle the iron in water?" I would ask, thinking how horrid it would be to do. "Sure!" the

goodnatured blacksmith would reply, "that makes the iron hard." I would sigh heavily and walk away,

bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this of course I confided to no one, for there is something too

mysterious in the burden of "the winds that come from the fields of sleep" to be communicated, although it is

My great veneration and pride in my father manifested itself in curious ways. On several Sundays, doubtless

occurring in two or three different years, the Union Sunday School of the village was visited by strangers,

some of those "strange people" who live outside a child's realm, yet constantly thrill it by their close

approach. My father taught the large Bible class in the lefthand corner of the church next to the pulpit, and to

my eyes at least, was a most imposing figure in his Sunday frock coat, his fine head rising high above all the

others. I imagined that the strangers were filled with admiration for this dignified person, and I prayed with

all my heart that the ugly, pigeontoed little girl, whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held

very much upon one side, would never be pointed out to these visitors as the daughter of this fine man. In

order to lessen the possibility of a connection being made, on these particular Sundays I did not walk beside

my father, although this walk was the great event of the week, but attached myself firmly to the side of my

Uncle James Addams, in the hope that I should be mistaken for his child, or at least that I should not remain

so conspicuously unattached that troublesome questions might identify an Ugly Duckling with her imposing

parent. My uncle, who had many children of his own, must have been mildly surprised at this unwonted

attention, but he would look down kindly at me, and say, "So you are going to walk with me today?" "Yes,

please, Uncle James," would be my meek reply. He fortunately never explored my motives, nor do I

remember that my father ever did, so that in all probability my machinations have been safe from public

It is hard to account for the manifestations of a child's adoring affection, so emotional, so irrational, so

tangled with the affairs of the imagination. I simply could not endure the thought that "strange people" should

know that my handsome father owned this homely little girl. But even in my chivalric desire to protect him

from his fate, I was not quite easy in the sacrifice of my uncle, although I quieted my scruples with the

reflection that the contrast was less marked and that, anyway, his own little girl "was not so very pretty." I do

not know that I commonly dwelt much upon my personal appearance, save as it thrust itself as an incongruity

into my father's life, and in spite of unending evidence to the contrary, there were even black moments when

I allowed myself to speculate as to whether he might not share the feeling. Happily, however, this specter was

laid before it had time to grow into a morbid familiar by a very trifling incident. One day I met my father

coming out of his bank on the main street of the neighboring city which seemed to me a veritable whirlpool

of society and commerce. With a playful touch of exaggeration, he lifted his high and shining silk hat and

made me an imposing bow. This distinguished public recognition, this totally unnecessary identification

among a mass of "strange people" who couldn't possibly know unless he himself made the sign, suddenly

filled me with a sense of the absurdity of the entire feeling. It may not even then have seemed as absurd as it

really was, but at least it seemed enough so to collapse or to pass into the limbo of forgotten specters.

I made still other almost equally grotesque attempts to express this doglike affection. The house at the end of

the village in which I was born, and which was my home until I moved to HullHouse, in my earliest

childhood had opposite to itonly across the road and then across a little stretch of greenswardtwo mills

belonging to my father; one flour mill, to which the various grains were brought by the neighboring farmers,

and one sawmill, in which the logs of the native timber were sawed into lumber. The latter offered the great

excitement of sitting on a log while it slowly approached the buzzing saw which was cutting it into slabs, and

of getting off just in time to escape a sudden and gory death. But the flouring mill was much more beloved. It

was full of dusky, floury places which we adored, of empty bins in which we might play house; it had a

basement, with piles of bran and shorts which were almost as good as sand to play in, whenever the miller let

us wet the edges of the pile with water brought in his sprinkling pot from the millrace.

In addition to these fascinations was the association of the mill with my father's activities, for doubtless at

that time I centered upon him all that careful imitation which a little girl ordinarily gives to her mother's ways

and habits. My mother had died when I was a baby and my father's second marriage did not occur until my

I had a consuming ambition to posses a miller's thumb, and would sit contentedly for a long time rubbing

between my thumb and fingers the ground wheat as it fell from between the millstones, before it was taken up

on an endless chain of mysterious little buckets to be bolted into flour. I believe I have never since wanted

anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened, as my father's had become, during

his earlier years of a miller's life. Somewhat discouraged by the slow process of structural modification, I also

took measures to secure on the backs of my hands the tiny purple and red spots which are always found on

the hands of the miller who dresses millstones. The marks on my father's hands had grown faint, but were

quite visible when looked for, and seemed to me so desirable that they must be procured at all costs. Even

when playing in our house or yard, I could always tell when the millstones were being dressed, because the

rumbling of the mill then stopped, and there were few pleasures I would not instantly forego, rushing at once

to the mill, that I might spread out my hands near the millstones in the hope that the little hard flints flying

form the miller's chisel would light upon their backs and make the longedfor marks. I used hotly to accuse

the German miller, my dear friend Ferdinand, "of trying not to hit my hands," but he scornfully replied that

he could not hit them if he did try, and that they were too little to be of use in a mill anyway. Although I

This sincere tribute of imitation, which affection offers to its adored object, had later, I hope, subtler

manifestations, but certainly these first ones were altogether genuine. In this case, too, I doubtless contributed

my share to that stream of admiration which our generation so generously poured forth for the selfmade

man. I was consumed by a wistful desire to apprehend the hardships of my father's earlier life in that faraway

time when he had been a miller's apprentice. I knew that he still woke up punctually at three o'clock because

for so many years he had taken his turn at the mill in the early morning, and if by chance I awoke at the same

hour, as curiously enough I often did, I imagined him in the early dawn in my uncle's old mill reading

through the entire village library, book after book, beginning with the lives of the signers of the Declaration

of Independence. Copies of the same books, mostly bound in calfskin, were to be found in the library below,

and I courageously resolved that I too would read them all and try to understand life as he did. I did in fact

later begin a course of reading in the early morning hours, but I was caught by some fantastic notion of

chronological order and early legendary form. Pope's translation of the "Iliad," even followed by Dryden's

"Virgil," did not leave behind the residuum of wisdom for which I longed, and I finally gave them up for a

thick book entitled "The History of the World" as affording a shorter and an easier path.

Although I constantly confided my sins and perplexities to my father, there are only a few occasions on

which I remember having received direct advice or admonition; it may easily be true, however, that I have

forgotten the latter, in the manner of many seekers after advice who enjoyably set forth their situation but do

not really listen to the advice itself. I can remember an admonition on one occasion, however, when, as a little

girl of eight years, arrayed in a new cloak, gorgeous beyond anything I had ever worn before, I stood before

my father for his approval. I was much chagrined by his remark that it was a very pretty cloakin fact so

much prettier than any cloak the other little girls in the Sunday School had, that he would advise me to wear

my old cloak, which would keep me quite as warm, with the added advantage of not making the other little

girls feel badly. I complied with the request but I fear without inner consent, and I certainly was quite without

the joy of selfsacrifice as I walked soberly through the village street by the side of my counselor. My mind

was busy, however, with the old question eternally suggested by the inequalities of the human lot. Only as we

neared the church door did I venture to ask what could be done about it, receiving the reply that it might

never be righted so far as clothes went, but that people might be equal in things that mattered much more than

clothes, the affairs of education and religion, for instance, which we attended to when we went to school and

church, and that it was very stupid to wear the sort of clothes that made it harder to have equality even there.

It must have been a little later when I held a conversation with my father upon the doctrine of foreordination,

which at one time very much perplexed my childish mind. After setting the difficulty before him and

complaining that I could not make it out, although my best friend "understood it perfectly," I settled down to

hear his argument, having no doubt that he could make it quite clear. To my delighted surprise, for any

intimation that our minds were on an equality lifted me high indeed, he said that he feared that he and I did

not have the kind of mind that would ever understand foreordination very well and advised me not to give

too much time to it; but he then proceeded to say other things of which the final impression left upon my

mind was, that it did not matter much whether one understood foreordination or not, but that it was very

important not to pretend to understand what you didn't understand and that you must always be honest with

yourself inside, whatever happened. Perhaps on the whole as valuable a lesson as the shorter catechism itself

My memory merges this early conversation on religious doctrine into one which took place years later when I

put before my father the situation in which I found myself at boarding school when under great evangelical

pressure, and once again I heard his testimony in favor of "mental integrity above everything else."

At the time we were driving through a piece of timber in which the wood choppers had been at work during

the winter, and so earnestly were we talking that he suddenly drew up the horses to find that he did not know

where he was. We were both entertained by the incident, I that my father had been "lost in his own timber" so

that various cords of wood must have escaped his practiced eye, and he on his side that he should have

become so absorbed in this maze of youthful speculation. We were in high spirits as we emerged from the

tender green of the spring woods into the clear light of day, and as we came back into the main road I

"Very well," he added, "to people who insist upon details, as some one is doing now, I add that I am a

Hicksite Quaker"; and not another word on the weighty subject could I induce him to utter.

These early recollections are set in a scene of rural beauty, unusual at least for Illinois. The prairie around the

village was broken into hills, one of them crowned by pine woods, grown up from a bag full of Norway pine

seeds sown by my father in 1844, the very year he came to Illinois, a testimony perhaps that the most

vigorous pioneers gave at least an occasional thought to beauty. The banks of the mill stream rose into high

bluffs too perpendicular to be climbed without skill, and containing caves of which one at least was so black

that it could not be explored without the aid of a candle; and there was a deserted limekiln which became

associated in my mind with the unpardonable sin of Hawthorne's "LimeBurner." My stepbrother and I

carried on games and crusades which lasted week after week, and even summer after summer, as only

freeranging country children can do. It may be in contrast to this that one of the most piteous aspects in the

life of city children, as I have seen it in the neighborhood of HullHouse, is the constant interruption to their

play which is inevitable on the streets, so that it can never have any continuitythe most elaborate "plan or

chart" or "fragment from their dream of human life" is sure to be rudely destroyed by the passing traffic.

Although they start over and over again, even the most vivacious become worn out at last and take to that

passive "standing 'round" varied by rude horseplay, which in time becomes so characteristic of city children.

We had of course our favorite places and trees and birds and flowers. It is hard to reproduce the

companionship which children establish with nature, but certainly it is much too unconscious and intimate to

come under the head of aesthetic appreciation or anything of the sort. When we said that the purple

windflowersthe anemone patens"looked as if the winds had made them," we thought much more of the

fact that they were windborn than that they were beautiful: we clapped our hands in sudden joy over the soft

radiance of the rainbow, but its enchantment lay in our half belief that a pot of gold was to be found at its

farther end; we yielded to a soft melancholy when we heard the whippoorwill in the early twilight, but while

he aroused in us vague longings of which we spoke solemnly, we felt no beauty in his call.

We erected an altar beside the stream, to which for several years we brought all the snakes we killed during

our excursions, no matter how long the toilsome journey which we had to make with a limp snake

dangling between two sticks. I remember rather vaguely the ceremonial performed upon this altar one autumn

day, when we brought as further tribute one out of every hundred of the black walnuts which we had

gathered, and then poured over the whole a pitcher full of cider, fresh from the cider mill on the barn floor. I

think we had also burned a favorite book or two upon this pyre of stones. The entire affair carried on with

such solemnity was probably the result of one of those imperative impulses under whose compulsion children

seek a ceremonial which shall express their sense of identification with man's primitive life and their familiar

Long before we had begun the study of Latin at the village school, my brother and I had learned the Lord's

Prayer in Latin out of an old copy of the Vulgate, and gravely repeated it every night in an execrable

When, however, I really prayed, what I saw before my eyes was a most outrageous picture which adorned a

songbook used in Sunday School, portraying the Lord upon his throne, surrounded by tiers and tiers of

saints and angels all in a blur of yellow. I am ashamed to tell how old I was when that picture ceased to

appear before my eyes, especially when moments of terror compelled me to ask protection from the heavenly

I recall with great distinctness my first direct contact with death when I was fifteen years old: Polly was an

old nurse who had taken care of my mother and had followed her to frontier Illinois to help rear a second

generation of children. She had always lived in our house, but made annual visits to her cousins on a farm a

few miles north of the village. During one of those visits, word came to us one Sunday evening that Polly was

dying, and for a number of reasons I was the only person able to go to her. I left the lamplit, warm house to

be driven four miles through a blinding storm which every minute added more snow to the already high

drifts, with a sense of starting upon a fateful errand. An hour after my arrival all of the cousin's family went

downstairs to supper, and I was left alone to watch with Polly. The square, oldfashioned chamber in the

lonely farmhouse was very cold and still, with nothing to be heard but the storm outside. Suddenly the great

change came. I heard a feeble call of "Sarah," my mother's name, as the dying eyes were turned upon me,

followed by a curious breathing and in place of the face familiar from my earliest childhood and associated

with homely household cares, there lay upon the pillow strange, august features, stern and withdrawn from all

the small affairs of life. That sense of solitude, of being unsheltered in a wide world of relentless and

elemental forces which is at the basis of childhood's timidity and which is far from outgrown at fifteen, seized

me irresistibly before I could reach the narrow stairs and summon the family from below.

As I was driven home in the winter storm, the wind through the trees seemed laden with a passing soul and

the riddle of life and death pressed hard; once to be young, to grow old and to die, everything came to that,

and then a mysterious journey out into the Unknown. Did she mind faring forth alone? Would the journey

perhaps end in something as familiar and natural to the aged and dying as life is to the young and living?

Through all the drive and indeed throughout the night these thoughts were pierced by sharp worry, a sense of

faithlessness because I had forgotten the text Polly had confided to me long before as the one from which she

wished her funeral sermon to be preached. My comfort as usual finally came from my father, who pointed out

what was essential and what was of little avail even in such a moment as this, and while he was much too

wise to grow dogmatic upon the great theme of death, I felt a new fellowship with him because we had

Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people

from all that has to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all hazards on the assumption that

the ills of life will come soon enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their

elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences. They too wish

to climb steep stairs and to eat their bread with tears, and they imagine that the problems of existence which

so press upon them in pensive moments would be less insoluble in the light of these great happenings.

An incident which stands out clearly in my mind as an exciting suggestion of the great world of moral

enterprise and serious undertakings must have occurred earlier than this, for in 1872, when I was not yet

twelve years old, I came into my father's room one morning to find him sitting beside the fire with a

newspaper in his hand, looking very solemn; and upon my eager inquiry what had happened, he told me that

Joseph Mazzini was dead. I had never even heard Mazzini's name, and after being told about him I was

inclined to grow argumentative, asserting that my father did not know him, that he was not an American, and

that I could not understand why we should be expected to feel badly about him. It is impossible to recall the

conversation with the complete breakdown of my cheap arguments, but in the end I obtained that which I

have ever regarded as a valuable possession, a sense of the genuine relationship which may exist between

men who share large hopes and like desires, even though they differ in nationality, language, and creed; that

those things count for absolutely nothing between groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in

America or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy. At any rate, I was heartily ashamed of my meager

notion of patriotism, and I came out of the room exhilarated with the consciousness that impersonal and

international relations are actual facts and not mere phrases. I was filled with pride that I knew a man who

held converse with great minds and who really sorrowed and rejoiced over happenings across the sea. I never

recall those early conversations with my father, nor a score of others like them, but there comes into my mind

a line from Mrs. Browning in which a daughter describes her relations with her father:

I suppose all the children who were born about the time of the Civil War have recollections quite unlike those

of the children who are living now. Although I was but four and a half years old when Lincoln died, I

distinctly remember the day when I found on our two white gateposts American flags companioned with

black. I tumbled down on the harsh gravel walk in my eager rush into the house to inquire what they were

"there for." To my amazement I found my father in tears, something that I had never seen before, having

assumed, as all children do, that grownup people never cried. The two flags, my father's tears, and his

impressive statement that the greatest man in the world had died, constituted my initiation, my baptism, as it

were, into the thrilling and solemn interests of a world lying quite outside the two white gateposts. The great

war touched children in many ways: I remember an engraved roster of names, headed by the words "Addams'

Guard," and the whole surmounted by the insignia of the American eagle clutching many flags, which always

hung in the family livingroom. As children we used to read this list of names again and again. We could

reach it only by dint of putting the family Bible on a chair and piling the dictionary on top of it; using the

Bible to stand on was always accompanied by a little thrill of superstitious awe, although we carefully put the

dictionary above that our profane feet might touch it alone. Having brought the roster within reach of our

eager fingers,fortunately it was glazed,we would pick out the names of those who "had fallen on the

field" from those who "had come back from the war," and from among the latter those whose children were

our schoolmates. When drives were planned, we would say, "Let us take this road," that we might pass the

farm where a soldier had once lived; if flowers from the garden were to be given away, we would want them

to go to the mother of one of those heroes whose names we knew from the "Addams' Guard." If a guest

should become interested in the roster on the wall, he was at once led by the eager children to a small picture

of Colonel Davis which hung next the opposite window, that he might see the brave Colonel of the Regiment.

The introduction to the picture of the onearmed man seemed to us a very solemn ceremony, and long after

the guest was tired of listening, we would tell each other all about the local hero, who at the head of his

troops had suffered wounds unto death. We liked very much to talk to a gentle old lady who lived in a white

farmhouse a mile north of the village. She was the mother of the village hero, Tommy, and used to tell us of

her long anxiety during the spring of '62; how she waited day after day for the hospital to surrender up her

son, each morning airing the white homespun sheets and holding the little bedroom in immaculate readiness.

It was after the battle of Fort Donelson that Tommy was wounded and had been taken to the hospital at

Springfield; his father went down to him and saw him getting worse each week, until it was clear that he was

going to die; but there was so much red tape about the department, and affairs were so confused, that his

discharge could not be procured. At last the hospital surgeon intimated to his father that he should quietly

take him away; a man as sick as that, it would be all right; but when they told Tommy, weak as he was, his

eyes flashed, and he said, "No, sir; I will go out of the front door or I'll die here." Of course after that every

man in the hospital worked for it, and in two weeks he was honorably discharged. When he came home at

last, his mother's heart was broken to see him so wan and changed. She would tell us of the long quiet days

that followed his return, with the windows open so that the dying eyes might look over the orchard slope to

the meadow beyond where the younger brothers were mowing the early hay. She told us of those days when

his school friends from the Academy flocked in to see him, their old acknowledged leader, and of the burning

words of earnest patriotism spoken in the crowded little room, so that in three months the Academy was

almost deserted and the new Company who marched away in the autumn took as drummer boy Tommy's

third brother, who was only seventeen and too young for a regular. She remembered the still darker days that

followed, when the bright drummer boy was in Andersonville prison, and little by little she learned to be

However much we were given to talk of war heroes, we always fell silent as we approached an isolated

farmhouse in which two old people lived alone. Five of their sons had enlisted in the Civil War, and only the

youngest had returned alive in the spring of 1865. In the autumn of the same year, when he was hunting for

wild ducks in a swamp on the rough little farm itself, he was accidently shot and killed, and the old people

were left alone to struggle with the halfcleared land as best they might. When we were driven past this

forlorn little farm our childish voices always dropped into speculative whisperings as to how the accident

could have happened to this remaining son out of all the men in the world, to him who had escaped so many

chances of death! Our young hearts swelled in first rebellion against that which Walter Pater calls "the

inexplicable shortcoming or misadventure on the part of life itself"; we were overwhelmingly oppressed by

that grief of things as they are, so much more mysterious and intolerable than those griefs which we think

It was well perhaps that life thus early gave me a hint of one of her most obstinate and insoluble riddles, for I

have sorely needed the sense of universality thus imparted to that mysterious injustice, the burden of which

My childish admiration for Lincoln is closely associated with a visit made to the war eagle, Old Abe, who, as

we children well knew, lived in the state capital of Wisconsin, only sixtyfive miles north of our house,

really no farther than an eagle could easily fly! He had been carried by the Eighth Wisconsin Regiment

through the entire war, and now dwelt an honored pensioner in the state building itself.

Many times, standing in the north end of our orchard, which was only twelve miles from that mysterious line

which divided Illinois from Wisconsin, we anxiously scanned the deep sky, hoping to see Old Abe fly

southward right over our apple trees, for it was clearly possible that he might at any moment escape from his

keeper, who, although he had been a soldier and a sentinel, would have to sleep sometimes. We gazed with

thrilled interest at one speck after another in the flawless sky, but although Old Abe never came to see us, a

We started one golden summer's day, two happy children in the family carriage, with my father and mother

and an older sister to whom, because she was just home from boarding school, we confidently appealed

whenever we needed information. We were driven northward hour after hour, past harvest fields in which the

stubble glinted from bronze to gold and the heavyheaded grain rested luxuriously in rounded shocks, until

we reached that beautiful region of hills and lakes which surrounds the capital city of Wisconsin.

But although Old Abe, sitting sedately upon his high perch, was sufficiently like an uplifted ensign to remind

us of a Roman eagle, and although his veteran keeper, clad in an old army coat, was ready to answer all our

questions and to tell us of the thirtysix battles and skirmishes which Old Abe had passed unscathed, the

crowning moment of the impressive journey came to me later, illustrating once more that children are as

quick to catch the meaning of a symbol as they are unaccountably slow to understand the real world about

The entire journey to the veteran war eagle had itself symbolized that search for the heroic and perfect which

so persistently haunts the young; and as I stood under the great white dome of Old Abe's stately home, for

one brief moment the search was rewarded. I dimly caught a hint of what men have tried to say in their

worldold effort to imprison a space in so divine a line that it shall hold only yearning devotion and

highhearted hopes. Certainly the utmost rim of my first dome was filled with the tumultuous impression of

soldiers marching to death for freedom's sake, of pioneers streaming westward to establish selfgovernment

in yet another sovereign state. Only the great dome of St. Peter's itself has ever clutched my heart as did that

modest curve which had sequestered from infinitude in a place small enough for my child's mind, the courage

and endurance which I could not comprehend so long as it was lost in "the void of unresponsible space"

under the vaulting sky itself. But through all my vivid sensations there persisted the image of the eagle in the

corridor below and Lincoln himself as an epitome of all that was great and good. I dimly caught the notion of

the martyred President as the standard bearer to the conscience of his countrymen, as the eagle had been the

Thirtyfive years later, as I stood on the hill campus of the University of Wisconsin with a commanding view

of the capitol building a mile directly across the city, I saw again the dome which had so uplifted my childish

spirit. The University, which was celebrating it's fiftieth anniversary, had honored me with a doctor's degree,

and in the midst of the academic pomp and the rejoicing, the dome again appeared to me as a fitting symbol

Thousands of children in the sixties and seventies, in the simplicity which is given to the understanding of a

child, caught a notion of imperishable heroism when they were told that brave men had lost their lives that

the slaves might be free. At any moment the conversation of our elders might turn upon these heroic events;

there were redletter days, when a certain general came to see my father, and again when Governor Oglesby,

whom all Illinois children called "Uncle Dick," spent a Sunday under the pine trees in our front yard. We felt

on those days a connection with the great world so much more heroic than the village world which

surrounded us through all the other days. My father was a member of the state senate for the sixteen years

between 1854 and 1870, and even as a little child I was dimly conscious of the grave march of public affairs

He was much too occupied to allow time for reminiscence, but I remember overhearing a conversation

between a visitor and himself concerning the stirring days before the war, when it was by no means certain

that the Union men in the legislature would always have enough votes to keep Illinois from seceding. I heard

with breathless interest my father's account of the trip a majority of the legislators had made one dark day to

St. Louis, that there might not be enough men for a quorum, and so no vote could be taken on the momentous

My father always spoke of the martyred President as Mr. Lincoln, and I never heard the great name without a

thrill. I remember the dayit must have been one of comparative leisure, perhaps a Sundaywhen at my

request my father took out of his desk a thin packet marked "Mr. Lincoln's Letters," the shortest one of which

bore unmistakable traces of that remarkable personality. These letters began, "My dear DoubleD'ed

Addams," and to the inquiry as to how the person thus addressed was about to vote on a certain measure then

before the legislature, was added the assurance that he knew that this Addams "would vote according to his

conscience," but he begged to know in which direction the same conscience "was pointing." As my father

folded up the bits of paper I fairly held my breath in my desire that he should go on with the reminiscence of

this wonderful man, whom he had known in his comparative obscurity, or better still, that he should be

moved to tell some of the exciting incidents of the LincolnDouglas debates. There were at least two pictures

of Lincoln that always hung in my father's room, and one in our oldfashioned upstairs parlor, of Lincoln

with little Tad. For one or all of these reasons I always tend to associate Lincoln with the tenderest thoughts

I recall a time of great perplexity in the summer of 1894, when Chicago was filled with federal troops sent

there by the President of the United States, and their presence was resented by the governor of the state, that I

walked the wearisome way from HullHouse to Lincoln Parkfor no cars were running regularly at that

moment of sympathetic strikesin order to look at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I might, from the

marvelous St. Gaudens statue which had been but recently been placed at the entrance of the park. Some of

Lincoln's immortal words were cut into the stone at his feet, and never did a distracted town more sorely need

the healing of "with charity towards all" than did Chicago at that moment, and the tolerance of the man who

Of the many things written of my father in that sad August in 1881, when he died, the one I cared for most

was written by an old political friend of his who was then editor of a great Chicago daily. He wrote that while

there were doubtless many members of the Illinois legislature who during the great contracts of the war time

and the demoralizing reconstruction days that followed, had never accepted a bribe, he wished to bear

testimony that he personally had known but this one man who had never been offered a bribe because bad

I feel now the hot chagrin with which I recalled this statement during those early efforts of Illinois in which

Hull House joined, to secure the passage of the first factory legislation. I was told by the representatives of

an informal association of manufacturers that if the residents of HullHouse would drop this nonsense about

a sweatshop bill, of which they knew nothing, certain business men would agree to give fifty thousand dollars

within two years to be used for any of the philanthropic activities of the Settlement. As the fact broke upon

me that I was being offered a bribe, the shame was enormously increased by the memory of this statement.

What had befallen the daughter of my father that such a thing could happen to her? The salutary reflection

that it could not have occurred unless a weakness in myself had permitted it, withheld me at least from an

historic display of indignation before the two men making the offer, and I explained as gently as I could that

we had no ambition to make HullHouse "the largest institution on the West Side," but that we were much

concerned that our neighbors should be protected from untoward conditions of work, andso much heroics,

youth must permit itselfif to accomplish this the destruction of HullHouse was necessary, that we would

cheerfully sing a Te Deum on its ruins. The good friend who had invited me to lunch at the Union League

Club to meet two of his friends who wanted to talk over the sweat shop bill here kindly intervened, and we all

hastened to cover the awkward situation by that scurrying away from ugly morality which seems to be an

Of the many old friends of my father who kindly came to look up his daughter in the first days of

HullHouse, I recall none with more pleasure than Lyman Trumbull, whom we used to point out to members

of the Young Citizen's Club as the man who had for days held in his keeping the Proclamation of

Emancipation until his friend President Lincoln was ready to issue it. I remember the talk he gave at

HullHouse on one of our early celebrations of Lincoln's birthday, his assertion that Lincoln was no cheap

popular hero, that the "common people" would have to make an effort if they would understand his greatness,

as Lincoln painstakingly made a long effort to understand the greatness of the people. There was something

in the admiration of Lincoln's contemporaries, or at least of those men who had known him personally, which

was quite unlike even the best of the devotion and reverent understanding which has developed since. In the

first place, they had so large a fund of common experience; they too had pioneered in a western country, and

had urged the development of canals and railroads in order that the raw prairie crops might be transported to

market; they too had realized that if this last tremendous experiment in selfgovernment failed here, it would

be the disappointment of the centuries and that upon their ability to organize selfgovernment in state,

county, and town depended the verdict of history. These men also knew, as Lincoln himself did, that if this

tremendous experiment was to come to fruition, it must be brought about by the people themselves; that there

was no other capital fund upon which to draw. I remember an incident occurring when I was about fifteen

years old, in which the conviction was driven into my mind that the people themselves were the great

resource of the country. My father had made a little address of reminiscence at a meeting of "the old settlers

of Stephenson County," which was held every summer in the grove beside the mill, relating his experiences

in inducing the farmers of the county to subscribe for stock in the Northwestern Railroad, which was the first

to penetrate the county and make a connection with the Great Lakes at Chicago. Many of the Pennsylvania

German farmers doubted the value of "the whole newfangled business," and had no use for any railroad,

much less for one in which they were asked to risk their hardearned savings. My father told of his despair in

one farmers' community dominated by such prejudice which did not in the least give way under his argument,

but finally melted under the enthusiasm of a highspirited German matron who took a share to be paid for

"out of butter and egg money." As he related his admiration of her, an old woman's piping voice in the

audience called out: "I'm here today, Mr. Addams, and I'd do it again if you asked me." The old woman,

bent and broken by her seventy years of toilsome life, was brought to the platform and I was much impressed

by my father's grave presentation of her as "one of the publicspirited pioneers to whose heroic fortitude we

are indebted for the development of this country." I remember that I was at that time reading with great

enthusiasm Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship," but on the evening of "Old Settlers' Day," to my surprise, I

found it difficult to go on. Its sonorous sentences and exaltation of the man who "can" suddenly ceased to be

convincing. I had already written down in my commonplace book a resolution to give at least twentyfive

copies of this book each year to noble young people of my acquaintance. It is perhaps fitting in this chapter

that the very first Christmas we spent at HullHouse, in spite of exigent demands upon my slender purse for

candy and shoes, I gave to a club of boys twentyfive copies of the then new Carl Schurz's "Appreciation of

In our early effort at HullHouse to hand on to our neighbors whatever of help we had found for ourselves,

we made much of Lincoln. We were often distressed by the children of immigrant parents who were ashamed

of the pit whence they were digged, who repudiated the language and customs of their elders, and counted

themselves successful as they were able to ignore the past. Whenever I held up Lincoln for their admiration

as the greatest American, I invariably pointed out his marvelous power to retain and utilize past experiences;

that he never forgot how the plain people in Sangamon County thought and felt when he himself had moved

to town; that this habit was the foundation for his marvelous capacity for growth; that during those distracting

years in Washington it enabled him to make clear beyond denial to the American people themselves, the goal

towards which they were moving. I was sometimes bold enough to add that proficiency in the art of

recognition and comprehension did not come without effort, and that certainly its attainment was necessary

An instance of the invigorating and clarifying power of Lincoln's influence came to me many years ago in

England. I had spent two days in Oxford under the guidance of Arnold Toynbee's old friend Sidney Ball of

St. John's College, who was closely associated with the group of scholars we all identify with the beginnings

of the Settlement movement. It was easy to claim the philosophy of Thomas Hill Green, the roadbuilding

episode of Ruskin, the experimental living in the east end by Frederick Maurice, the London Workingman's

College of Edward Dennison, as foundations laid by university men for the establishment of Toynbee Hall. I

was naturally much interested in the beginnings of the movement whose slogan was "Back to the People,"

and which could doubtless claim the Settlement as one of its manifestations. Nevertheless the processes by

which so simple a conclusion as residence among the poor in East London was reached, seemed to me very

involved and roundabout. However inevitable these processes might be for classconscious Englishmen, they

could not but seem artificial to a western American who had been born in a rural community where the early

pioneer life had made social distinctions impossible. Always on the alert lest American Settlements should

become mere echoes and imitations of the English movement, I found myself assenting to what was shown

me only with that part of my consciousness which had been formed by reading of English social movements,

Why should an American be lost in admiration of a group of Oxford students because they went out to mend

a disused road, inspired thereto by Ruskin's teaching for the bettering of the common life, when all the

country roads in America were mended each spring by selfrespecting citizens, who were thus carrying out

the simple method devised by a democratic government for providing highways. No humor penetrated my

high mood even as I somewhat uneasily recalled certain spring thaws when I had been mired in roads

provided by the American citizen. I continued to fumble for a synthesis which I was unable to make until I

developed that uncomfortable sense of playing two roles at once. It was therefore almost with a dual

consciousness that I was ushered, during the last afternoon of my Oxford stay, into the drawingroom of the

Master of Balliol. Edward Caird's "Evolution of Religion," which I had read but a year or two before, had

been of unspeakable comfort to me in the labyrinth of differing ethical teachings and religious creeds which

the many immigrant colonies of our neighborhood presented. I remember that I wanted very much to ask the

author himself how far it was reasonable to expect the same quality of virtue and a similar standard of

conduct from these divers people. I was timidly trying to apply his method of study to those groups of

homesick immigrants huddled together in strange tenement houses, among whom I seemed to detect the

beginnings of a secular religion or at least of a wide humanitarianism evolved out of the various exigencies of

the situation; somewhat as a household of children, whose mother is dead, out of their sudden necessity

perform unaccustomed offices for each other and awkwardly exchange consolations, as children in happier

households never dream of doing. Perhaps Mr. Caird could tell me whether there was any religious content in

But when tea was over and my opportunity came for a talk with my host, I suddenly remembered, to the

exclusion of all other associations, only Mr. Caird's fine analysis of Abraham Lincoln, delivered in a lecture

The memory of Lincoln, the mention of his name, came like a refreshing breeze from off the prairie, blowing

aside all the scholarly implications in which I had become so reluctantly involved, and as the philosopher

spoke of the great American "who was content merely to dig the channels through which the moral life of his

countrymen might flow," I was gradually able to make a natural connection between this intellectual

penetration at Oxford and the moral perception which is always necessary for the discovery of new methods

by which to minister to human needs. In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig

channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to

Gradually a healing sense of wellbeing enveloped me and a quick remorse for my blindness, as I realized

that no one among his own countrymen had been able to interpret Lincoln's greatness more nobly than this

Oxford scholar had done, and that vision and wisdom as well as high motives must lie behind every effective

stroke in the continuous labor for human equality; I remembered that another Master of Balliol, Jowett

himself, had said that it was fortunate for society that every age possessed at least a few minds, which, like

Arnold Toynbee's, were "perpetually disturbed over the apparent inequalities of mankind." Certainly both the

English and American settlements could unite in confessing to that disturbance of mind.

Traces of this Oxford visit are curiously reflected in a paper I wrote soon after my return at the request of the

Is it not Abraham Lincoln who has cleared the title to our democracy? He made plain, once for all, that

democratic government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and shortcomings of the common people, still

remains the most valuable contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.

As my three older sisters had already attended the seminary at Rockford, of which my father was trustee,

without any question I entered there at seventeen, with such meager preparation in Latin and algebra as the

village school had afforded. I was very ambitious to go to Smith College, although I well knew that my

father's theory in regard to the education of his daughters implied a school as near at home as possible, to be

followed by travel abroad in lieu of the wider advantages which the eastern college is supposed to afford. I

was much impressed by the recent return of my sister from a year in Europe, yet I was greatly disappointed at

the moment of starting to humdrum Rockford. After the first weeks of homesickness were over, however, I

became very much absorbed in the little world which the boarding school in any form always offers to its

The school at Rockford in 1877 had not changed its name from seminary to college, although it numbered, on

its faculty and among its alumnae, college women who were most eager that this should be done, and who

really accomplished it during the next five years. The school was one of the earliest efforts for women's

higher education in the Mississippi Valley, and from the beginning was called "The Mount Holyoke of the

It reflected much of the missionary spirit of that pioneer institution, and the proportion of missionaries among

its early graduates was almost as large as Mount Holyoke's own. In addition there had been thrown about the

founders of the early western school the glamour of frontier privations, and the first students, conscious of the

heroic selfsacrifice made in their behalf, felt that each minute of the time thus dearly bought must be

conscientiously used. This inevitably fostered an atmosphere of intensity, a fever of preparation which

continued long after the direct making of it had ceased, and which the later girls accepted, as they did the

There was, moreover, always present in the school a larger or smaller group of girls who consciously

accepted this heritage and persistently endeavored to fulfill its obligation. We worked in those early years as

if we really believed the portentous statement from Aristotle which we found quoted in Boswell's Johnson

and with which we illuminated the wall of the room occupied by our Chess Club; it remained there for

months, solely out of reverence, let us hope, for the two ponderous names associated with it; at least I have

enough confidence in human nature to assert that we never really believed that "There is the same difference

between the learned and the unlearned as there is between the living and the dead." We were also too fond of

quoting Carlyle to the effect, "'Tis not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things that the poorest

As I attempt to reconstruct the spirit of my contemporary group by looking over many documents, I find

nothing more amusing than a plaint registered against life's indistinctness, which I imagine more or less

reflected the sentiments of all of us. At any rate here it is for the entertainment of the reader if not for his

edification: "So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in sleep, we find it

difficult to have any experience at all." We did not, however, tamely accept such a state of affairs, for we

At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous "Dreams" more sympathetically, by

drugging ourselves with opium. We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an entire

long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and the suspense and excitement did not even permit us

to grow sleepy. About four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young teacher whom we had been obliged to

take into our confidence, grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey and all the

remaining powders, administrated an emetic to each of the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all

human experience, and sent us to our separate rooms with a stern command to appear at family worship after

Whenever we had a chance to write, we took, of course, large themes, usually from the Greek because they

were the most stirring to the imagination. The Greek oration I gave at our Junior Exhibition was written with

infinite pains and taken to the Greek professor in Beloit College that there might be no mistakes, even after

the Rockford College teacher and the most scholarly clergyman in town had both passed upon it. The oration

upon Bellerophon and his successful fight with the Chimera contended that social evils could only be

overcome by him who soared above them into idealism, as Bellerophon mounted upon the winged horse

There were practically no Economics taught in women's collegesat least in the freshwater onesthirty

years ago, although we painstakingly studied "Mental" and "Moral" Philosophy, which, though far from dry

in the classroom, became the subject of more spirited discussion outside, and gave us a clew for animated

rummaging in the little college library. Of course we read a great deal of Ruskin and Browning, and liked the

most abstruse parts the best; but like the famous gentleman who talked prose without knowing it, we never

dreamed of connecting them with our philosophy. My genuine interest was history, partly because of a

superior teacher, and partly because my father had always insisted upon a certain amount of historic reading

ever since he had paid me, as a little girl, five cents a "Life" for each Plutarch hero I could intelligently report

When we started for the long vacations, a little group of five would vow that during the summer we would

read all of Motley's "Dutch Republic" or, more ambitious still, all of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire." When we returned at the opening of school and three of us announced we had finished the

latter, each became skeptical of the other two. We fell upon each other in a sort of roughandtumble

examination, in which no quarter was given or received; but the suspicion was finally removed that anyone

had skipped. We took for a class motto the early Saxon word for lady, translated into breadgiver, and we took

for our class color the poppy, because poppies grow among the wheat, as if Nature knew that wherever there

was hunger that needed food there would be pain that needed relief. We must have found the sentiment in a

book somewhere, but we used it so much it finally seemed like an idea of our own, although of course none

of us had ever seen a European field, the only page upon which Nature has written this particular message.

That this group of ardent girls, who discussed everything under the sun with unabated interest, did not take it

all out in talk may be demonstrated by the fact that one of the class who married a missionary founded a very

successful school in Japan for the children of the English and Americans living there; another of the class

became a medical missionary to Korea, and because of her successful treatment of the Queen, was made

court physician at a time when the opening was considered of importance in the diplomatic as well as in the

missionary world; still another became an unusually skilled teacher of the blind; and one of them a pioneer

Perhaps this early companionship showed me how essentially similar are the various forms of social effort,

and curiously enough, the actual activities of a missionary school are not unlike many that are carried on in a

Settlement situated in a foreign quarter. Certainly the most sympathetic and comprehending visitors we have

ever had at HullHouse have been returned missionaries; among them two elderly ladies, who had lived for

years in India and who had been homesick and bewildered since their return, declared that the fortnight at

Of course in such an atmosphere a girl like myself, of serious not to say priggish tendency, did not escape a

concerted pressure to push her into the "missionary field." During the four years it was inevitable that every

sort of evangelical appeal should have been made to reach the comparatively few "unconverted" girls in the

school. We were the subject of prayer at the daily chapel exercise and the weekly prayer meeting, attendance

I was singularly unresponsive to all these forms of emotional appeal, although I became unspeakably

embarrassed when they were presented to me at close range by a teacher during the "silent hour," which we

were all required to observe every evening, and which was never broken into, even by a member of the

faculty, unless the errand was one of grave import. I found these occasional interviews on the part of one of

the more serious young teachers, of whom I was extremely fond, hard to endure, as was a long series of

conversations in my senior year conducted by one of the most enthusiastic members of the faculty, in which

the desirability of Turkey as a field for missionary labor was enticingly put before me. I suppose I held

myself aloof from all these influences, partly owing to the fact that my father was not a communicant of any

church, and I tremendously admired his scrupulous morality and sense of honor in all matters of personal and

public conduct, and also because the little group to which I have referred was much given to a sort of

rationalism, doubtless founded upon an early reading of Emerson. In this connection, when Bronson Alcott

came to lecture at the school, we all vied with each other for a chance to do him a personal service because he

had been a friend of Emerson, and we were inexpressibly scornful of our younger fellowstudents who cared

for him merely on the basis of his grandfatherly relation to "Little Women." I recall cleaning the clay of the

But I think in my case there were other factors as well that contributed to my unresponsiveness to the

evangelical appeal. A curious course of reading I had marked out for myself in medieval history, seems to

have left me fascinated by an ideal of mingled learning, piety and physical labor, more nearly exemplified by

The only moments in which I seem to have approximated in my own experience to a faint realization of the

"beauty of holiness," as I conceived it, was each Sunday morning between the hours of nine and ten, when I

went into the exquisitely neat room of the teacher of Greek and read with her from a Greek testament. We did

this every Sunday morning for two years. It was not exactly a lesson, for I never prepared for it, and while I

was held within reasonable bounds of syntax, I was allowed much more freedom in translation than was

permitted the next morning when I read Homer; neither did we discuss doctrines, for although it was with this

same teacher that in our junior year we studied Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, committing all of it to memory

and analyzing and reducing it to doctrines within an inch of our lives, we never allowed an echo of this

exercise to appear at these blessed Sunday morning readings. It was as if the disputations of Paul had not yet

been, for we always read from the Gospels. The regime of Rockford Seminary was still very simple in the

70's. Each student made her own fire and kept her own room in order. Sunday morning was a great clearing

up day, and the sense of having made immaculate my own immediate surroundings, the consciousness of

clean linen, said to be close to the consciousness of a clean conscience, always mingles in my mind with

these early readings. I certainly bore away with me a lifelong enthusiasm for reading the Gospels in bulk, a

whole one at a time, and an insurmountable distaste for having them cut up into chapter and verse, or for

hearing the incidents in that wonderful Life thus referred to as if it were merely a record.

My copy of the Greek testament had been presented to me by the brother of our Greek teacher, Professor

Blaisdell of Beloit College, a true scholar in "Christian Ethics," as his department was called. I recall that one

day in the summer after I left collegeone of the black days which followed the death of my fatherthis

kindly scholar came to see me in order to bring such comfort as he might and to inquire how far I had found

solace in the little book he had given me so long before. When I suddenly recall the village in which I was

born, its steeples and roofs look as they did that day from the hilltop where we talked together, the familiar

details smoothed out and merging, as it were, into that wide conception of the universe, which for the

moment swallowed up my personal grief or at least assuaged it with a realization that it was but a drop in that

"torrent of sorrow and aguish and terror which flows under all the footsteps of man." This realization of

sorrow as the common lot, of death as the universal experience, was the first comfort which my bruised spirit

had received. In reply to my impatience with the Christian doctrine of "resignation," that it implied that you

thought of your sorrow only in its effect upon you and were disloyal to the affection itself, I remember how

quietly the Christian scholar changed his phraseology, saying that sometimes consolation came to us better in

the words of Plato, and, as nearly as I can remember, that was the first time I had ever heard Plato's sonorous

When Professor Blaisdell returned to his college, he left in my hands a small copy of "The Crito." The Greek

was too hard for me, and I was speedily driven to Jowett's translation. That oldfashioned habit of presenting

favorite books to eager young people, although it degenerated into the absurdity of "friendship's offerings,"

had much to be said for it, when it indicated the wellsprings of literature from which the donor himself had

Throughout our school years, we were always keenly conscious of the growing development of Rockford

Seminary into a college. The opportunity for our Alma Mater to take her place in the new movement of full

college education for women filled us with enthusiasm, and it became a driving ambition with the

undergraduates to share in this new and glorious undertaking. We gravely decided that it was important that

some of the students should be ready to receive the bachelor's degree the very first moment that the charter of

the school should secure the right to confer it. Two of us, therefore, took a course in mathematics, advanced

beyond anything previously given in the school, from one of those early young women working for a Ph.D.,

who was temporarily teaching in Rockford that she might study more mathematics in Leipsic.

My companion in all these arduous labors has since accomplished more than any of us in the effort to procure

the franchise for women, for even then we all took for granted the righteousness of that cause into which I at

least had merely followed my father's conviction. In the oldfashioned spirit of that cause I might cite the

career of this companion as an illustration of the efficacy of higher mathematics for women, for she possesses

singular ability to convince even the densest legislators of their legal right to define their own electorate, even

when they quote against her the dustiest of state constitutions or city charters.

In line with this policy of placing a woman's college on an equality with the other colleges of the state, we

applied for an opportunity to compete in the intercollegiate oratorical contest of Illinois, and we succeeded in

having Rockford admitted as the first woman's college. When I was finally selected as the orator, I was

somewhat dismayed to find that, representing not only one school but college women in general, I could not

resent the brutal frankness with which my oratorical possibilities were discussed by the enthusiastic group

who would allow no personal feeling to stand in the way of progress, especially the progress of Woman's

Cause. I was told among other things that I had an intolerable habit of dropping my voice at the end of a

sentence in the most feminine, apologetic and even deprecatory manner which would probably lose Woman

Woman certainly did lose the first place and stood fifth, exactly in the dreary middle, but the ignominious

position may not have been solely due to bad mannerisms, for a prior place was easily accorded to William

Jennings Bryan, who not only thrilled his auditors with an almost prophetic anticipation of the cross of gold,

but with a moral earnestness which we had mistakenly assumed would be the unique possession of the

I so heartily concurred with the decision of the judges of the contest that it was with a carefree mind that I

induced my colleague and alternate to remain long enough in "The Athens of Illinois," in which the

successful college was situated, to visit the state institutions, one for the Blind and one for the Deaf and

Dumb. Dr Gillette was at that time head of the latter institution; his scholarly explanation of the method of

teaching, his concern for his charges, this sudden demonstration of the care the state bestowed upon its most

unfortunate children, filled me with grave speculations in which the first, the fifth, or the ninth place in the

However, this brief delay between our field of Waterloo and our arrival at our aspiring college turned out to

be most unfortunate, for we found the ardent group not only exhausted by the premature preparations for the

return of a successful orator, but naturally much irritated as they contemplated their garlands drooping

disconsolately in tubs and bowls of water. They did not fail to make me realize that I had dealt the cause of

woman's advancement a staggering blow, and all my explanations of the fifth place were haughtily

considered insufficient before that golden Bar of Youth, so absurdly inflexible!

To return to my last year of school, it was inevitable that the pressure toward religious profession should

increase as graduating day approached. So curious, however, are the paths of moral development that several

times during subsequent experiences have I felt that this passive resistance of mine, this clinging to an

individual conviction, was the best moral training I received at Rockford College. During the first decade of

HullHouse, it was felt by propagandists of diverse social theories that the new Settlement would be a fine

coign of vantage from which to propagate social faiths, and that a mere preliminary step would be the

conversion of the founders; hence I have been reasoned with hours at a time, and I recall at least three

occasions when this was followed by actual prayer. In the first instance, the honest exhorter who fell upon his

knees before my astonished eyes, was an advocate of single tax upon land values. He begged, in that

phraseology which is deemed appropriate for prayer, that "the sister might see the beneficent results it would

bring to the poor who live in the awful congested districts around this very house."

The early socialists used every method of attack,a favorite one being the statement, doubtless sometimes

honestly made, that I really was a socialist, but "too much of a coward to say so." I remember one socialist

who habitually opened a very telling address he was in the habit of giving upon the street corners, by holding

me up as an awful example to his fellow socialists, as one of their number "who had been caught in the toils

of capitalism." He always added as a final clinching of the statement that he knew what he was talking about

because he was a member of the HullHouse Men's Club. When I ventured to say to him that not all of the

thousands of people who belong to a class or club at HullHouse could possibly know my personal opinions,

and to mildly inquire upon what he founded his assertions, he triumphantly replied that I had once admitted

to him that I had read Sombart and Loria, and that anyone of sound mind must see the inevitable conclusions

I could multiply these two instances a hundredfold, and possibly nothing aided me to stand on my own feet

and to select what seemed reasonable from this wilderness of dogma, so much as my early encounter with

genuine zeal and affectionate solicitude, associated with what I could not accept as the whole truth.

I do not wish to take callow writing too seriously, but I reproduce from an oratorical contest the following bit

of premature pragmatism, doubtless due much more to temperament than to perception, because I am still

ready to subscribe to it, although the grandiloquent style is, I hope, a thing of the past: "Those who believe

that Justice is but a poetical longing within us, the enthusiast who thinks it will come in the form of a

millennium, those who see it established by the strong arm of a hero, are not those who have comprehended

the vast truths of life. The actual Justice must come by trained intelligence, by broadened sympathies toward

the individual man or woman who crosses our path; one item added to another is the only method by which to

This schoolgirl recipe has been tested in many later experiences, the most dramatic of which came when I

was called upon by a manufacturing company to act as one of three arbitrators in a perplexing struggle

between themselves, a group of tradeunionists and a nonunion employee of their establishment. The

nonunion man who was the cause of the difficulty had ten years before sided with his employers in a

prolonged strike and had bitterly fought the union. He had been so badly injured at that time, that in spite of

long months of hospital care he had never afterward been able to do a full day's work, although his employers

had retained him for a decade at full pay in recognition of his loyalty. At the end of ten years the once

defeated union was strong enough to enforce its demands for a union shop and in spite of the distaste of the

firm for the arrangement, no obstacle to harmonious relations with the union remained but for the refusal of

the tradeunionists to receive as one of their members the old crippled employee, whose spirit was broken as

last and who was now willing to join the union and to stand with his old enemies for the sake of retaining his

But the union men would not receive "a traitor," the firm flatly refused to dismiss so faithful an employee, the

busy season was upon them, and everyone concerned had finally agreed to abide without appeal by the

decision of the arbitrators. The chairman of our little arbitration committee, a venerable judge, quickly

demonstrated that it was impossible to collect trustworthy evidence in regards to the events already ten years

old which lay at the bottom of this bitterness, and we soon therefore ceased to interview the conflicting

witnesses; the second member of the committee sternly bade the men remember that the most ancient Hebraic

authority gave no sanction for holding even a just resentment for more than seven years, and at last we all

settled down to that wearisome effort to secure the inner consent of all concerned, upon which alone the

"mystery of justice" as Maeterlinck has told us, ultimately depends. I am not quite sure that in the end we

administered justice, but certainly employers, tradeunionists, and arbitrators were all convinced that justice

will have to be established in industrial affairs with the same care and patience which has been necessary for

centuries in order to institute it in men's civic relationships, although as the judge remarked the search must

be conducted without much help from precedent. The conviction remained with me, that however long a time

might be required to establish justice in the new relationships of our raw industrialism, it would never be

stable until it had received the sanction of those upon whom the present situation presses so harshly.

Towards the end of our four years' course we debated much as to what we were to be, and long before the end

of my school days it was quite settled in my mind that I should study medicine and "live with the poor." This

conclusion of course was the result of many things, perhaps epitomized in my graduating essay on

"Cassandra" and her tragic fate "always to be in the right, and always to be disbelieved and rejected."

This state of affairs, it may readily be guessed, the essay held to be an example of the feminine trait of mind

called intuition, "an accurate perception of Truth and Justice, which rests contented in itself and will make no

effort to confirm itself or to organize through existing knowledge." The essay then proceedsI am forced to

admit, with overmuch convictionwith the statement that women can only "grow accurate and intelligible

by the thorough study of at least one branch of physical science, for only with eyes thus accustomed to the

search for truth can she detect all selfdeceit and fancy in herself and learn to express herself without

dogmatism." So much for the first part of the thesis. Having thus "gained accuracy, would woman bring this

force to bear throughout morals and justice, then she must find in active labor the promptings and inspirations

that come from growing insight." I was quite certain that by following these directions carefully, in the end

the contemporary woman would find "her faculties clear and acute from the study of science, and her hand

This veneration for science portrayed in my final essay was doubtless the result of the statements the

textbooks were then making of what was called the theory of evolution, the acceptance of which even thirty

years after the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species" had about it a touch of intellectual adventure. We

knew, for instance, that our science teacher had accepted this theory, but we had a strong suspicion that the

teacher of Butler's "Analogy" had not. We chafed at the meagerness of the college library in this direction,

and I used to bring back in my handbag books belonging to an advanced brotherinlaw who had studied

medicine in Germany and who therefore was quite emancipated. The first gift I made when I came into

possession of my small estate the year after I left school, was a thousand dollars to the library of Rockford

College, with the stipulation that it be spent for scientific books. In the long vacations I pressed plants,

stuffed birds and pounded rocks in some vague belief that I was approximating the new method, and yet

when my stepbrother who was becoming a real scientist, tried to carry me along with him to the merest

outskirts of the methods of research, it at once became evident that I had no aptitude and was unable to follow

intelligently Darwin's careful observations on the earthworm. I made a heroic effort, although candor compels

me to state that I never would have finished if I had not been pulled and pushed by my really ardent

companion, who in addition to a multitude of earthworms and a fine microscope, possessed untiring tact with

As our boardingschool days neared the end, in the consciousness of approaching separation we vowed

eternal allegiance to our "early ideals," and promised each other we would "never abandon them without

conscious justification," and we often warned each other of "the perils of selftradition."

We believed, in our sublime selfconceit, that the difficulty of life would lie solely in the direction of losing

these precious ideals of ours, of failing to follow the way of martyrdom and high purpose we had marked out

for ourselves, and we had no notion of the obscure paths of tolerance, just allowance, and selfblame

wherein, if we held our minds open, we might learn something of the mystery and complexity of life's

The year after I had left college I came back, with a classmate, to receive the degree we had so eagerly

anticipated. Two of the graduating class were also ready and four of us were dubbed B.A. on the very day

that Rockford Seminary was declared a college in the midst of tumultuous anticipations. Having had a year

outside of college walls in that trying land between vague hope and definite attainment, I had become very

much sobered in my desire for a degree, and was already beginning to emerge from that rosecolored mist

Whatever may have been the perils of selftradition, I certainly did not escape them, for it required eight

yearsfrom the time I left Rockford in the summer of 1881 until HullHouse was opened in the the autumn

of 1889to formulate my convictions even in the least satisfactory manner, much less to reduce them to a

plan for action. During most of that time I was absolutely at sea so far as any moral purpose was concerned,

clinging only to the desire to live in a really living world and refusing to be content with a shadowy

The winter after I left school was spent in the Woman's Medical College of Philadelphia, but the development

of the spinal difficulty which had shadowed me from childhood forced me into Dr. Weir Mitchell's hospital

for the late spring, and the next winter I was literally bound to a bed in my sister's house for six months. In

spite of its tedium, the long winter had its mitigations, for after the first few weeks I was able to read with a

luxurious consciousness of leisure, and I remember opening the first volume of Carlyle's "Frederick the

Great" with a lively sense of gratitude that it was not Gray's "Anatomy," having found, like many another,

that general culture is a much easier undertaking than professional study. The long illness inevitably put aside

the immediate prosecution of a medical course, and although I had passed my examinations creditably

enough in the required subjects for the first year, I was very glad to have a physician's sanction for giving up

clinics and dissecting rooms and to follow his prescription of spending the next two years in Europe.

Before I returned to America I had discovered that there were other genuine reasons for living among the

poor than that of practicing medicine upon them, and my brief foray into the profession was never resumed.

The long illness left me in a state of nervous exhaustion with which I struggled for years, traces of it

remaining long after HullHouse was opened in 1889. At the best it allowed me but a limited amount of

energy, so that doubtless there was much nervous depression at the foundation of the spiritual struggles which

this chapter is forced to record. However, it could not have been all due to my health, for as my wise little

notebook sententiously remarked, "In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a

It would, of course, be impossible to remember that some of these struggles ever took place at all, were it not

for these selfsame notebooks, in which, however, I no longer wrote in moments of high resolve, but judging

from the internal evidence afforded by the books themselves, only in moments of deep depression when

One of the most poignant of these experiences, which occurred during the first few months after our landing

upon the other side of the Atlantic, was on a Saturday night, when I received an ineradicable impression of

the wretchedness of East London, and also saw for the first time the overcrowded quarters of a great city at

midnight. A small party of tourists were taken to the East End by a city missionary to witness the Saturday

night sale of decaying vegetables and fruit, which, owing to the Sunday laws in London, could not be sold

until Monday, and, as they were beyond safe keeping, were disposed of at auction as late as possible on

Saturday night. On Mile End Road, from the top of an omnibus which paused at the end of a dingy street

lighted by only occasional flares of gas, we saw two huge masses of illclad people clamoring around two

hucksters' carts. They were bidding their farthings and ha'pennies for a vegetable held up by the auctioneer,

which he at last scornfully flung, with a gibe for its cheapness, to the successful bidder. In the momentary

pause only one man detached himself from the groups. He had bidden in a cabbage, and when it struck his

hand, he instantly sat down on the curb, tore it with his teeth, and hastily devoured it, unwashed and

uncooked as it was. He and his fellows were types of the "submerged tenth," as our missionary guide told us,

with some little satisfaction in the then new phrase, and he further added that so many of them could scarcely

be seen in one spot save at this Saturday night auction, the desire for cheap food being apparently the one

thing which could move them simultaneously. They were huddled into illfitting, castoff clothing, the

ragged finery which one sees only in East London. Their pale faces were dominated by that most unlovely of

human expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargainhunter who starves if he cannot make a

successful trade, and yet the final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow

faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug

his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward. I have never since been able to see

a number of hands held upward, even when they are moving rhythmically in a calisthenic exercise, or when

they belong to a class of chubby children who wave them in eager response to a teacher's query, without a

certain revival of this memory, a clutching at the heart reminiscent of the despair and resentment which

For the following weeks I went about London almost furtively, afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys

lest they disclose again this hideous human need and suffering. I carried with me for days at a time that

curious surprise we experience when we first come back into the streets after days given over to sorrow and

death; we are bewildered that the world should be going on as usual and unable to determine which is real,

the inner pang or the outward seeming. In time all huge London came to seem unreal save the poverty in its

East End. During the following two years on the continent, while I was irresistibly drawn to the poorer

quarters of each city, nothing among the beggars of South Italy nor among the salt miners of Austria carried

with it the same conviction of human wretchedness which was conveyed by this momentary glimpse of an

East London street. It was, of course, a most fragmentary and lurid view of the poverty of East London, and

quite unfair. I should have been shown either less or more, for I went away with no notion of the hundreds of

men and women who had gallantly identified their fortunes with these emptyhanded people, and who, in

church and chapel, "relief works," and charities, were at least making an effort towards its mitigation.

Our visit was made in November, 1883, the very year when the Pall Mall Gazette exposure started "The

Bitter Cry of Outcast London," and the conscience of England was stirred as never before over this joyless

city in the East End of its capital. Even then, vigorous and drastic plans were being discussed, and a splendid

program of municipal reforms was already dimly outlined. Of all these, however, I had heard nothing but the

No comfort came to me then from any source, and the painful impression was increased because at the very

moment of looking down the East London street from the top of the omnibus, I had been sharply and

painfully reminded of "The Vision of Sudden Death" which had confronted De Quincey one summer's night

as he was being driven through rural England on a high mail coach. Two absorbed lovers suddenly appear

between the narrow, blossoming hedgerows in the direct path of the huge vehicle which is sure to crush them

to their death. De Quincey tries to send them a warning shout, but finds himself unable to make a sound

because his mind is hopelessly entangled in an endeavor to recall the exact lines from the Iliad which

describe the great cry with which Achilles alarmed all Asia militant. Only after his memory responds is his

will released from its momentary paralysis, and he rides on through the fragrant night with the horror of the

escaped calamity thick upon him, but he also bears with him the consciousness that he had given himself over

so many years to classic learningthat when suddenly called upon for a quick decision in the world of life

This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital

situation spread before our eyes. It seemed to me too preposterous that in my first view of the horror of East

London I should have recalled De Quincey's literary description of the literary suggestion which had once

paralyzed him. In my disgust it all appeared a hateful, vicious circle which even the apostles of culture

themselves admitted, for had not one of the greatest among the moderns plainly said that "conduct, and not

For two years in the midst of my distress over the poverty which, thus suddenly driven into my

consciousness, had become to me the "Weltschmerz," there was mingled a sense of futility, of misdirected

energy, the belief that the pursuit of cultivation would not in the end bring either solace or relief. I gradually

reached a conviction that the first generation of college women had taken their learning too quickly, had

departed too suddenly from the active, emotional life led by their grandmothers and greatgrandmothers; that

the contemporary education of young women had developed too exclusively the power of acquiring

knowledge and of merely receiving impressions; that somewhere in the process of 'being educated' they had

lost that simple and almost automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful reaction resulting in

activity from the mere presence of suffering or of helplessness; that they are so sheltered and pampered they

In the German and French pensions, which twentyfive years ago were crowded with American mothers and

their daughters who had crossed the seas in search of culture, one often found the mother making real

connection with the life about her, using her inadequate German with great fluency, gaily measuring the

enormous sheets or exchanging recipes with the German Hausfrau, visiting impartially the nearest

kindergarten and market, making an atmosphere of her own, hearty and genuine as far as it went, in the house

and on the street. On the other hand, her daughter was critical and uncertain of her linguistic acquirements,

and only at ease when in the familiar receptive attitude afforded by the art gallery and opera house. In the

latter she was swayed and moved, appreciative of the power and charm of the music, intelligent as to the

legend and poetry of the plot, finding use for her trained and developed powers as she sat "being cultivated"

in the familiar atmosphere of the classroom which had, as it were, become sublimated and romanticized.

I remember a happy busy mother who, complacent with the knowledge that her daughter daily devoted four

hours to her music, looked up from her knitting to say, "If I had had your opportunities when I was young,

my dear, I should have been a very happy girl. I always had musical talent, but such training as I had, foolish

The mother did not dream of the sting her words left and that the sensitive girl appreciated only too well that

her opportunities were fine and unusual, but she also knew that in spite of some facility and much good

teaching she had no genuine talent and never would fulfill the expectations of her friends. She looked back

upon her mother's girlhood with positive envy because it was so full of happy industry and extenuating

obstacles, with undisturbed opportunity to believe that her talents were unusual. The girl looked wistfully at

her mother, but had not the courage to cry out what was in her heart: "I might believe I had unusual talent if I

did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the

rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply

smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning."

This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning and the assumption that the sheltered,

educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all about her,

and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which

overwhelms her; it peers at her in the form of heavyladen market women and underpaid street laborers,

I recall one snowy morning in SaxeCoburg, looking from the window of our little hotel upon the town

square, that we saw crossing and recrossing it a single file of women with semicircular, heavy, wooden tanks

fastened upon their backs. They were carrying in this primitive fashion to a remote cooling room these tanks

filled with a hot brew incident to one stage of beer making. The women were bent forward, not only under

the weight which they were bearing, but because the tanks were so high that it would have been impossible

for them to have lifted their heads. Their faces and hands, reddened in the cold morning air, showed clearly

the white scars where they had previously been scalded by the hot stuff which splashed if they stumbled ever

so little on their way. Stung into action by one of those sudden indignations against cruel conditions which at

times fill the young with unexpected energy, I found myself across the square, in company with mine host,

interviewing the phlegmatic owner of the brewery who received us with exasperating indifference, or rather

received me, for the innkeeper mysteriously slunk away as soon as the great magnate of the town began to

speak. I went back to a breakfast for which I had lost my appetite, as I had for Gray's "Life of Prince Albert"

and his wonderful tutor, Baron Stockmar, which I had been reading late the night before. The book had lost

its fascination; how could a good man, feeling so keenly his obligation "to make princely the mind of his

prince," ignore such conditions of life for the multitude of humble, hardworking folk. We were spending

two months in Dresden that winter, given over to much reading of "The History of Art" and after such an

experience I would invariably suffer a moral revulsion against this feverish search after culture. It was

doubtless in such moods that I founded my admiration for Albrecht Durer, taking his wonderful pictures,

however, in the most unorthodox manner, merely as human documents. I was chiefly appealed to by his

unwillingness to lend himself to a smooth and cultivated view of life, by his determination to record its

frustrations and even the hideous forms which darken the day for our human imagination and to ignore no

human complications. I believed that his canvases intimated the coming religious and social changes of the

Reformation and the peasants' wars, that they were surcharged with pity for the downtrodden, that his sad

knights, gravely standing guard, were longing to avert that shedding of blood which is sure to occur when

men forget how complicated life is and insist upon reducing it to logical dogmas.

The largest sum of money that I ever ventured to spend in Europe was for an engraving of his "St. Hubert,"

the background of which was said to be from an original Durer plate. There is little doubt, I am afraid, that

the background as well as the figures "were put in at a later date," but the purchase at least registered the

The wonder and beauty of Italy later brought healing and some relief to the paralyzing sense of the futility of

all artistic and intellectual effort when disconnected from the ultimate test of the conduct it inspired. The

serene and soothing touch of history also aroused old enthusiasms, although some of their manifestations

were such as one smiles over more easily in retrospection than at the moment. I fancy that it was no smiling

matter to several people in our party, whom I induced to walk for three miles in the hot sunshine beating

down upon the Roman Campagna, that we might enter the Eternal City on foot through the Porta del Popolo,

as pilgrims had done for centuries. To be sure, we had really entered Rome the night before, but the railroad

station and the hotel might have been anywhere else, and we had been driven beyond the walls after breakfast

and stranded at the very spot where the pilgrims always said "Ecco Roma," as they caught the first glimpse of

St. Peter's dome. This melodramatic entrance into Rome, or rather pretended entrance, was the prelude to

days of enchantment, and I returned to Europe two years later in order to spend a winter there and to carry out

a great desire to systematically study the Catacombs. In spite of my distrust of "advantages" I was apparently

The two years which elapsed before I again found myself in Europe brought their inevitable changes. Family

arrangements had so come about that I had spent three or four months of each of the intervening winters in

Baltimore, where I seemed to have reached the nadir of my nervous depression and sense of maladjustment,

in spite of my interest in the fascinating lectures given there by Lanciani of Rome, and a definite course of

reading under the guidance of a Johns Hopkins lecturer upon the United Italy movement. In the latter I

naturally encountered the influence of Mazzini, which was a source of great comfort to me, although perhaps

I went too suddenly from a contemplation of his wonderful ethical and philosophical appeal to the

workingmen of Italy, directly to the lecture rooms at Johns Hopkins University, for I was certainly much

disillusioned at this time as to the effect of intellectual pursuits upon moral development.

The summers were spent in the old home in northern Illinois, and one Sunday morning I received the rite of

baptism and became a member of the Presbyterian church in the village. At this time there was certainly no

outside pressure pushing me towards such a decision, and at twentyfive one does not ordinarily take such a

step from a mere desire to conform. While I was not conscious of any emotional "conversion," I took upon

myself the outward expressions of the religious life with all humility and sincerity. It was doubtless true that I

and that various cherished safeguards and claims to selfdependence had been broken into by many piteous

failures. But certainly I had been brought to the conclusion that "sincerely to give up one's conceit or hope of

being good in one's own right is the only door to the Universe's deeper reaches." Perhaps the young

clergyman recognized this as the test of the Christian temper, at any rate he required little assent to dogma or

miracle, and assured me that while both the ministry and the officers of his church were obliged to subscribe

to doctrines of wellknown severity, the faith required to the laity was almost early Christian in its simplicity.

I was conscious of no change from my childish acceptance of the teachings of the Gospels, but at this

moment something persuasive within made me long for an outward symbol of fellowship, some bond of

peace, some blessed spot where unity of spirit might claim right of way over all differences. There was also

growing within me an almost passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy, and when in all history had

these ideals been so thrillingly expressed as when the faith of the fisherman and the slave had been boldly

opposed to the accepted moral belief that the wellbeing of a privileged few might justly be built upon the

ignorance and sacrifice of the many? Who was I, with my dreams of universal fellowship, that I did not

identify myself with the institutional statement of this belief, as it stood in the little village in which I was

born, and without which testimony in each remote hamlet of Christendom it would be so easy for the world to

In one of the intervening summers between these European journeys I visited a western state where I had

formerly invested a sum of money in mortgages. I was much horrified by the wretched conditions among the

farmers, which had resulted from a long period of drought, and one forlorn picture was fairly burned into my

mind. A number of starved hogscollateral for a promissory notewere huddled into an open pen. Their

backs were humped in a curious, camellike fashion, and they were devouring one of their own number, the

latest victim of absolute starvation or possibly merely the one least able to defend himself against their

voracious hunger. The farmer's wife looked on indifferently, a picture of despair as she stood in the door of

the bare, crude house, and the two children behind her, whom she vainly tried to keep out of sight,

continually thrust forward their faces almost covered by masses of coarse, sunburned hair, and their little bare

feet so black, so hard, the great cracks so filled with dust that they looked like flattened hoofs. The children

could not be compared to anything so joyous as satyrs, although they appeared but halfhuman. It seemed to

me quite impossible to receive interest from mortgages placed upon farms which might at any season be

reduced to such conditions, and with great inconvenience to my agent and doubtless with hardship to the

farmers, as speedily as possible I withdrew all my investment. But something had to be done with the money,

and in my reaction against unseen horrors I bought a farm near my native village and also a flock of

innocentlooking sheep. My partner in the enterprise had not chosen the shepherd's lot as a permanent

occupation, but hoped to speedily finish his college course upon half the proceeds of our venture. This

pastoral enterprise still seems to me to have been essentially sound, both economically and morally, but

perhaps one partner depended too much upon the impeccability of her motives and the other found himself

too preoccupied with study to know that it is not a real kindness to bed a sheepfold with straw, for certainly

the venture ended in a spectacle scarcely less harrowing than the memory it was designed to obliterate. At

least the sight of two hundred sheep with four rotting hoofs each, was not reassuring to one whose conscience

craved economic peace. A fortunate series of sales of mutton, wool, and farm enabled the partners to end the

enterprise without loss, and they passed on, one to college and the other to Europe, if not wiser, certainly

It was during this second journey to Europe that I attended a meeting of the London match girls who were on

strike and who met daily under the leadership of wellknown labor men of London. The low wages that were

reported at the meetings, the phossy jaw which was described and occasionally exhibited, the appearance of

the girls themselves I did not, curiously enough, in any wise connect with what was called the labor

movement, nor did I understand the efforts of the London tradesunionists, concerning whom I held the

vaguest notions. But of course this impression of human misery was added to the others which were already

making me so wretched. I think that up to this time I was still filled with the sense which Wells describes in

one of his young characters, that somewhere in Church or State are a body of authoritative people who will

put things to rights as soon as they really know what is wrong. Such a young person persistently believes that

behind all suffering, behind sin and want, must lie redeeming magnanimity. He may imagine the world to be

tragic and terrible, but it never for an instant occurs to him that it may be contemptible or squalid or

selfseeking. Apparently I looked upon the efforts of the tradesunionists as I did upon those of Frederic

Harrison and the Positivists whom I heard the next Sunday in Newton Hall, as a manifestation of "loyalty to

humanity" and an attempt to aid in its progress. I was enormously interested in the Positivists during these

European years; I imagined that their philosophical conception of man's religious development might include

all expressions of that for which so many ages of men have struggled and aspired. I vaguely hoped for this

universal comity when I stood in Stonehenge, on the Acropolis in Athens, or in the Sistine Chapel in the

Vatican. But never did I so desire it as in the cathedrals of Winchester, Notre Dame, Amiens. One winter's

day I traveled from Munich to Ulm because I imagined from what the art books said that the cathedral

hoarded a medieval statement of the Positivists' final synthesis, prefiguring their conception of a "Supreme

In this I was not altogether disappointed. The religious history carved on the choir stalls at Ulm contained

Greek philosophers as well as Hebrew prophets, and among the disciples and saints stood the discoverer of

music and a builder of pagan temples. Even then I was startled, forgetting for the moment the religious

revolutions of south Germany, to catch sight of a window showing Luther as he affixed his thesis on the door

at Wittenberg, the picture shining clear in the midst of the older glass of saint and symbol.

My smug notebook states that all this was an admission that "the saints but embodied fine action," and it

proceeds at some length to set forth my hope for a "cathedral of humanity," which should be "capacious

enough to house a fellowship of common purpose," and which should be "beautiful enough to persuade men

to hold fast to the vision of human solidarity." It is quite impossible for me to reproduce this experience at

Ulm unless I quote pages more from the notebook in which I seem to have written half the night, in a fever of

composition cast in illdigested phrases from Comte. It doubtless reflected also something of the faith of the

Old Catholics, a charming group of whom I had recently met in Stuttgart, and the same mood is easily traced

in my early hopes for the Settlement that it should unite in the fellowship of the deed those of widely

The beginning of 1887 found our little party of three in very picturesque lodgings in Rome, and settled into a

certain student's routine. But my study of the Catacombs was brought to an abrupt end in a fortnight by a

severe attack of sciatic rheumatism, which kept me in Rome with a trained nurse during many weeks, and

later sent me to the Riviera to lead an invalid's life once more. Although my Catacomb lore thus remained

hopelessly superficial, it seemed to me a sufficient basis for a course of six lectures which I timidly offered to

a Deaconess's Training School during my first winter in Chicago, upon the simple ground that this early

interpretation of Christianity is the one which should be presented to the poor, urging that the primitive

church was composed of the poor and that it was they who took the wonderful news to the more prosperous

Romans. The openminded head of the school gladly accepted the lectures, arranging that the course should

be given each spring to her graduating class of Home and Foreign Missionaries, and at the end of the third

year she invited me to become one of the trustees of the school. I accepted and attended one meeting of the

board, but never another, because some of the older members objected to my membership on the ground that

"no religious instruction was given at HullHouse." I remember my sympathy for the embarrassment in

which the head of the school was placed, but if I needed comfort, a bit of it came to me on my way home

from the trustees' meeting when an Italian laborer paid my streetcar fare, according to the custom of our

simpler neighbors. Upon my inquiry of the conductor as to whom I was indebted for the little courtesy, he

replied roughly enough, "I cannot tell one dago from another when they are in a gang, but sure, any one of

It is hard to tell just when the very simple plan which afterward developed into the Settlement began to form

itself in my mind. It may have been even before I went to Europe for the second time, but I gradually became

convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual

needs are found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study might restore a

balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself; where they might try out some of

the things they had been taught and put truth to "the ultimate test of the conduct it dictates or inspires." I do

not remember to have mentioned this plan to anyone until we reached Madrid in April, 1888.

We had been to see a bull fight rendered in the most magnificent Spanish style, where greatly to my surprise

and horror, I found that I had seen, with comparative indifference, five bulls and many more horses killed.

The sense that this was the last survival of all the glories of the amphitheater, the illusion that the riders on

the caparisoned horses might have been knights of a tournament, or the matadore a slightly armed gladiator

facing his martyrdom, and all the rest of the obscure yet vivid associations of an historic survival, had carried

me beyond the endurance of any of the rest of the party. I finally met them in the foyer, stern and pale with

disapproval of my brutal endurance, and but partially recovered from the faintness and disgust which the

spectacle itself had produced upon them. I had no defense to offer to their reproaches save that I had not

thought much about the bloodshed; but in the evening the natural and inevitable reaction came, and in deep

chagrin I felt myself tried and condemned, not only by this disgusting experience but by the entire moral

situation which it revealed. It was suddenly made quite clear to me that I was lulling my conscience by a

dreamer's scheme, that a mere paper reform had become a defense for continued idleness, and that I was

making it a raison d'etre for going on indefinitely with study and travel. It is easy to become the dupe of a

deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of

selfdeception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come. Nothing less

than the moral reaction following the experience at a bullfight had been able to reveal to me that so far from

following in the wake of a chariot of philanthropic fire, I had been tied to the tail of the veriest oxcart of

I had made up my mind that next day, whatever happened, I would begin to carry out the plan, if only by

talking about it. I can well recall the stumbling and uncertainty with which I finally set it forth to Miss Starr,

my oldtime school friend, who was one of our party. I even dared to hope that she might join in carrying out

the plan, but nevertheless I told it in the fear of that disheartening experience which is so apt to afflict our

most cherished plans when they are at last divulged, when we suddenly feel that there is nothing there to talk

about, and as the golden dream slips through our fingers we are left to wonder at our own fatuous belief. But

gradually the comfort of Miss Starr's companionship, the vigor and enthusiasm which she brought to bear

upon it, told both in the growth of the plan and upon the sense of its validity, so that by the time we had

reached the enchantment of the Alhambra, the scheme had become convincing and tangible although still

A month later we parted in Paris, Miss Starr to go back to Italy, and I to journey on to London to secure as

many suggestions as possible from those wonderful places of which we had heard, Toynbee Hall and the

People's Palace. So that it finally came about that in June, 1888, five years after my first visit in East London,

I found myself at Toynbee Hall equipped not only with a letter of introduction from Canon Fremantle, but

with high expectations and a certain belief that whatever perplexities and discouragement concerning the life

of the poor were in store for me, I should at least know something at first hand and have the solace of daily

activity. I had confidence that although life itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive

receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the everlasting "preparation for life," however

It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy's phrase "the snare of preparation," which he insists

we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very

period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.

The next January found Miss Starr and myself in Chicago, searching for a neighborhood in which we might

put our plans into execution. In our eagerness to win friends for the new undertaking, we utilized every

opportunity to set forth the meaning of the Settlement as it had been embodied at Toynbee Hall, although in

those days we made no appeal for money, meaning to start with our own slender resources. From the very

first the plan received courteous attention, and the discussion, while often skeptical, was always friendly.

Professor Swing wrote a commendatory column in the Evening Journal, and our early speeches were reported

quite out of proportion to their worth. I recall a spirited evening at the home of Mrs. Wilmarth, which was

attended by that renowned scholar, Thomas Davidson, and by a young Englishman who was a member of the

then new Fabian society and to whom a peculiar glamour was attached because he had scoured knives all

summer in a camp of highminded philosophers in the Adirondacks. Our new little plan met with criticism,

not to say disapproval, from Mr. Davidson, who, as nearly as I can remember, called it "one of those

It was in vain we asserted that the collective living was not an essential part of the plan, that we would always

scrupulously pay our own expenses, and that at any moment we might decide to scatter through the

neighborhood and to live in separate tenements; he still contended that the fascination for most of those

volunteering residence would lie in the collective living aspect of the Settlement. His contention was, of

course, essentially sound; there is a constant tendency for the residents to "lose themselves in the cave of their

own companionship," as the Toynbee Hall phrase goes, but on the other hand, it is doubtless true that the very

companionship, the give and take of colleagues, is what tends to keep the Settlement normal and in touch

with "the world of things as they are." I am happy to say that we never resented this nor any other difference

of opinion, and that fifteen years later Professor Davidson handsomely acknowledged that the advantages of a

group far outweighed the weaknesses he had early pointed out. He was at that later moment sharing with a

group of young men, on the East Side of New York, his ripest conclusions in philosophy and was much

touched by their intelligent interest and absorbed devotion. I think that time has also justified our early

contention that the mere foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in

spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities,

would be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago. I am not so sure that we succeeded in our endeavors "to

make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society and to add the social

function to democracy". But HullHouse was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on

each other is reciprocal; and that as the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gives a form of

In our search for a vicinity in which to settle we went about with the officers of the compulsory education

department, with city missionaries, and with the newspaper reporters whom I recall as a much older set of

men than one ordinarily associates with that profession, or perhaps I was only sent out with the older ones on

what they must all have considered a quixotic mission. One Sunday afternoon in the late winter a reporter

took me to visit a socalled anarchist sunday school, several of which were to be found on the northwest side

of the city. The young man in charge was of the German student type, and his face flushed with enthusiasm

as he led the children singing one of Koerner's poems. The newspaperman, who did not understand German,

asked me what abominable stuff they were singing, but he seemed dissatisfied with my translation of the

simple words and darkly intimated that they were "deep ones," and had probably "fooled" me. When I replied

that Koerner was an ardent German poet whose songs inspired his countrymen to resist the aggressions of

Napoleon, and that his bound poems were found in the most respectable libraries, he looked at me rather

askance and I then and there had my first intimation that to treat a Chicago man, who is called an anarchist, as

Another Sunday afternoon in the early spring, on the way to a Bohemian mission in the carriage of one of its

founders, we passed a fine old house standing well back from the street, surrounded on three sides by a broad

piazza, which was supported by wooden pillars of exceptionally pure Corinthian design and proportion. I was

so attracted by the house that I set forth to visit it the very next day, but though I searched for it then and for

several days after, I could not find it, and at length I most reluctantly gave up the search.

Three weeks later, with the advice of several of the oldest residents of Chicago, including the exmayor of

the city, Colonel Mason, who had from the first been a warm friend to our plans, we decided upon a location

somewhere near the junction of Blue Island Avenue, Halsted Street, and Harrison Street. I was surprised and

overjoyed on the very first day of our search for quarters to come upon the hospitable old house, the quest for

which I had so recently abandoned. The house was of course rented, the lower part of it used for offices and

storerooms in connection with a factory that stood back of it. However, after some difficulties were

overcome, it proved to be possible to sublet the second floor and what had been a large drawingroom on the

The house had passed through many changes since it had been built in 1856 for the homestead of one of

Chicago's pioneer citizens, Mr. Charles J. Hull, and although battered by its vicissitudes, was essentially

sound. Before it had been occupied by the factory, it had sheltered a secondhand furniture store, and at one

time the Little Sisters of the Poor had used it for a home for the aged. It had a halfskeptical reputation for a

haunted attic, so far respected by the tenants living on the second floor that they always kept a large pitcher

full of water on the attic stairs. Their explanation of this custom was so incoherent that I was sure it was a

survival of the belief that a ghost could not cross running water, but perhaps that interpretation was only my

The fine old house responded kindly to repairs, its wide hall and open fireplace always insuring it a gracious

aspect. Its generous owner, Miss Helen Culver, in the following spring gave us a free leasehold of the entire

house. Her kindness has continued through the years until the group of thirteen buildings, which at present

comprises our equipment, is built largely upon land which Miss Culver has put at the service of the

Settlement which bears Mr. Hull's name. In those days the house stood between an undertaking establishment

and a saloon. "Knight, Death and the Devil," the three were called by a Chicago wit, and yet any mock

heroics which might be implied by comparing the Settlement to a knight quickly dropped away under the

genuine kindness and hearty welcome extended to us by the families living up and down the street.

We furnished the house as we would have furnished it were it in another part of the city, with the photographs

and other impedimenta we had collected in Europe, and with a few bits of family mahogany. While all the

new furniture which was bought was enduring in quality, we were careful to keep it in character with the fine

old residence. Probably no young matron ever placed her own things in her own house with more pleasure

than that with which we first furnished HullHouse. We believed that the Settlement may logically bring to

its aid all those adjuncts which the cultivated man regards as good and suggestive of the best of the life of the

On the 18th of September, 1889, Miss Starr and I moved into it, with Miss Mary Keyser, who began

performing the housework, but who quickly developed into a very important factor in the life of the vicinity

as well as that of the household, and whose death five years later was most sincerely mourned by hundreds of

In our enthusiasm over "settling," the first night we forgot not only to lock but to close a side door opening on

Polk Street, and we were much pleased in the morning to find that we possessed a fine illustration of the

Our first guest was an interesting young woman who lived in a neighboring tenement, whose widowed

mother aided her in the support of the family by scrubbing a downtown theater every night. The mother, of

English birth, was well bred and carefully educated, but was in the midst of that bitter struggle which awaits

so many strangers in American cities who find that their social position tends to be measured solely by the

standards of living they are able to maintain. Our guest has long since married the struggling young lawyer to

whom she was then engaged, and he is now leading his profession in an eastern city. She recalls that month's

experience always with a sense of amusement over the fact that the succession of visitors who came to see the

new Settlement invariably questioned her most minutely concerning "these people" without once suspecting

that they were talking to one who had been identified with the neighborhood from childhood. I at least was

able to draw a lesson from the incident, and I never addressed a Chicago audience on the subject of the

Settlement and its vicinity without inviting a neighbor to go with me, that I might curb any hasty

generalization by the consciousness that I had an auditor who knew the conditions more intimately than I

Halsted Street has grown so familiar during twenty years of residence that it is difficult to recall its gradual

changes,the withdrawal of the more prosperous Irish and Germans, and the slow substitution of Russian

Jews, Italians, and Greeks. A description of the street such as I gave in those early addresses still stands in my

In the very first weeks of our residence Miss Starr started a reading party in George Eliot's "Romola," which

was attended by a group of young women who followed the wonderful tale with unflagging interest. The

weekly reading was held in our little upstairs dining room, and two members of the club came to dinner each

week, not only that they might be received as guests, but that they might help us wash the dishes afterwards

Our "first resident," as she gaily designated herself, was a charming old lady who gave five consecutive

readings from Hawthorne to a most appreciative audience, interspersing the magic tales most delightfully

with recollections of the elusive and fascinating author. Years before she had lived at Brook Farm as a pupil

of the Ripleys, and she came to us for ten days because she wished to live once more in an atmosphere where

"idealism ran high." We thus early found the type of class which through all the years has remained most

Volunteers to the new undertaking came quickly; a charming young girl conducted a kindergarten in the

drawing room, coming regularly every morning from her home in a distant part of the North Side of the city.

Although a tablet to her memory has stood upon a mantel shelf in HullHouse for five years, we still

associate her most vividly with the play of little children, first in her kindergarten and then in her own

nursery, which furnished a veritable illustration of Victor Hugo's definition of heaven"a place where

parents are always young and children always little." Her daily presence for the first two years made it quite

impossible for us to become too solemn and selfconscious in our strenuous routine, for her mirth and

buoyancy were irresistible and her eager desire to share the life of the neighborhood never failed, although it

was often put to a severe test. One day at luncheon she gaily recited her futile attempt to impress temperance

principles upon the mind of an Italian mother, to whom she had returned a small daughter of five sent to the

kindergarten "in quite a horrid state of intoxication" from the winesoaked bread upon which she had

breakfasted. The mother, with the gentle courtesy of a South Italian, listened politely to her graphic portrayal

of the untimely end awaiting so immature a wine bibber; but long before the lecture was finished, quite

unconscious of the incongruity, she hospitably set forth her best wines, and when her baffled guest refused

one after the other, she disappeared, only to quickly return with a small dark glass of whisky, saying

reassuringly, "See, I have brought you the true American drink." The recital ended in seriocomic despair,

with the rueful statement that "the impression I probably made on her darkened mind was, that it was the

American custom to breakfast children on bread soaked in whisky instead of light Italian wine."

That first kindergarten was a constant source of education to us. We were much surprised to find social

distinctions even among its lambs, although greatly amused with the neat formulation made by the superior

little Italian boy who refused to sit beside uncouth little Angelina because "we eat our macaroni this

way"imitating the movement of a fork from a plate to his mouth"and she eat her macaroni this way,"

holding his hand high in the air and throwing back his head, that his wideopen mouth might receive an

imaginary cascade. Angelina gravely nodded her little head in approval of this distinction between gentry and

peasant. "But isn't it astonishing that merely table manners are made such a test all the way along" was the

comment of their democratic teacher. Another memory which refuses to be associated with death, which

came to her all too soon, is that of the young girl who organized our first really successful club of boys,

holding their fascinated interest by the old chivalric tales, set forth so dramatically and vividly that checkers

and jackstraws were abandoned by all the other clubs on Boys' Day, that their members might form a

I met a member of the latter club one day as he flung himself out of the House in the rage by which an

emotional boy hopes to keep from shedding tears. "There is no use coming here any more, Prince Roland is

dead," he gruffly explained as we passed. We encouraged the younger boys in tournaments and dramatics of

all sorts, and we somewhat fatuously believed that boys who were early interested in adventurers or explorers

might later want to know the lives of living statesmen and inventors. It is needless to add that the boys

quickly responded to such a program, and that the only difficulty lay in finding leaders who were able to

carry it out. This difficulty has been with us through all the years of growth and development in the Boys'

Club until now, with its fivestory building, its splendid equipment of shops, of recreation and study rooms,

that group alone is successful which commands the services of a resourceful and devoted leader.

The dozens of younger children who from the first came to Hull House were organized into groups which

were not quite classes and not quite clubs. The value of these groups consisted almost entirely in arousing a

higher imagination and in giving the children the opportunity which they could not have in the crowded

schools, for initiative and for independent social relationships. The public schools then contained little hand

work of any sort, so that naturally any instruction which we provided for the children took the direction of

this supplementary work. But it required a constant effort that the pressure of poverty itself should not defeat

the educational aim. The Italian girls in the sewing classes would count the day lost when they could not

carry home a garment, and the insistence that it should be neatly made seemed a superrefinement to those in

As these clubs have been continued during the twenty years they have developed classes in the many forms

of handicraft which the newer education is so rapidly adapting for the delight of children; but they still keep

their essentially social character and still minister to that large number of children who leave school the very

week they are fourteen years old, only too eager to close the schoolroom door forever on a tiresome task that

is at last well over. It seems to us important that these children shall find themselves permanently attached to

a House that offers them evening clubs and classes with their old companions, that merges as easily as

possible the school life into the working life and does what it can to find places for the bewildered young

things looking for work. A large proportion of the delinquent boys brought into the juvenile court in Chicago

are the oldest sons in large families whose wages are needed at home. The grades from which many of them

leave school, as the records show, are piteously far from the seventh and eighth where the very first

introduction in manual training is given, nor have they been caught by any other abiding interest.

In spite of these flourishing clubs for children early established at HullHouse, and the fact that our first

organized undertaking was a kindergarten, we were very insistent that the Settlement should not be primarily

for the children, and that it was absurd to suppose that grown people would not respond to opportunities for

education and social life. Our enthusiastic kindergartner herself demonstrated this with an old woman of

ninety who, because she was left alone all day while her daughter cooked in a restaurant, had formed such a

persistent habit of picking the plaster off the walls that one landlord after another refused to have her for a

tenant. It required but a few week's time to teach her to make large paper chains, and gradually she was

content to do it all day long, and in the end took quite as much pleasure in adorning the walls as she had

formally taken in demolishing them. Fortunately the landlord had never heard the aesthetic principle that

exposure of basic construction is more desirable than gaudy decoration. In course of time it was discovered

that the old woman could speak Gaelic, and when one or two grave professors came to see her, the

neighborhood was filled with pride that such a wonder lived in their midst. To mitigate life for a woman of

ninety was an unfailing refutation of the statement that the Settlement was designed for the young.

On our first New Year's Day at HullHouse we invited the older people in the vicinity, sending a carriage for

the most feeble and announcing to all of them that we were going to organize an Old Settlers' Party.

Every New Year's Day since, older people in varying numbers have come together at HullHouse to relate

early hardships, and to take for the moment the place in the community to which their pioneer life entitles

them. Many people who were formerly residents of the vicinity, but whom prosperity has carried into more

desirable neighborhoods, come back to these meetings and often confess to each other that they have never

since found such kindness as in early Chicago when all its citizens came together in mutual enterprises. Many

of these pioneers, so like the men and women of my earliest childhood that I always felt comforted by their

presence in the house, were very much opposed to "foreigners," whom they held responsible for a

depreciation of property and a general lowering of the tone of the neighborhood. Sometimes we had a chance

for championship; I recall one old man, fiercely American, who had reproached me because we had so many

"foreign views" on our walls, to whom I endeavored to set forth our hope that the pictures might afford a

familiar island to the immigrants in a sea of new and strange impressions. The old settler guest, taken off his

guard, replied, "I see; they feel as we did when we saw a Yankee notion from Down East,"thereby

formulating the dim kinship between the pioneer and the immigrant, both "buffeting the waves of a new

development." The older settlers as well as their children throughout the years have given genuine help to our

various enterprises for neighborhood improvement, and from their own memories of earlier hardships have

made many shrewd suggestions for alleviating the difficulties of that first sharp struggle with untoward

In those early days we were often asked why we had come to live on Halsted Street when we could afford to

live somewhere else. I remember one man who used to shake his head and say it was "the strangest thing he

had met in his experience," but who was finally convinced that it was "not strange but natural." In time it

came to seem natural to all of us that the Settlement should be there. If it is natural to feed the hungry and

care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, comfort to the aged, and to minister to

the deepseated craving for social intercourse that all men feel. Whoever does it is rewarded by something

which, if not gratitude, is at least spontaneous and vital and lacks that irksome sense of obligation with which

In addition to the neighbors who responded to the receptions and classes, we found those who were too

battered and oppressed to care for them. To these, however, was left that susceptibility to the bare offices of

From the first it seemed understood that we were ready to perform the humblest neighborhood services. We

were asked to wash the newborn babies, and to prepare the dead for burial, to nurse the sick, and to "mind

Occasionally these neighborly offices unexpectedly uncovered ugly human traits. For six weeks after an

operation we kept in one of our three bedrooms a forlorn little baby who, because he was born with a cleft

palate, was most unwelcome even to his mother, and we were horrified when he died of neglect a week after

he was returned to his home; a little Italian bride of fifteen sought shelter with us one November evening to

escape her husband who had beaten her every night for a week when he returned home from work, because

she had lost her wedding ring; two of us officiated quite alone at the birth of an illegitimate child because the

doctor was late in arriving, and none of the honest Irish matrons would "touch the likes of her"; we

ministered at the deathbed of a young man, who during a long illness of tuberculosis had received so many

bottles of whisky through the mistaken kindness of his friends, that the cumulative effect produced wild

We were also early impressed with the curious isolation of many of the immigrants; an Italian woman once

expressed her pleasure in the red roses that she saw at one of our receptions in surprise that they had been

"brought so fresh all the way from Italy." She would not believe for an instant that they had been grown in

America. She said that she had lived in Chicago for six years and had never seen any roses, whereas in Italy

she had seen them every summer in great profusion. During all that time, of course, the woman had lived

within ten blocks of a florist's window; she had not been more than a fivecent car ride away from the public

parks; but she had never dreamed of faring forth for herself, and no one had taken her. Her conception of

America had been the untidy street in which she lived and had made her long struggle to adapt herself to

But in spite of some untoward experiences, we were constantly impressed with the uniform kindness and

courtesy we received. Perhaps these first days laid the simple human foundations which are certainly

essential for continuous living among the poor; first, genuine preference for residence in an industrial quarter

to any other part of the city, because it is interesting and makes the human appeal; and second, the conviction,

in the words of Canon Barnett, that the things that make men alike are finer and better than the things that

keep them apart, and that these basic likenesses, if they are properly accentuated, easily transcend the less

Perhaps even in those first days we made a beginning toward that object which was afterwards stated in our

charter: "To provide a center for higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and

philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago."

The Ethical Culture Societies held a summer school at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1892, to which they

invited several people representing the then new Settlement movement, that they might discuss with others

I venture to produce here parts of a lecture I delivered in Plymouth, both because I have found it impossible

to formulate with the same freshness those early motives and strivings, and because, when published with

other papers given that summer, it was received by the Settlement people themselves as a satisfactory

I remember on golden summer afternoon during the sessions of the summer school that several of us met on

the shores of a pond in a pine wood a few miles from Plymouth, to discuss our new movement. The natural

leader of the group was Robert A. Woods. He had recently returned from a residence in Toynbee Hall,

London, to open Andover House in Boston, and had just issued a book, "English Social Movements," in

which he had gathered together and focused the many forms of social endeavor preceding and

contemporaneous with the English Settlements. There were Miss Vida D. Scudder and Miss Helena Dudley

from the College Settlement Association, Miss Julia C. Lathrop and myself from HullHouse. Some of us

had numbered our years as far as thirty, and we all carefully avoided the extravagance of statement which

characterizes youth, and yet I doubt if anywhere on the continent that summer could have been found a group

of people more genuinely interested in social development or more sincerely convinced that they had found a

clue by which the conditions in crowded cities might be understood and the agencies for social betterment

We were all careful to avoid saying that we had found a "life work," perhaps with an instinctive dread of

expending all our energy in vows of constancy, as so often happens; and yet it is interesting to note that of all

the people whom I have recalled as the enthusiasts at that little conference have remained attached to

Settlements in actual residence for longer or shorter periods each year during the eighteen years that have

elapsed since then, although they have also been closely identified as publicists or governmental officials

with movements outside. It is as if they had discovered that the Settlement was too valuable as a method as a

way of approach to the social question to abandoned, although they had long since discovered it was not a

"social movement" in itself. This, however, is anticipating the future, whereas the following paper on "The

Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" should have a chance to speak for itself. It is perhaps too late in

This paper is an attempt to analyze the motives which underlie a movement based, not only upon conviction,

but upon genuine emotion, wherever educated young people are seeking an outlet for that sentiment for

universal brotherhood, which the best spirit of our times is forcing from an emotion into a motive. These

young people accomplish little toward the solution of this social problem, and bear the brunt of being

cultivated into unnourished, oversensitive lives. They have been shut off from the common labor by which

they live which is a great source of moral and physical health. They feel a fatal want of harmony between

their theory and their lives, a lack of coordination between thought and action. I think it is hard for us to

realize how seriously many of them are taking to the notion of human brotherhood, how eagerly they long to

give tangible expression to the democratic ideal. These young men and women, longing to socialize their

democracy, are animated by certain hopes which may be thus loosely formulated; that if in a democratic

country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to

establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the notion of a

higher civic life can be fostered save through common intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with

a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be

permanent; that the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in midair, until it is

secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. It is easier to state these hopes than to formulate

the line of motives, which I believe to constitute the trend of the subjective pressure toward the Settlement.

There is something primordial about these motives, but I am perhaps overbold in designating them as a great

desire to share the race life. We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of

the race. Our very organism holds memories and glimpses of that long life of our ancestors, which still goes

on among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of

enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual

ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shut one's self away

from that half of the race life is to shut one's self away from the most vital part of it; it is to live out but half

the humanity to which we have been born heir and to use but half our faculties. We have all had longings for

a fuller life which should include the use of these faculties. These longings are the physical complement of

the "Intimations of Immortality," on which no ode has yet been written. To portray these would be the work

You may remember the forlorn feeling which occasionally seizes you when you arrive early in the morning a

stranger in a great city: the stream of laboring people goes past you as you gaze through the plateglass

window of your hotel; you see hard working men lifting great burdens; you hear the driving and jostling of

huge carts and your heart sinks with a sudden sense of futility. The door opens behind you and you turn to the

man who brings you in your breakfast with a quick sense of human fellowship. You find yourself praying that

you may never lose your hold on it all. A more poetic prayer would be that the great mother breasts of our

common humanity, with its labor and suffering and its homely comforts, may never be withheld from you.

You turn helplessly to the waiter and feel that it would be almost grotesque to claim from him the sympathy

you crave because civilization has placed you apart, but you resent your position with a sudden sense of

snobbery. Literature is full of portrayals of these glimpses: they come to shipwrecked men on rafts; they

overcome the differences of an incongruous multitude when in the presence of a great danger or when moved

by a common enthusiasm. They are not, however, confined to such moments, and if we were in the habit of

telling them to each other, the recital would be as long as the tales of children are, when they sit down on the

green grass and confide to each other how many times they have remembered that they lived once before. If

these childish tales are the stirring of inherited impressions, just so surely is the other the striving of inherited

"It is true that there is nothing after disease, indigence and a sense of guilt, so fatal to health and to life itself

as the want of a proper outlet for active faculties." I have seen young girls suffer and grow sensibly lowered

in vitality in the first years after they leave school. In our attempt then to give a girl pleasure and freedom

from care we succeed, for the most part, in making her pitifully miserable. She finds "life" so different from

what she expected it to be. She is besotted with innocent little ambitions, and does not understand this

apparent waste of herself, this elaborate preparation, if no work is provided for her. There is a heritage of

noble obligation which young people accept and long to perpetuate. The desire for action, the wish to right

wrong and alleviate suffering haunts them daily. Society smiles at it indulgently instead of making it of value

to itself. The wrong to them begins even farther back, when we restrain the first childish desires for "doing

good", and tell them that they must wait until they are older and better fitted. We intimate that social

obligation begins at a fixed date, forgetting that it begins at birth itself. We treat them as children who, with

stronggrowing limbs, are allowed to use their legs but not their arms, or whose legs are daily carefully

exercised that after a while their arms may be put to high use. We do this in spite of the protest of the best

educators, Locke and Pestalozzi. We are fortunate in the meantime if their unused members do not weaken

and disappear. They do sometimes. There are a few girls who, by the time they are "educated", forget their

old childish desires to help the world and to play with poor little girls "who haven't playthings". Parents are

often inconsistent: they deliberately expose their daughters to knowledge of the distress in the world; they

send them to hear missionary addresses on famines in India and China; they accompany them to lectures on

the suffering in Siberia; they agitate together over the forgotten region of East London. In addition to this,

from babyhood the altruistic tendencies of these daughters are persistently cultivated. They are taught to be

selfforgetting and selfsacrificing, to consider the good of the whole before the good of the ego. But when

all this information and culture show results, when the daughter comes back from college and begins to

recognize her social claim to the "submerged tenth", and to evince a disposition to fulfill it, the family claim

is strenuously asserted; she is told that she is unjustified, illadvised in her efforts. If she persists, the family

too often are injured and unhappy unless the efforts are called missionary and the religious zeal of the family

carry them over their sense of abuse. When this zeal does not exist, the result is perplexing. It is a curious

violation of what we would fain believe a fundamental lawthat the final return of the deed is upon the head

of the doer. The deed is that of exclusiveness and caution, but the return, instead of falling upon the head of

the exclusive and cautious, falls upon a young head full of generous and unselfish plans. The girl loses

something vital out of her life to which she is entitled. She is restricted and unhappy; her elders meanwhile,

We have in America a fastgrowing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for

their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them

to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is

the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy

of function. These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study,

but they are sustaining this shock of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that the things that

make us all alike are stronger than the things that make us different. They say that all men are united by needs

and sympathies far more permanent and radical than anything that temporarily divides them and sets them in

opposition to each other. If they affect art, they say that the decay in artistic expression is due to the decay in

ethics, that art when shut away from the human interests and from the great mass of humanity is

selfdestructive. They tell their elders with all the bitterness of youth that if they expect success from them in

business or politics or in whatever lines their ambition for them has run, they must let them consult all of

humanity; that they must let them find out what the people want and how they want it. It is only the stronger

young people, however, who formulate this. Many of them dissipate their energies in socalled enjoyment.

Others not content with that, go on studying and go back to college for their second degrees; not that they are

especially fond of study, but because they want something definite to do, and their powers have been trained

in the direction of mental accumulation. Many are buried beneath this mental accumulation with lowered

vitality and discontent. Walter Besant says they have had the vision that Peter had when he saw the great

sheet let down from heaven, wherein was neither clean nor unclean. He calls it the sense of humanity. It is not

philanthropy nor benevolence, but a thing fuller and wider than either of these.

This young life, so sincere in its emotion and good phrases and yet so undirected, seems to me as pitiful as

the other great mass of destitute lives. One is supplementary to the other, and some method of

communication can surely be devised. Mr. Barnett, who urged the first Settlement,Toynbee Hall, in East

London,recognized this need of outlet for the young men of Oxford and Cambridge, and hoped that the

Settlement would supply the communication. It is easy to see why the Settlement movement originated in

England, where the years of education are more constrained and definite than they are here, where class

distinctions are more rigid. The necessity of it was greater there, but we are fast feeling the pressure of the

need and meeting the necessity for Settlements in America. Our young people feel nervously the need of

putting theory into action, and respond quickly to the Settlement form of activity.

Other motives which I believe make toward the Settlement are the result of a certain renaissance going

forward in Christianity. The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make social service,

irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of Christ, is as old as Christianity itself. We have no proof from

the records themselves that the early Roman Christians, who strained their simple art to the point of

grotesqueness in their eagerness to record a "good news" on the walls of the catacombs, considered this good

news a religion. Jesus had no set of truths labeled Religious. On the contrary, his doctrine was that all truth is

one, that the appropriation of it is freedom. His teaching had no dogma to mark it off from truth and action in

general. He himself called it a revelationa life. These early Roman Christians received the Gospel

message, a command to love all men, with a certain joyous simplicity. The image of the Good Shepherd is

blithe and gay beyond the gentlest shepherd of Greek mythology; the hart no longer pants, but rushes to the

water brooks. The Christians looked for the continuous revelation, but believed what Jesus said, that this

revelation, to be retained and made manifest, must be put into terms of action; that action is the only medium

man has for receiving and appropriating truth; that the doctrine must be known through the will.

That Christianity has to be revealed and embodied in the line of social progress is a corollary to the simple

proposition, that man's action is found in his social relationships in the way in which he connects with his

fellows; that his motives for action are the zeal and affection with which he regards his fellows. By this

simple process was created a deep enthusiasm for humanity; which regarded man as at once the organ and the

object of revelation; and by this process came about the wonderful fellowship, the true democracy of the

early Church, that so captivates the imagination. The early Christians were preeminently nonresistant. They

believed in love as a cosmic force. There was no iconoclasm during the minor peace of the Church. They did

not yet denounce nor tear down temples, nor preach the end of the world. They grew to a mighty number, but

it never occurred to them, either in their weakness or in their strength, to regard other men for an instant as

their foes or as aliens. The spectacle of the Christians loving all men was the most astounding Rome had ever

seen. They were eager to sacrifice themselves for the weak, for children, and for the aged; they identified

themselves with slaves and did not avoid the plague; they longed to share the common lot that they might

receive the constant revelation. It was a new treasure which the early Christians added to the sum of all

treasures, a joy hitherto unknown in the worldthe joy of finding the Christ which lieth in each man, but

which no man can unfold save in fellowship. A happiness ranging from the heroic to the pastoral enveloped

them. They were to possess a revelation as long as life had new meaning to unfold, new action to propose.

I believe that there is a distinct turning among many young men and women toward this simple acceptance of

Christ's message. They resent the assumption that Christianity is a set of ideas which belong to the religious

consciousness, whatever that may be. They insist that it cannot be proclaimed and instituted apart from the

social life of the community and that it must seek a simple and natural expression in the social organism

itself. The Settlement movement is only one manifestation of that wider humanitarian movement which

throughout Christendom, but preeminently in England, is endeavoring to embody itself, not in a sect, but in

I believe that this turning, this renaissance of the early Christian humanitarianism, is going on in America, in

Chicago, if you please, without leaders who write or philosophize, without much speaking, but with a bent to

express in social service and in terms of action the spirit of Christ. Certain it is that spiritual force is found in

the Settlement movement, and it is also true that this force must be evoked and must be called into play

before the success of any Settlement is assured. There must be the overmastering belief that all that is noblest

in life is common to men as men, in order to accentuate the likenesses and ignore the differences which are

found among the people whom the Settlement constantly brings into juxtaposition. It may be true, as the

Positivists insist, that the very religious fervor of man can be turned into love for his race, and his desire for a

future life into content to live in the echo of his deeds; Paul's formula of seeking for the Christ which lieth in

each man and founding our likenesses on him, seems a simpler formula to many of us.

In a thousand voices singing the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel's "Messiah," it is possible to distinguish the

leading voices, but the differences of training and cultivation between them and the voices in the chorus, are

lost in the unity of purpose and in the fact that they are all human voices lifted by a high motive. This is a

weak illustration of what a Settlement attempts to do. It aims, in a measure, to develop whatever of social life

its neighborhood may afford, to focus and give form to that life, to bring to bear upon it the results of

cultivation and training; but it receives in exchange for the music of isolated voices the volume and strength

of the chorus. It is quite impossible for me to say in what proportion or degree the subjective necessity which

led to the opening of HullHouse combined the three trends: first, the desire to interpret democracy in social

terms; secondly, the impulse beating at the very source of our lives, urging us to aid in the race progress; and,

thirdly, the Christian movement toward humanitarianism. It is difficult to analyze a living thing; the analysis

is at best imperfect. Many more motives may blend with the three trends; possibly the desire for a new form

of social success due to the nicety of imagination, which refuses worldly pleasures unmixed with the joys of

selfsacrifice; possibly a love of approbation, so vast that it is not content with the treble clapping of delicate

hands, but wishes also to hear the bass notes from toughened palms, may mingle with these.

The Settlement then, is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems

which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not

confined to any one portion of a city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one

end of society and the destitution at the other; but it assumes that this overaccumulation and destitution is

most sorely felt in the things that pertain to social and educational privileges. From its very nature it can stand

for no political or social propaganda. It must, in a sense, give the warm welcome of an inn to all such

propaganda, if perchance one of them be found an angel. The only thing to be dreaded in the Settlement is

that it lose its flexibility, its power of quick adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment

may demand. It must be open to conviction and must have a deep and abiding sense of tolerance. It must be

hospitable and ready for experiment. It should demand from its residents a scientific patience in the

accumulation of facts and the steady holding of their sympathies as one of the best instruments for that

accumulation. It must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a

philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot

boy. Its residents must be emptied of all conceit of opinion and all selfassertion, and ready to arouse and

interpret the public opinion of their neighborhood. They must be content to live quietly side by side with their

neighbors, until they grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests. Their neighbors are held apart by

differences of race and language which the residents can more easily overcome. They are bound to see the

needs of their neighborhood as a whole, to furnish data for legislation, and to use their influence to secure it.

In short, residents are pledged to devote themselves to the duties of good citizenship and to the arousing of

the social energies which too largely lie dormant in every neighborhood given over to industrialism. They are

bound to regard the entire life of their city as organic, to make an effort to unify it, and to protest against its

It is always easy to make all philosophy point one particular moral and all history adorn one particular tale;

but I may be forgiven the reminder that the best speculative philosophy sets forth the solidarity of the human

race; that the highest moralists have taught that without the advance and improvement of the whole, no man

can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or material individual condition; and that the

subjective necessity for Social Settlements is therefore identical with that necessity, which urges us on toward

If the early American Settlements stood for a more exigent standard in philanthropic activities, insisting that

each new undertaking should be preceded by carefully ascertained facts, then certainly HullHouse held to

this standard in the opening of our new coffeehouse first started as a public kitchen. An investigation of the

sweatshops had disclosed the fact, that sewing women during the busy season paid little attention to the

feeding of their families, for it was only by working steadily through the long day that the scanty pay of five,

seven, or nine cents for finishing a dozen pairs of trousers could be made into a day's wage; and they bought

from the nearest grocery the canned goods that could be most quickly heated, or gave a few pennies to the

One of the residents made an investigation, at the instance of the United States Department of Agriculture,

into the food values of the dietaries of the various immigrants, and this was followed by an investigation

made by another resident, for the United States Department of Labor, into the foods of the Italian colony, on

the supposition that the constant use of imported products bore a distinct relation to the cost of living. I recall

an Italian who, coming into HullHouse one day as we were sitting at the dinner table, expressed great

surprise that Americans ate a variety of food, because he believed that they partook only of potatoes and beer.

A little inquiry showed that this conclusion was drawn from the fact that he lived next to an Irish saloon and

At that time the New England kitchen was comparatively new in Boston, and Mrs. Richards, who was largely

responsible for its foundation, hoped that cheaper cuts of meat and simpler vegetables, if they were subjected

to slow and thorough processes of cooking, might be made attractive and their nutritive value secured for the

people who so sadly needed more nutritious food. It was felt that this could be best accomplished in public

kitchens, where the advantage of scientific training and careful supervision could be secured. One of the

residents went to Boston for a training under Mrs. Richards, and when the HullHouse kitchen was fitted

under her guidance and direction, our hopes ran high for some modification of the food of the neighborhood.

We did not reckon, however, with the wide diversity in nationality and inherited tastes, and while we sold a

certain amount of the carefully prepared soups and stews in the neigh boring factoriesa sale which has

steadily increased throughout the yearsand were also patronized by a few households, perhaps the

neighborhood estimate was best summed up by the woman who frankly confessed, that the food was certainly

nutritious, but that she didn't like to eat what was nutritious, that she liked to eat "what she'd ruther."

If the dietetics were appreciated but slowly, the social value of the coffeehouse and the gymnasium, which

were in the same building, were quickly demonstrated. At that time the saloon halls were the only places in

the neighborhood where the immigrant could hold his social gatherings, and where he could celebrate such

These halls were rented very cheaply with the understanding that various sums of money should be "passed

across the bar," and it was considered a mean host or guest who failed to live up to this implied bargain. The

consequence was that many a reputable party ended with a certain amount of disorder, due solely to the fact

that the social instinct was traded upon and used as a basis for money making by an adroit host. From the

beginning the young people's clubs had asked for dancing, and nothing was more popular than the increased

space for parties offered by the gymnasium, with the chance to serve refreshments in the room below. We

tried experiments with every known "soft drink," from those extracted from an expensive soda water fountain

to slender glasses of grape juice, but so far as drinks were concerned we never became a rival to the saloon,

nor indeed did anyone imagine that we were trying to do so. I remember one man who looked about the cozy

little room and said, "This would be a nice place to sit in all day if one could only have beer." But the

coffeehouse gradually performed a mission of its own and became something of a social center to the

neighborhood as well as a real convenience. Business men from the adjacent factories and school teachers

from the nearest public schools, used it increasingly. The HullHouse students and club members supped

together in little groups or held their reunions and social banquets, as, to a certain extent, did organizations

from all parts of the town. The experience of the coffeehouse taught us not to hold to preconceived ideas of

what the neighborhood ought to have, but to keep ourselves in readiness to modify and adapt our

undertakings as we discovered those things which the neighborhood was ready to accept.

Better food was doubtless needed, but more attractive and safer places for social gatherings were also needed,

and the neighborhood was ready for one and not for the other. We had no hint then in Chicago of the small

parks which were to be established fifteen years later, containing the halls for dancing and their own

restaurants in buildings where the natural desire of the young for gayety and social organization, could be

safely indulged. Yet even in that early day a member of the HullHouse Men's Club who had been appointed

superintendent of Douglas Park had secured there the first public swimming pool, and his fellow club

There was in the earliest undertakings at HullHouse a touch of the artist's enthusiasm when he translates his

inner vision through his chosen material into outward form. Keenly conscious of the social confusion all

about us and the hard economic struggle, we at times believed that the very struggle itself might become a

source of strength. The devotion of the mothers to their children, the dread of the men lest they fail to provide

for the family dependent upon their daily exertions, at moments seemed to us the secret stores of strength

from which society is fed, the invisible array of passion and feeling which are the surest protectors of the

world. We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common

destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract from life's very misfortunes a power of

Of course there was always present the harrowing consciousness of the difference in economic condition

between ourselves and our neighbors. Even if we had gone to live in the most wretched tenement, there

would have always been an essential difference between them and ourselves, for we should have had a sense

of security in regard to illness and old age and the lack of these two securities are the specters which most

persistently haunt the poor. Could we, in spite of this, make their individual efforts more effective through

Some such vague hope was in our minds when we started the HullHouse Cooperative Coal Association,

which led a vigorous life for three years, and developed a large membership under the skillful advice of its

one paid officer, an English workingman who had had experience in cooperative societies at "'ome." Some of

the meetings of the association, in which people met to consider together their basic dependence upon fire

and warmth, had a curious challenge of life about them. Because the cooperators knew what it meant to bring

forth children in the midst of privation and to see the tiny creatures struggle for life, their recitals cut a cross

section, as it were, in that worldold effortthe "dying to live" which so inevitably triumphs over poverty

and suffering. And yet their very familiarity with hardship may have been responsible for that sentiment

which traditionally ruins business, for a vote of the cooperators that the basket buyers be given one basket

free out of every six, that the presentation of five purchase tickets should entitle the holders to a profit in coal

instead of stock "because it would be a shame to keep them waiting for the dividend," was always pointed to

by the conservative quarterofaton buyers as the beginning of the end. At any rate, at the close of the third

winter, although the Association occupied an imposing coal yard on the southeast corner of the HullHouse

block and its gross receipts were between three and four hundred dollars a day, it became evident that the

concern could not remain solvent if it continued its philanthropic policy, and the experiment was terminated

Our next cooperative experiment was much more successful, perhaps because it was much more spontaneous.

At a meeting of working girls held at HullHouse during a strike in a large shoe factory, the discussions

made it clear that the strikers who had been most easily frightened, and therefore first to capitulate, were

naturally those girls who were paying board and were afraid of being put out if they fell too far behind. After

a recital of a case of peculiar hardship one of them exclaimed: "Wouldn't it be fine if we had a boarding club

of our own, and then we could stand by each other in a time like this?" After that events moved quickly. We

read aloud together Beatrice Potter's little book on "Cooperation," and discussed all the difficulties and

fascinations of such an undertaking, and on the first of May, 1891, two comfortable apartments near

HullHouse were rented and furnished. The Settlement was responsible for the furniture and paid the first

month's rent, but beyond that the members managed the club themselves. The undertaking "marched," as the

French say, from the very first, and always on its own feet. Although there were difficulties, none of them

proved insurmountable, which was a matter for great satisfaction in the face of a statement made by the head

of the United States Department of Labor, who, on a visit to the club when it was but two years old, said that

his department had investigated many cooperative undertakings, and that none founded and managed by

women had ever succeeded. At the end of the third year the club occupied all of the six apartments which the

It was in connection with our efforts to secure a building for the Jane Club, that we first found ourselves in

the dilemma between the needs of our neighbors and the kindhearted response upon which we had already

come to rely for their relief. The adapted apartments in which the Jane Club was housed were inevitably more

or less uncomfortable, and we felt that the success of the club justified the erection of a building for its sole

Up to that time, our history had been as the minor peace of the early Church. We had had the most generous

interpretation of our efforts. Of course, many people were indifferent to the idea of the Settlement; others

looked on with tolerant and sometimes cynical amusement which we would often encounter in a good story

related at our expense; but all this was remote and unreal to us, and we were sure that if the critics could but

The situation changed markedly after the Pullman strike, and our efforts to secure factory legislation later

brought upon us a certain amount of distrust and suspicion; until then we had been considered merely a

kindly philanthropic undertaking whose new form gave us a certain idealistic glamour. But sterner tests were

coming, and one of the first was in connection with the new building for the Jane Club. A trustee of

HullHouse came to see us one day with the good news that a friend of his was ready to give twenty

thousand dollars with which to build the desired new clubhouse. When, however, he divulged the name of his

generous friend, it proved to be that of a man who was notorious for underpaying the girls in his

establishment and concerning whom there were even darker stories. It seemed clearly impossible to erect a

clubhouse for working girls with such money and we at once said that we must decline the offer. The trustee

of HullHouse was put in the most embarrassing situation; he had, of course, induced the man to give the

money and had had no thought but that it would be eagerly received; he would now be obliged to return with

the astonishing, not to say insulting, news that the money was considered unfit.

In the long discussion which followed, it gradually became clear to all of us that such a refusal could be

valuable only as it might reveal to the man himself and to others, public opinion in regard to certain methods

of moneymaking, but that from the very nature of the case our refusal of this money could not be made

public because a representative of HullHouse had asked for it. However, the basic fact remained that we

could not accept the money, and of this the trustee himself was fully convinced. This incident occurred during

a period of much discussion concerning "tainted money" and is perhaps typical of the difficulty of dealing

with it. It is impossible to know how far we may blame the individual for doing that which all of his

competitors and his associates consider legitimate; at the same time, social changes can only be inaugurated

by those who feel the unrighteousness of contemporary conditions, and the expression of their scruples may

be the one opportunity for pushing forward moral tests into that dubious area wherein wealth is accumulated.

In the course of time a new clubhouse was built by an old friend of HullHouse much interested in working

girls, and this has been occupied for twelve years by the very successful cooperating Jane Club. The incident

of the early refusal is associated in my mind with a long talk upon the subject of questionable money I held

with the warden of Toynbee Hall, whom I visited at Bristol where he was then canon in the Cathedral. By

way of illustration he showed me a beautiful little church which had been built by the last slavetrading

merchant in Bristol, who had been much disapproved of by his fellow townsmen and had hoped by this

transmutation of illgotten money into exquisite Gothic architecture to reconcile himself both to God and

man. His impulse to build may have been born from his own scruples or from the quickened consciences of

his neighbors who saw that the worldold iniquity of enslaving men must at length come to an end. The

Abolitionists may have regarded this beautiful building as the fruit of a contrite heart, or they may have

scorned it as an attempt to magnify the goodness of a slave trader and thus perplex the doubting citizens of

Canon Barnett did not pronounce judgment on the Bristol merchant. He was, however, quite clear upon the

point that a higher moral standard for industrial life must be embodied in legislation as rapidly as possible,

that it may bear equally upon all, and that an individual endeavoring to secure this legislation must forbear

harsh judgment. This was doubtless a sound position, but during all the period of hot discussion concerning

tainted money I never felt clear enough on the general principle involved, to accept the many invitations to

write and speak upon the subject, although I received much instruction in the many letters of disapproval sent

to me by radicals of various schools because I was a member of the university extension staff of the then new

A little incident of this time illustrated to me the confusion in the minds of a least many older men between

religious teaching and advancing morality. One morning I received a letter from the head of a Settlement in

New York expressing his perplexity over the fact that his board of trustees had asked money from a man

notorious for his unscrupulous business methods. My correspondent had placed his resignation in the hands

of his board, that they might accept it at any time when they felt his utterances on the subject of tainted

money were offensive, for he wished to be free to openly discuss a subject of such grave moral import. The

very morning when my mind was full of the questions raised by this letter, I received a call from the daughter

of the same business man whom my friend considered so unscrupulous. She was passing through Chicago

and came to ask me to give her some arguments which she might later use with her father to confute the

charge that Settlements were irreligious. She said, "You see, he has been asked to give money to our

Settlement and would like to do it, if his conscience was only clear; he disapproves of Settlements because

I remember later discussing the incident with Washington Gladden who was able to parallel it from his own

experience. Now that this discussion upon tainted money has subsided, it is easy to view it with a certain

detachment impossible at the moment, and it is even difficult to understand why the feeling should have been

There was room for discouragement in the many unsuccessful experiments in cooperation which were carried

on in Chicago during the early nineties; a carpenter shop on Van Buren Street near Halsted, a labor exchange

started by the unemployed, not so paradoxical an arrangement as it seems, and a very ambitious plan for a

country colony which was finally carried out at Ruskin, Tennessee. In spite of failures, cooperative schemes

went on, some of the same men appearing in one after another with irrepressible optimism. I remember

during a cooperative congress, which met at HullHouse in the World's Fair summer that Mr. Henry D.

Lloyd, who collected records of cooperative experiments with the enthusiasm with which other men collect

coins or pictures, put before the congress some of the remarkable successes in Ireland and North England,

which he later embodied in his book on "Copartnership." One of the oldtime cooperators denounced the

modern method as "too much like cutthroat business" and declared himself in favor of "principles which

may have failed over and over again, but are nevertheless as sound as the law of gravitation." Mr. Lloyd and I

agreed that the fiery old man presented as fine a spectacle of devotion to a lost cause as either of us had ever

seen, although we both possessed memories well stored with such romantic attachments.

And yet this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers

of production is coming to pass all over the face of the earth. Five years later in the same HullHouse hall in

which the cooperative congress was held, an Italian senator told a large audience of his fellow countrymen of

the successful system of cooperative banks in north Italy and of their cooperative methods of selling produce

to the value of millions of francs annually; still later Sir Horace Plunkett related the remarkable successes in

I have seldom been more infected by enthusiasm than I once was in Dulwich at a meeting of English

cooperators where I was fairly overwhelmed by the fervor underlying the businesslike proceedings of the

congress, and certainly when I served as a juror in the Paris Exposition of 1900, nothing in the entire display

in the department of Social Economy was so imposing as the building housing the exhibit, which had been

erected by cooperative tradesunions without the assistance of a single contractor.

And so one's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized ideal of better human relations. At least

traces of successful cooperation are found even in individualistic America. I recall my enthusiasm on the day

when I set forth to lecture at New Harmony, Indiana, for I had early been thrilled by the tale of Robert Owen,

as every young person must be who is interested in social reform; I was delighted to find so much of his spirit

still clinging to the little town which had long ago held one of his ardent experiments, although the poor old

cooperators, who for many years claimed friendship at HullHouse because they heard that we "had once

tried a cooperative coal association," might well have convinced me of the persistency of the cooperative

Many experiences in those early years, although vivid, seemed to contain no illumination; nevertheless they

doubtless permanently affected our judgments concerning what is called crime and vice. I recall a series of

striking episodes on the day when I took the wife and child, as well as the old godfather, of an Italian convict

to visit him in the State Penitentiary. When we approached the prison, the sight of its heavy stone walls and

armed sentries threw the godfather into a paroxysm of rage; he cast his hat upon the ground and stamped

upon it, tore his hair, and loudly fulminated in weird Italian oaths, until one of the guards, seeing his strange

actions, came to inquire if "the gentleman was having a fit." When we finally saw the convict, his wife, to my

extreme distress, talked of nothing but his striped clothing, until the poor man wept with chagrin. Upon our

return journey to Chicago, the little son aged eight presented me with two oranges, so affectionately and

gayly that I was filled with reflections upon the advantage of each generation making a fresh start, when the

train boy, finding the stolen fruit in my lap, violently threatened to arrest the child. But stranger than any

episode was the fact itself that neither the convict, his wife, nor his godfather for a moment considered him a

criminal. He had merely gotten excited over cards and had stabbed his adversary with a knife. "Why should a

man who took his luck badly be kept forever from the sun?" was their reiterated inquiry.

I recall our perplexity over the first girls who had "gone astray"the poor, little, forlorn objects, fifteen and

sixteen years old, with their moral natures apparently untouched and unawakened; one of them whom the

police had found in a professional house and asked us to shelter for a few days until she could be used as a

witness, was clutching a battered doll which she had kept with her during her six months of an "evil life."

Two of these prematurely aged children came to us one day directly from the maternity ward of the Cook

County hospital, each with a baby in her arms, asking for protection, because they did not want to go home

for fear of "being licked." For them were no jewels nor idle living such as the storybooks portrayed. The first

of the older women whom I knew came to HullHouse to ask that her young sister, who was about to arrive

from Germany, might live near us; she wished to find her respectable work and wanted her to have the

"decent pleasures" that HullHouse afforded. After the arrangement had been completed and I had in a

measure recovered from my astonishment at the businesslike way in which she spoke of her own life, I

ventured to ask her history. In a very few words she told me that she had come from Germany as a music

teacher to an American family. At the end of two years, in order to avoid a scandal involving the head of the

house, she had come to Chicago where her child was born, but when the remittances ceased after its death,

finding herself without home and resources, she had gradually become involved in her present mode of life.

By dint of utilizing her family solicitude, we finally induced her to move into decent lodgings before her

sister arrived, and for a difficult year she supported herself by her exquisite embroidery. At the end of that

time, she gave up the struggle, the more easily as her young sister, well established in the dressmaking

But discouraging as these and other similar efforts often were, nevertheless the difficulties were infinitely less

in those days when we dealt with "fallen girls" than in the years following when the "white slave traffic"

became gradually established and when agonized parents, as well as the victims themselves, were totally

unable to account for the situation. In the light of recent disclosures, it seems as if we were unaccountably

dull not to have seen what was happening, especially to the Jewish girls among whom "the home trade of the

white slave traffic" was first carried on and who were thus made to break through countless generations of

chastity. We early encountered the difficulties of that old problem of restoring the woman, or even the child,

into the society she has once outraged. I well remember our perplexity when we attempted to help two girls

straight from a Virginia tobacco factory, who had been decoyed into a disreputable house when innocently

seeking a lodging on the late evening of their arrival. Although they had been rescued promptly, the stigma

remained, and we found it impossible to permit them to join any of the social clubs connected with

HullHouse, not so much because there was danger of contamination, as because the parents of the club

members would have resented their presence most hotly. One of our trustees succeeded in persuading a

repentant girl, fourteen years old, whom we tried to give a fresh start in another part of the city, to attend a

Sunday School class of a large Chicago church. The trustee hoped that the contact with nice girls, as well as

the moral training, would help the poor child on her hard road. But unfortunately tales of her shortcomings

reached the superintendent who felt obliged, in order to protect the other girls, to forbid her the school. She

came back to tell us about it, defiant as well as discouraged, and had it not been for the experience with our

own clubs, we could easily have joined her indignation over a church which "acted as if its Sunday School

In spite of poignant experiences or, perhaps, because of them, the memory of the first years at HullHouse is

more or less blurred with fatigue, for we could of course become accustomed only gradually to the unending

activity and to the confusion of a house constantly filling and refilling with groups of people. The little

children who came to the kindergarten in the morning were followed by the afternoon clubs of older children,

and those in turn made way for the educational and social organizations of adults, occupying every room in

the house every evening. All one's habits of living had to be readjusted, and any student's tendency to sit with

To thus renounce "the luxury of personal preference" was, however, a mere trifle compared to our perplexity

over the problems of an industrial neighborhood situated in an unorganized city. Life pressed hard in many

directions and yet it has always seemed to me rather interesting that when we were so distressed over its stern

aspects and so impressed with the lack of municipal regulations, the first building erected for HullHouse

should have been designed for an art gallery, for although it contained a readingroom on the first floor and a

studio above, the largest space on the second floor was carefully designed and lighted for art exhibits, which

had to do only with the cultivation of that which appealed to the powers of enjoyment as over against a

wageearning capacity. It was also significant that a Chicago business man, fond of pictures himself,

responded to this first appeal of the new and certainly puzzling undertaking called a Settlement.

The situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that at the time the building was erected in 1891, our

free lease of the land upon which HullHouse stood expired in 1895. The donor of the building, however,

overcame the difficulty by simply calling his gift a donation of a thousand dollars a year. This restriction of

course necessitated the simplest sort of a structure, although I remember on the exciting day when the new

building was promised to us, that I looked up my European notebook which contained the record of my

experience in Ulm, hoping that I might find a description of what I then thought "a Cathedral of Humanity"

ought to be. The description was "low and widespreading as to include all men in fellowship and mutual

responsibility even as the older pinnacles and spires indicated communion with God." The description did not

prove of value as an architectural motive I am afraid, although the architects, who have remained our friends

through all the years, performed marvels with a combination of complicated demands and little money. At the

moment when I read this girlish outbreak it gave me much comfort, for in those days in addition to our other

These first buildings were very precious to us and it afforded us the greatest pride and pleasure as one

building after another was added to the HullHouse group. They clothed in brick and mortar and made

visible to the world that which we were trying to do; they stated to Chicago that education and recreation

ought to be extended to the immigrants. The boys came in great numbers to our provisional gymnasium fitted

up in a former saloon, and it seemed to us quite as natural that a Chicago man, fond of athletics, should erect

I do not wish to give a false impression, for we were often bitterly pressed for money and worried by the

prospect of unpaid bills, and we gave up one golden scheme after another because we could not afford it; we

cooked the meals and kept the books and washed the windows without a thought of hardship if we thereby

But in spite of our financial stringency, I always believed that money would be given when we had once

clearly reduced the Settlement idea to the actual deed. This chapter, therefore, would be incomplete if it did

not record a certain theory of nonresistance or rather universal good will which I had worked out in

connection with the Settlement idea and which was later so often and so rudely disturbed. At that time I had

come to believe that if the activities of HullHouse were ever misunderstood, it would be either because there

was not time to fully explain or because our motives had become mixed, for I was convinced that

disinterested action was like truth or beauty in its lucidity and power of appeal.

But more gratifying than any understanding or response from without could possibly be, was the

consciousness that a growing group of residents was gathering at HullHouse, held together in that soundest

of all social bonds, the companionship of mutual interests. These residents came primarily because they were

genuinely interested in the social situation and believed that the Settlement was valuable as a method of

approach to it. A house in which the men residents lived was opened across the street, and at the end of the

first five years the HullHouse residential force numbered fifteen, a majority of whom still remain identified

Even in those early years we caught glimpses of the fact that certain social sentiments, which are "the

difficult and cumulating product of human growth" and which like all higher aims live only by communion

and fellowship, are cultivated most easily in the fostering soil of a community life.

Occasionally I obscurely felt as if a demand were being made upon us for a ritual which should express and

carry forward the hope of the social movement. I was constantly bewildered by the number of requests I

received to officiate at funeral services and by the curious confessions made to me by total strangers. For a

time I accepted the former and on one awful occasion furnished "the poetic part" of a wedding ceremony

really performed by a justice of the peace, but I soon learned to steadfastly refuse such offices, although I saw

that for many people without church affiliations the vague humanitarianism the Settlement represented was

the nearest approach they could find to an expression of their religious sentiments.

These hints of what the Settlement might mean to at least a few spirits among its contemporaries became

clear to me for the first time one summer's day in rural England, when I discussed with John Trevor his

attempts to found a labor church and his desire to turn the toil and danger attached to the life of the

workingman into the means of a universal fellowship. That very year a papyrus leaf brought to the British

Museum from Egypt, containing among other sayings of Jesus, "Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find me;

cleave the wood and I am there," was a powerful reminder to all England of the basic relations between daily

In those early years at HullHouse we were, however, in no danger of losing ourselves in mazes of

speculation or mysticism, and there was shrewd penetration in a compliment I received from one of our

Scotch neighbors. He came down Polk Street as I was standing near the foundations of our new gymnasium,

and in response to his friendly remark that "HullHouse was spreading out," I replied that "Perhaps we were

spreading out too fast." "Oh, no," he rejoined, "you can afford to spread out wide, you are so well planted in

the mud," giving the compliment, however, a practical turn, as he glanced at the deep mire on the then

unpaved street. It was this same condition of Polk Street which had caused the crown prince of Belgium when

he was brought upon a visit to HullHouse to shake his head and meditatively remark, "There is not such a

At the end of five years the residents of HullHouse published some first found facts and our reflections

thereon in a book called "HullHouse Maps and Papers." The maps were taken from information collected by

one of the residents for the United States Bureau of Labor in the investigation into "the slums of great cities"

and the papers treated of various neighborhood matters with candor and genuine concern if not with skill. The

first edition became exhausted in two years, and apparently the Boston publisher did not consider the book

That neglected and forlorn old age is daily brought to the attention of a Settlement which undertakes to bear

its share of the neighborhood burden imposed by poverty, was pathetically clear to us during our first months

of residence at HullHouse. One day a boy of ten led a tottering old lady into the House, saying that she had

slept for six weeks in their kitchen on a bed made up next to the stove; that she had come when her son died,

although none of them had ever seen her before; but because her son had "once worked in the same shop with

Pa she thought of him when she had nowhere to go." The little fellow concluded by saying that our house was

so much bigger than theirs that he thought we would have more roomfor beds. The old woman herself said

absolutely nothing, but looking on with that gripping fear of the poorhouse in her eyes, she was a living

embodiment of that dread which is so heartbreaking that the occupants of the County Infirmary themselves

seem scarcely less wretched than those who are making their last stand against it.

This look was almost more than I could bear for only a few days before some frightened women had bidden

me come quickly to the house of an old German woman, whom two men from the country agent's office were

attempting to remove to the County Infirmary. The poor old creature had thrown herself bodily upon a small

and battered chest of drawers and clung there, clutching it so firmly that it would have been impossible to

remove her without also taking the piece of furniture . She did not weep nor moan nor indeed make any

human sound, but between her broken gasps for breath she squealed shrilly like a frightened animal caught in

a trap. The little group of women and children gathered at her door stood aghast at this realization of the

black dread which always clouds the lives of the very poor when work is slack, but which constantly grows

more imminent and threatening as old age approaches. The neighborhood women and I hastened to make all

sorts of promises as to the support of the old woman and the country officials, only too glad to be rid of their

unhappy duty, left her to our ministrations. This dread of the poorhouse, the result of centuries of deterrent

Poor Law administration, seemed to me not without some justification one summer when I found myself

perpetually distressed by the unnecessary idleness and forlornness of the old women in the Cook County

Infirmary, many of whom I had known in the years when activity was still a necessity, and when they yet felt

bustlingly important. To take away from an old woman whose life has been spent in household cares all the

foolish little belongings to which her affections cling and to which her very fingers have become accustomed,

is to take away her last incentive to activity, almost to life itself. To give an old woman only a chair and a

bed, to leave her no cupboard in which her treasures may be stowed, not only that she may take them out

when she desires occupation, but that their mind may dwell upon them in moments of revery, is to reduce

The poor creature who clung so desperately to her chest of drawers was really clinging to the last remnant of

normal livinga symbol of all she was asked to renounce. For several years after this summer I invited five

or six old women to take a two weeks' vacation from the poorhouse which was eagerly and even gayly

accepted. Almost all the old men in the County Infirmary wander away each summer taking their chances for

finding food or shelter and return much refreshed by the little "tramp," but the old women cannot do this

unless they have some help from the outside, and yet the expenditure of a very little money secures for them

the coveted vacation. I found that a few pennies paid their car fare into town, a dollar a week procured

lodging with an old acquaintance; assured of two good meals a day in the HullHouse coffeehouse they

could count upon numerous cups of tea among old friends to whom they would airily state that they had

"come out for a little change" and hadn't yet made up their minds about "going in again for the winter." They

thus enjoyed a two weeks' vacation to the top of their bent and returned with wondrous tales of their

The reminiscences of these old women, their shrewd comments upon life, their sense of having reached a

point where they may at last speak freely with nothing to lose because of their frankness, makes them often

the most delightful of companions. I recall one of my guests, the mother of many scattered children, whose

one bright spot through all the dreary years had been the wedding feast of her son Mike,a feast which had

become transformed through long meditation into the nectar and ambrosia of the very gods. As a farewell

fling before she went "in" again, we dined together upon chicken pie, but it did not taste like the "the chicken

Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old

age. I recall the dying hour of one old Scotchwoman whose long struggle to "keep respectable" had so

embittered her that her last words were gibes and taunts for those who were trying to minister to her. "So you

came in yourself this morning, did you? You only sent things yesterday. I guess you knew when the doctor

was coming. Don't try to warm my feet with anything but that old jacket that I've got there; it belonged to my

boy who was drowned at sea nigh thirty years ago, but it's warmer yet with human feelings than any of your

damned charity hotwater bottles." Suddenly the harsh gasping voice was stilled in death and I awaited the

The lack of municipal regulation already referred to was, in the early days of HullHouse, parallelled by the

inadequacy of the charitable efforts of the city and an unfounded optimism that there was no real poverty

among us. Twenty years ago there was no Charity Organization Society in Chicago and the Visiting Nurse

Association had not yet begun its beneficial work, while the relief societies, although conscientiously

As social reformers gave themselves over to discussion of general principles, so the poor invariably accused

poverty itself of their destruction. I recall a certain Mrs. Moran, who was returning one rainy day from the

office of the county agent with her arms full of paper bags containing beans and flour which alone lay

between her children and starvation. Although she had no money she boarded a street car in order to save her

booty from complete destruction by the rain, and as the burst bags dropped "flour on the ladies' dresses" and

""beans all over the place," she was sharply reprimanded by the conductor, who was the further exasperated

when he discovered she had no fare. He put her off, as she had hoped he would, almost in front of

HullHouse. She related to us her state of mind as she stepped off the car and saw the last of her wares

disappearing; she admitted she forgot the proprieties and "cursed a little," but, curiously enough, she

pronounced her malediction, not against the rain nor the conductor, nor yet against the worthless husband

who had been set up to the city prison, but, true to the Chicago spirit of the moment, went to the root of the

This spirit of generalization and lack of organization among the charitable forces of the city was painfully

revealed in that terrible winter after the World's Fair, when the general financial depression throughout the

country was much intensified in Chicago by the numbers of unemployed stranded at the close of the

exposition. When the first cold weather came the police stations and the very corridors of the city hall were

crowded by men who could afford no other lodging. They made huge demonstrations on the lake front,

It was the winter in which Mr. Stead wrote his indictment of Chicago. I can vividly recall his visits to

HullHouse, some of them between eleven and twelve o'clock at night, when he would come in wet and

hungry from an investigation of the levee district, and while he was drinking hot chocolate before an open

fire, would relate in one of his curious monologues, his experience as an outofdoor laborer standing in line

without an overcoat for two hours in the sleet, that he might have a chance to sweep the streets; or his

adventures with a crook, who mistook him for one of this own kind and offered him a place as an agent for a

gambling house, which he promptly accepted. Mr. Stead was much impressed with the mixed goodness in

Chicago, the lack of rectitude in many high places, the simple kindness of the most wretched to each other.

Before he published "If Christ Came to Chicago" he made his attempt to rally the diverse moral forces of the

city in a huge mass meeting, which resulted in a temporary organization, later developing into the Civic

Federation. I was a member of the committee of five appointed to carry out the suggestions made in this

remarkable meeting, and or first concern was to appoint a committee to deal with the unemployed. But when

has a committee ever dealt satisfactorily with the unemployed? Relief stations were opened in various part of

the city, temporary lodging houses were established, HullHouse undertaking to lodge the homeless women

who could be received nowhere else; employment stations were opened giving sewing to the women, and

street sweeping for the men was organized. It was in connection with the latter that the perplexing question of

the danger of permanently lowering wages at such a crisis, in the praiseworthy effort to bring speedy relief,

was brought home to me. I insisted that it was better to have the men work half a day for seventyfive cents

than a whole day for a dollar, better that they should earn three dollars in two days than in three days. I

resigned from the streetcleaning committee in despair of making the rest of the committee understand that,

as our real object was not street cleaning but the help of the unemployed, we must treat the situation in such

wise that the men would not be worse off when they returned to their normal occupations. The discussion

opened up situations new to me and carried me far afield in perhaps the most serious economic reading I have

A beginning also was then made toward a Bureau of Organized Charities, the main office being put in charge

of a young man recently come from Boston, who lived at HullHouse. But to employ scientific methods for

the first time at such a moment involved difficulties, and the most painful episode of the winter came for me

from an attempt on my part to conform to carefully received instructions. A shipping clerk whom I had

known for a long time had lost his place, as so many people had that year, and came to the relief station

established at HullHouse four or five times to secure help for his family. I told him one day of the

opportunity for work on the drainage canal and intimated that if any employment were obtainable, he ought

to exhaust that possibility before asking for help. The man replied that he had always worked indoors and that

he could not endure outside work in winter. I am grateful to remember that I was too uncertain to be severe,

although I held to my instructions. He did not come again for relief, but worked for two days digging on the

canal, where he contracted pneumonia and died a week later. I have never lost trace of the two little children

he left behind him, although I cannot see them without a bitter consciousness that it was at their expense I

learned that life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man's

difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole; and that to treat an isolated

It was also during this winter that I became permanently impressed with the kindness of the poor to each

other; the woman who lives upstairs will willingly share her breakfast with the family below because she

knows they "are hard up"; the man who boarded with them last winter will give a month's rent because he

knows the father of the family is out of work; the baker across the street who is fast being pushed to the wall

by his downtown competitors, will send across three loaves of stale bread because he has seen the children

looking longingly into his window and suspects they are hungry. There are also the families who, during

times of business depression, are obliged to seek help from the county or some benevolent society, but who

are themselves most anxious not to be confounded with the pauper class, with whom indeed they do not in

the least belong. Charles Booth, in his brilliant chapter on the unemployed, expresses regret that the problems

of the working class are so often confounded with the problems of the inefficient and the idle, that although

working people live in the same street with those in need of charity, to thus confound two problems is to

I remember one family in which the father had been out of work for this same winter, most of the furniture

had been pawned, and as the wornout shoes could not be replaced the children could not go to school. The

mother was ill and barely able to come for the supplies and medicines. Two years later she invited me to

supper one Sunday evening in the little home which had been completely restored, and she gave as a reason

for the invitation that she couldn't bear to have me remember them as they had been during that one winter,

which she insisted had been unique in her twelve years of married life. She said that it was as if she had met

me, not as I am ordinarily, but as I should appear misshapen with rheumatism or with a face distorted by

neuralgic pain; that it was not fair to judge poor people that way. She perhaps unconsciously illustrated the

difference between the reliefstation relation to the poor and the Settlement relation to its neighbors, the

latter wishing to know them through all the varying conditions of life, to stand by when they are in distress,

but by no means to drop intercourse with them when normal prosperity has returned, enabling the relation to

Possibly something of the same effort has to be made within the Settlement itself to keep its own sense of

proportion in regard to the relation of the crowded city quarter to the rest of the country. It was in the spring

following this terrible winter, during a journey to meet lecture engagements in California, that I found myself

amazed at the large stretches of open country and prosperous towns through which we passed day by day,

In the latter part of the summer of 1895, I served as a member on a commission appointed by the mayor of

Chicago, to investigate conditions in the county poorhouse, public attention having become centered on it

through one of those distressing stories, which exaggerates the wrong in a public institution while at the same

time it reveals conditions which need to be rectified. However necessary publicity is for securing reformed

administration, however useful such exposures may be for political purposes, the whole is attended by such a

waste of the most precious human emotions, by such a tearing of living tissue, that it can scarcely be endured.

Every time I entered HullHouse during the days of the investigation, I would find waiting for me from

twenty to thirty people whose friends and relatives were in the suspected institution, all in such acute distress

of mind that to see them was to look upon the victims of deliberate torture. In most cases my visitor would

state that it seemed impossible to put their invalids in any other place, but if these stories were true,

something must be done. Many of the patients were taken out only to be returned after a few days or weeks to

meet the sullen hostility of their attendants and with their own attitude changed from confidence to timidity

This piteous dependence of the poor upon the good will of public officials was made clear to us in an early

experience with a peasant woman straight from the fields of Germany, whom we met during our first six

months at HullHouse. Her four years in America had been spent in patiently carrying water up and down

two flights of stairs, and in washing the heavy flannel suits of iron foundry workers. For this her pay had

averaged thirtyfive cents a day. Three of her daughters had fallen victims to the vice of the city. The mother

was bewildered and distressed, but understood nothing. We were able to induce the betrayer of one daughter

to marry her; the second, after a tedious lawsuit, supported his child; with the third we were able to do

nothing. This woman is now living with her family in a little house seventeen miles from the city. She has

made two payments on her land and is a lesson to all beholders as she pastures her cow up and down the

railroad tracks and makes money from her ten acres. She did not need charity for she had an immense

capacity for hard work, but she sadly needed the service of the State's attorney office, enforcing the laws

We early found ourselves spending many hours in efforts to secure support for deserted women, insurance for

bewildered widows, damages for injured operators, furniture from the clutches of the installment store. The

Settlement is valuable as an information and interpretation bureau. It constantly acts between the various

institutions of the city and the people for whose benefit these institutions were erected. The hospitals, the

county agencies, and State asylums are often but vague rumors to the people who need them most. Another

function of the Settlement to its neighborhood resembles that of the big brother whose mere presence on the

We early learned to know the children of harddriven mothers who went out to work all day, sometimes

leaving the little things in the casual care of a neighbor, but often locking them into their tenement rooms.

The first three crippled children we encountered in the neighborhood had all been injured while their mothers

were at work: one had fallen out of a thirdstory window, another had been burned, and the third had a

curved spine due to the fact that for three years he had been tied all day long to the leg of the kitchen table,

only released at noon by his older brother who hastily ran in from a neighboring factory to share his lunch

with him. When the hot weather came the restless children could not brook the confinement of the stuffy

rooms, and, as it was not considered safe to leave the doors open because of sneak thieves, many of the

children were locked out. During our first summer an increasing number of these poor little mites would

wander into the cool hallway of HullHouse. We kept them there and fed them at noon, in return for which

we were sometimes offered a hot penny which had been held in a tight little fist "ever since mother left this

morning, to buy something to eat with." Out of kindergarten hours our little guests noisily enjoyed the

hospitality of our bedrooms under the socalled care of any resident who volunteered to keep an eye on them,

but later they were moved into a neighboring apartment under more systematic supervision.

HullHouse was thus committed to a day nursery which we sustained for sixteen years first in a little cottage

on a side street and then in a building designed for its use called the Children's House. It is now carried on by

the United Charities of Chicago in a finely equipped building on our block, where the immigrant mothers are

cared for as well as the children, and where they are taught the things which will make life in America more

possible. Our early day nursery brought us into natural relations with the poorest women of the

neighborhood, many of whom were bearing the burden of dissolute and incompetent husbands in addition to

the support of their children. Some of them presented an impressive manifestation of that miracle of affection

which outlives abuse, neglect, and crime,the affection which cannot be plucked from the heart where it has

lived, although it may serve only to torture and torment. "Has your husband come back?" you inquire of Mrs.

S., whom you have known for eight years as an overworked woman bringing her three delicate children every

morning to the nursery; she is bent under the double burden of earning the money which supports them and

giving them the tender care which alone keeps them alive. The oldest two children have at last gone to work,

and Mrs. S. has allowed herself the luxury of staying at home two days a week. And now the worthless

husband is back againthe "gentlemanly gambler" type who, through all vicissitudes, manages to present a

white shirtfront and a gold watch to the world, but who is dissolute, idle and extravagant. You dread to think

how much his presence will increase the drain upon the family exchequer, and you know that he stayed away

until he was certain that the children were old enough to earn money for his luxuries. Mrs. S. does not pretend

to take his return lightly, but she replies in all seriousness and simplicity, "You know my feeling for him has

never changed. You may think me foolish, but I was always proud of his good looks and educated

appearance. I was lonely and homesick during those eight years when the children were little and needed so

much doctoring, but I could never bring myself to feel hard toward him, and I used to pray the good Lord to

keep him from harm and bring him back to us; so, of course, I'm thankful now." She passes on with a dignity

I recall a similar case of a woman who had supported her three children for five years, during which time her

dissolute husband constantly demanded money for drink and kept her perpetually worried and intimidated.

One Saturday, before the "blessed Easter," he came back from a long debauch, ragged and filthy, but in a

state of lachrymose repentance. The poor wife received him as a returned prodigal, believed that his remorse

would prove lasting, and felt sure that if she and the children went to church with him on Easter Sunday and

he could be induced to take the pledge before the priest, all their troubles would be ended. After hours of

vigorous effort and the expenditure of all her savings, he finally sat on the front doorstep the morning of

Easter Sunday, bathed, shaved and arrayed in a fine new suit of clothes. She left him sitting there in the

reluctant spring sunshine while she finished washing and dressing the children. When she finally opened the

front door with the three shining children that they might all set forth together, the returned prodigal had

disappeared, and was not seen again until midnight, when he came back in a glorious state of intoxication

from the proceeds of his pawned clothes and clad once more in the dingiest attire. She took him in without

comment, only to begin again the wretched cycle. There were of course instances of the criminal husband as

well as of the merely vicious. I recall one woman who, during seven years, never missed a visiting day at the

penitentiary when she might see her husband, and whose little children in the nursery proudly reported the

messages from father with no notion that he was in disgrace, so absolutely did they reflect the gallant spirit of

While one was filled with admiration for these heroic women, something was also to be said for some of the

husbands, for the sorry men who, for one reason or another, had failed in the struggle of life. Sometimes this

failure was purely economic and the men were competent to give the children, whom they were not able to

support, the care and guidance and even education which were of the highest value. Only a few months ago I

met upon the street one of the early nursery mothers who for five years had been living in another part of the

city, and in response to my query as to the welfare of her five children, she bitterly replied, "All of them

except Mary have been arrested at one time or another, thank you." In reply to my remark that I thought her

husband had always had such admirable control over them, she burst out, "That has been the whole trouble. I

got tired taking care of him and didn't believe that his laziness was all due to his health, as he said, so I left

him and said that I would support the children, but not him. From that minute the trouble with the four boys

began. I never knew what they were doing, and after every sort of a scrape I finally put Jack and the twins

into institutions where I pay for them. Joe has gone to work at last, but with a disgraceful record behind him.

I tell you I ain't so sure that because a woman can make big money that she can be both father and mother to

As I walked on, I could but wonder in which particular we are most stupidto judge a man's worth so solely

by his wageearning capacity that a good wife feels justified in leaving him, or in holding fast to that

One of the most piteous revelations of the futility of the latter attempt came to me through the mother of

"Goosie," as the children for years called a little boy who, because he was brought to the nursery wrapped up

in his mother's shawl, always had his hair filled with the down and small feathers from the feather brush

factory where she worked. One March morning, Goosie's mother was hanging out the washing on a shed roof

before she left for the factory. Fiveyearold Goosie was trotting at her heels handing her clothes pins, when

he was suddenly blown off the roof by the high wind into the alley below. His neck was broken by the fall,

and as he lay piteous and limp on a pile of frozen refuse, his mother cheerily called him to "climb up again,"

so confident do overworked mothers become that their children cannot get hurt. After the funeral, as the poor

mother sat in the nursery postponing the moment when she must go back to her empty rooms, I asked her, in

a futile effort to be of comfort, if there was anything more we could do for her. The overworked,

sorrowstricken woman looked up and replied, "If you could give me my wages for tomorrow, I would not

go to work in the factory at all. I would like to stay at home all day and hold the baby. Goosie was always

asking me to take him and I never had any time." This statement revealed the condition of many nursery

mothers who are obliged to forego the joys and solaces which belong to even the most povertystricken. The

long hours of factory labor necessary for earning the support of a child leave no time for the tender care and

With all of the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit

the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world! It is curiously

inconsistent that with the emphasis which this generation has placed upon the mother and upon the

prolongation of infancy, we constantly allow the waste of this most precious material. I cannot recall without

indignation a recent experience. I was detained late one evening in an office building by a prolonged

committee meeting of the Board of Education. As I came out at eleven o'clock, I met in the corridor of the

fourteenth floor a woman whom I knew, on her knees scrubbing the marble tiling. As she straightened up to

greet me, she seemed so wet from her feet up to her chin, that I hastily inquired the cause. Her reply was that

she left home at five o'clock every night and had no opportunity for six hours to nurse her baby. Her mother's

milk mingled with the very water with which she scrubbed the floors until she should return at midnight,

heated and exhausted, to feed her screaming child with what remained within her breasts.

These are only a few of the problems connected with the lives of the poorest people with whom the residents

I cannot close this chapter without a reference to that gallant company of men and women among whom my

acquaintance is so large, who are fairly indifferent to starvation itself because of their preoccupation with

higher ends. Among them are visionaries and enthusiasts, unsuccessful artists, writers, and reformers. For

many years at HullHouse, we knew a wellbred German woman who was completely absorbed in the

experiment of expressing musical phrases and melodies by means of colors. Because she was small and

deformed, she stowed herself into her trunk every night, where she slept on a canvas stretched

hammockwise from the four corners and her food was of the meagerest; nevertheless if a visitor left an

offering upon her table, it was largely spent for apparatus or delicately colored silk floss, with which to

pursue the fascinating experiment. Another sadly crippled old woman, the widow of a sea captain, although

living almost exclusively upon malted milk tablets as affording a cheap form of prepared food, was always

eager to talk of the beautiful illuminated manuscripts she had sought out in her travels and to show specimens

of her own work as an illuminator. Still another of these impressive old women was an inveterate inventor.

Although she had seen prosperous days in England, when we knew her, she subsisted largely upon the

samples given away at the demonstration counters of the department stores, and on bits of food which she

cooked on a coal shovel in the furnace of the apartment house whose basement back room she occupied.

Although her inventions were not practicable, various experts to whom they were submitted always

pronounced them suggestive and ingenious. I once saw her receive this complimentary verdict"this ribbon

to stick in her coat"with such dignity and gravity that the words of condolence for her financial

These indomitable souls are but three out of many whom I might instance to prove that those who are

handicapped in the race for life's goods, sometimes play a magnificent trick upon the jade, life herself, by

ceasing to know whether or not they possess any of her tawdry goods and chattels.

The HullHouse residents were often bewildered by the desire for constant discussion which characterized

Chicago twenty years ago, for although the residents in the early Settlements were in many cases young

persons who had sought relief from the consciousness of social maladjustment in the "anodyne of work"

afforded by philanthropic and civic activities, their former experiences had not thrown them into company

with radicals. The decade between 18901900 was, in Chicago, a period of propaganda as over against

constructive social effort; the moment for marching and carrying banners, for stating general principles and

making a demonstration, rather than the time for uncovering the situation and for providing the legal

measures and the civic organization through which new social hopes might make themselves felt.

When HullHouse was established in 1889, the events of the Haymarket riot were already two years old, but

during that time Chicago had apparently gone through the first period of repressive measures, and in the

winter of 18891890, by the advice and with the active participation of its leading citizens, the city had

reached the conclusion that the only cure for the acts of anarchy was free speech and an open discussion of

the ills of which the opponents of government complained. Great open meetings were held every Sunday

evening in the recital hall of the then new auditorium, presided over by such representative citizens as Lyman

Gage, and every possible shade of opinion was freely expressed. A man who spoke constantly at these

meetings used to be pointed out to the visiting stranger as one who had been involved with the group of

convicted anarchists, and who doubtless would have been arrested and tried, but for the accident of his having

been in Milwaukee when the explosion occurred. One cannot imagine such meetings being held in Chicago

today, nor that such a man should be encouraged to raise his voice in a public assemblage presided over by

a leading banker. It is hard to tell just what change has come over our philosophy or over the minds of those

citizens who were then convinced that if these conferences had been established earlier, the Haymarket riot

At any rate, there seemed a further need for smaller clubs, where men who differed widely in their social

theories might meet for discussion, where representatives of the various economic schools might modify each

other, and at least learn tolerance and the futility of endeavoring to convince all the world of the truth of one

position. Fanaticism is engendered only when men, finding no contradiction to their theories, at last believe

that the very universe lends itself as an exemplification of one point of view. "The Working People's Social

Science Club" was organized at HullHouse in the spring of 1890 by an English workingman, and for seven

years it held a weekly meeting. At eight o'clock every Wednesday night the secretary called to order from

forty to one hundred people; a chairman for the evening was elected, a speaker was introduced who was

allowed to talk until nine o'clock; his subject was then thrown open to discussion and a lively debate ensued

until ten o'clock, at which hour the meeting was declared adjourned. The enthusiasm of this club seldom

lagged. Its zest for discussion was unceasing, and any attempt to turn it into a study or reading club always

In these weekly discussions in the HullHouse drawing room everything was thrown back upon general

principles and all discussion save that which "went to the root of things," was impatiently discarded as an

unworthy, halfway measure. I recall one evening in this club when an exasperated member had thrown out

the statement that "Mr. B. believes that socialism will cure the toothache." Mr. B. promptly rose to his feet

and said that it certainly would, that when every child's teeth were systematically cared for from the

beginning, toothaches would disappear from the face of the earth, belonging, as it did, to the extinct

competitive order, as the black plague had disappeared from the earth with the illregulated feudal regime of

the Middle Ages. "But," he added, "why do we spend time discussing trifles like the toothache when great

social changes are to be considered which will of themselves reform these minor ills?" Even the man who had

been humorous fell into the solemn tone of the gathering. It was, perhaps, here that the socialist surpassed

everyone else in the fervor of economic discussion. He was usually a German or a Russian, with a turn for

logical presentation, who saw in the concentration of capital and the growth of monopolies an inevitable

transition to the socialist state. He pointed out that the concentration of capital in fewer hands but increased

the mass of those whose interests were opposed to a maintenance of its power, and vastly simplified its final

absorption by the community; that monopoly "when it is finished doth bring forth socialism." Opposite to

him, springing up in every discussion was the individualist, or, as the socialist called him, the anarchist, who

insisted that we shall never secure just human relations until we have equality of opportunity; that the sole

function of the state is to maintain the freedom of each, guarded by the like freedom of all, in order that each

That first winter was within three years of the Henry George campaign in New York, when his adherents all

over the country were carrying on a successful and effective propaganda. When Henry George himself came

to HullHouse one Sunday afternoon, the gymnasium which was already crowded with men to hear Father

Huntington's address on "Why should a free thinker believe in Christ," fairly rocked on its foundations under

the enthusiastic and prolonged applause which greeted this great leader and constantly interrupted his stirring

address, filled, as all of his speeches were, with high moral enthusiasm and humanitarian fervor. Of the

remarkable congresses held in connection with the World's Fair, perhaps those inaugurated by the advocates

of single tax exceeded all others in vital enthusiasm. It was possibly significant that all discussions in the

department of social science had to be organized by partisans in separate groups. The very committee itself

on social science composed of Chicago citizens, of whom I was one, changed from week to week, as partisan

members had their feelings hurt because their cause did not receive "due recognition." And yet in the same

building adherents of the most diverse religious creeds, eastern and western, met in amity and good

fellowship. Did it perhaps indicate that their presentation of the eternal problems of life were cast in an older

and less sensitive mold than this presentation in terms of social experience, or was it rather that the new

social science was not yet a science at all but merely a name under cover of which we might discuss the

perplexing problems of the industrial situation? Certainly the difficulties of our committee were not

minimized by the fact that the then new science of sociology had not yet defined its own field. The University

of Chicago, opened only the year before the World's Fair, was the first great institution of learning to institute

In the meantime the HullHouse Social Science Club grew in numbers and fervor as various distinguished

people who were visiting the World's Fair came to address it. I recall a brilliant Frenchwoman who was filled

with amazement because one of the shabbiest men reflected a reading of Schopenhauer. She considered the

statement of another member most remarkablethat when he saw a carriage driving through the streets

occupied by a capitalist who was no longer even an entrepreneur, he felt quite as sure that his days were

numbered and that his very lack of function to society would speedily bring him to extinction, as he did when

The club at any rate convinced the residents that no one so poignantly realizes the failures in the social

structure as the man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered

most. I recall the shrewd comments of a certain sailor who had known the disinherited in every country; of a

Russian who had served his term in Siberia; of an old Irishman who called himself an atheist but who in

moments of excitement always blamed the good Lord for "setting supinely" when the world was so horribly

It was doubtless owing largely to this club that HullHouse contracted its early reputation for radicalism.

Visitors refused to distinguish between the sentiments expressed by its members in the heat of discussion and

the opinions held by the residents themselves. At that moment in Chicago the radical of every shade of

opinion was vigorous and dogmatic; of the sort that could not resign himself to the slow march of human

improvement; of the type who knew exactly "in what part of the world Utopia standeth."

During this decade Chicago seemed divided into two classes; those who held that "business is business" and

who were therefore annoyed at the very notion of social control, and the radicals, who claimed that nothing

could be done to really moralize the industrial situation until society should be reorganized.

A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which those who have a passion for the

equalization of human joys and opportunities are early attracted. It is this type of mind which is in itself so

often obnoxious to the man of conquering business faculty, to whom the practical world of affairs seems so

supremely rational that he would never vote to change the type of it even if he could. The man of social

enthusiasm is to him an annoyance and an affront. He does not like to hear him talk and considers him per se

"unsafe." Such a business man would admit, as an abstract proposition, that society is susceptible of

modification and would even agree that all human institutions imply progressive development, but at the

same time he deeply distrusts those who seek to reform existing conditions. There is a certain commonsense

foundation for this distrust, for too often the reformer is the rebel who defies things as they are, because of

the restraints which they impose upon his individual desires rather than because of the general defects of the

system. When such a rebel poses for a reformer, his shortcomings are heralded to the world, and his downfall

is cherished as an awful warning to those who refuse to worship "the god of things as they are."

And yet as I recall the members of this early club, even those who talked the most and the least rationally,

seem to me to have been particularly kindly and "safe." The most pronounced anarchist among them has long

since become a convert to a religious sect, holding Buddhistic tenets which imply little food and a distrust of

all action; he has become a wraith of his former self but he still retains his kindly smile.

In the discussion of these themes, HullHouse was of course quite as much under the suspicion of one side as

the other. I remember one night when I addressed a club of secularists, which met at the corner of South

Halsted and Madison streets, a roughlooking man called out: "You are all right now, but, mark my words,

when you are subsidized by the millionaires, you will be afraid to talk like this." The defense of free speech

was a sensitive point with me, and I quickly replied that while I did not intend to be subsidized by

millionaires, neither did I propose to be bullied by workingmen, and that I should state my honest opinion

without consulting either of them. To my surprise, the audience of radicals broke into applause, and the

discussion turned upon the need of resisting tyranny wherever found, if democratic institutions were to

endure. This desire to bear independent witness to social righteousness often resulted in a sense of

compromise difficult to endure, and at many times it seemed to me that we were destined to alienate

everybody. I should have been most grateful at that time to accept the tenets of socialism, and I

conscientiously made my effort, both by reading and by many discussions with the comrades. I found that I

could easily give an affirmative answer to the heated question "Don't you see that just as the hand mill

created a society with a feudal lord, so the steam mill creates a society with an industrial capitalist?" But it

was a little harder to give an affirmative reply to the proposition that the social relation thus established

proceeds to create principles, ideas and categories as merely historical and transitory products.

Of course I use the term "socialism" technically and do not wish to confuse it with the growing sensitiveness

which recognizes that no personal comfort, nor individual development can compensate a man for the misery

of his neighbors, nor with the increasing conviction that social arrangements can be transformed through

man's conscious and deliberate effort. Such a definition would not have been accepted for a moment by the

Russians, who then dominated the socialist party in Chicago and among whom a crude interpretation of the

During those first years on Halsted Street nothing was more painfully clear than the fact that pliable human

nature is relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment. I saw nowhere a more devoted effort to

understand and relieve that heavy pressure than the socialists were making, and I should have been glad to

have had the comradeship of that gallant company had they not firmly insisted that fellowship depends upon

identity of creed. They repudiated similarity of aim and social sympathy as tests which were much too loose

and wavering as they did that vague socialism which for thousands has come to be a philosophy or rather

I also longed for the comfort of a definite social creed, which should afford at one and the same time an

explanation of the social chaos and the logical steps towards its better ordering. I came to have an

exaggerated sense of responsibility for the poverty in the midst of which I was living and which the socialists

constantly forced me to defend. My plight was not unlike that which might have resulted in my old days of

skepticism regarding foreordination, had I then been compelled to defend the confusion arising from the

clashing of free wills as an alternative to an acceptance of the doctrine. Another difficulty in the way of

accepting this economic determinism, so baldly dependent upon the theory of class consciousness, constantly

arose when I lectured in country towns and there had opportunities to read human documents of prosperous

people as well as those of my neighbors who were crowded into the city. The former were stoutly

unconscious of any classes in America, and the class consciousness of the immigrants was fast being broken

into by the necessity for making new and unprecedented connections in the industrial life all about them.

In the meantime, although many men of many minds met constantly at our conferences, it was amazing to

find the incorrigible good nature which prevailed. Radicals are accustomed to hot discussion and sharp

differences of opinion and take it all in the day's work. I recall that the secretary of the HullHouse Social

Science Club at the anniversary of the seventh year of its existence read a report in which he stated that, so

far as he could remember, but twice during that time had a speaker lost his temper, and in each case it had

He also added that but once had all the club members united in applauding the same speaker; only Samuel

Jones, who afterwards became the "golden rule" mayor of Toledo, had been able to overcome all their

dogmatic differences, when he had set forth a plan of endowing a group of workingmen with a factory plant

and a working capital for experimentation in hours and wages, quite as groups of scholars are endowed for

Chicago continued to devote much time to economic discussion and remained in a state of youthful glamour

throughout the nineties. I recall a young Methodist minister who, in order to free his denomination from any

entanglement in his discussion of the economic and social situation, moved from his church building into a

neighboring hall. The congregation and many other people followed him there, and he later took to the street

corners because he found that the shabbiest men liked that best. Professor Herron filled to overflowing a

downtown hall every noon with a series of talks entitled "Between Caesar and Jesus"an attempt to apply

the teachings of the Gospel to the situations of modern commerce. A half dozen publications edited with

some ability and much moral enthusiasm have passed away, perhaps because they represented

pamphleteering rather than journalism and came to a natural end when the situation changed. Certainly their

editors suffered criticism and poverty on behalf of the causes which they represented.

Tradesunionists, unless they were also socialists, were not prominent in those economic discussions,

although they were steadily making an effort to bring order into the unnecessary industrial confusion. They

belonged to the second of the two classes into which Mill divides all those who are dissatisfied with human

life as it is, and whose feelings are wholly identified with its radical amendment. He states that the thoughts

of one class are in the region of ultimate aims, of "the highest ideals of human life," while the thoughts of the

other are in the region of the "immediately useful, and practically attainable."

The meetings of our Social Science Club were carried on by men of the former class, many of them with a

strong religious bias who constantly challenged the Church to assuage the human spirit thus torn and bruised

"in the tumult of a time disconsolate." These men were so serious in their demand for religious fellowship,

and several young clergymen were so ready to respond to the appeal, that various meetings were arranged at

HullHouse, in which a group of people met together to consider the social question, not in a spirit of

discussion, but in prayer and meditation. These clergymen were making heroic efforts to induce their

churches to formally consider the labor situation, and during the years which have elapsed since then, many

denominations of the Christian Church have organized labor committees; but at that time there was nothing

of the sort beyond the society in the established Church of England "to consider the conditions of labor."

During that decade even the most devoted of that pioneer church society failed to formulate the fervid desire

for juster social conditions into anything more convincing than a literary statement, and the Christian

Socialists, at least when the American branch held its annual meeting at HullHouse, afforded but a striking

portrayal of that "betweenage mood" in which so many of our religious contemporaries are forced to live. I

remember that I received the same impression when I attended a meeting called by the canon of an English

cathedral to discuss the relation of the Church to labor. The men quickly indicted the cathedral for its

uselessness, and the canon asked them what in their minds should be its future. The men promptly replied

that any new social order would wish, of course, to preserve beautiful historic buildings, that although they

would dismiss the bishop and all the clergy, they would want to retain one or two scholars as custodians and

interpreters. "And what next?" the imperturbable ecclesiastic asked. "We would democratize it," replied the

men. But when it came to a more detailed description of such an undertaking, the discussion broke down into

a dozen bits, although illuminated by much shrewd wisdom and affording a clue, perhaps as to the destruction

of the bishop's palace by the citizens of this same town, who had attacked it as a symbol of swollen prosperity

On the other hand the workingmen who continue to demand help from the Church thereby acknowledge their

kinship, as does the son who continues to ask bread from the father who gives him a stone. I recall an incident

connected with a prolonged strike in Chicago on the part of the typographical unions for an eighthour day.

The strike had been conducted in a most orderly manner and the union men, convinced of the justice of their

cause, had felt aggrieved because one of the religious publishing houses in Chicago had constantly opposed

them. Some of the younger clergymen of the denominations who were friendly to the strikers' cause came to

a luncheon at HullHouse, where the situation was discussed by the representatives of all sides. The

clergymen, becoming much interested in the idealism with which an officer of the State Federation of Labor

presented the cause, drew from him the story of his search for fraternal relation: he said that at fourteen years

of age he had joined a church, hoping to find it there; he had later become a member of many fraternal

organizations and mutual benefit societies, and, although much impressed by their rituals, he was

disappointed in the actual fraternity. He had finally found, so it seemed to him, in the cause of organized

labor, what these other organizations had failed to give himan opportunity for sacrificial effort.

Chicago thus took a decade to discuss the problems inherent in the present industrial organization and to

consider what might be done, not so much against deliberate aggression as against brutal confusion and

neglect; quite as the youth of promise passed through a mist of rosecolored hope before he settles in the land

of achievement where he becomes all too dull and literal minded. And yet as I hastily review the decade in

Chicago which followed this one given over to discussion, the actual attainment of these early hopes, so far

as they have been realized at all, seem to have come from men of affairs rather than from those given to

speculation. Was the whole decade of discussion an illustration of that striking fact which has been likened to

the changing of swords in Hamlet; that the abstract minds at length yield to the inevitable or at least grow less

ardent in their propaganda, while the concrete minds, dealing constantly with daily affairs, in the end

I remember when Frederick Harrison visited HullHouse that I was much disappointed to find that the

Positivists had not made their ardor for humanity a more potent factor in the English social movement, as I

was surprised during a visit from John Morley to find that he, representing perhaps the type of man whom

political life seemed to have pulled away from the ideals of his youth, had yet been such a champion of

democracy in the full tide of reaction. My observations were much too superficial to be of value and certainly

both men were well grounded in philosophy and theory of social reform and had long before carefully

formulated their principles, as the new English Labor Party, which is destined to break up the reactionary

period, is now being created by another set of theorists. There were certainly moments during the heated

discussions of this decade when nothing seemed so important as right theory: this was borne in upon me one

brilliant evening at HullHouse when Benjamin Kidd, author of the muchread "Social Evolution," was

pitted against Victor Berger of Milwaukee, even then considered a rising man in the Socialist Party.

At any rate the residents of HullHouse discovered that while their first impact with city poverty allied them

to groups given over to discussion of social theories , their sober efforts to heal neighborhood ills allied them

to general public movements which were without challenging creeds. But while we discovered that we most

easily secured the smallest of muchneeded improvements by attaching our efforts to those of organized

bodies, nevertheless these very organizations would have been impossible, had not the public conscience

been aroused and the community sensibility quickened by these same ardent theorists.

As I review these very first impressions of the workers in unskilled industries, living in a depressed quarter of

the city, I realize how easy it was for us to see exceptional cases of hardship as typical of the average lot, and

yet, in spite of alleviating philanthropy and labor legislation, the indictment of Tolstoy applied to Moscow

thirty years ago still fits every American city: "Wherever we may live, if we draw a circle around us of a

hundred thousand, or a thousand, or even of ten miles circumference, and look at the lives of those men and

women who are inside our circle, we shall find halfstarved children, old people, pregnant women, sick and

weak persons, working beyond their strength, who have neither food nor rest enough to support them, and

who, for this reason, die before their time; we shall see others, full grown, who are injured and needlessly

As the American city is awakening to selfconsciousness, it slowly perceives the civic significance of these

industrial conditions, and perhaps Chicago has been foremost in the effort to connect the unregulated

overgrowth of the huge centers of population, with the astonishingly rapid development of industrial

enterprises; quite as Chicago was foremost to carry on the preliminary discussion through which a basis was

laid for likemindedness and the coordination of diverse wills. I remember an astute English visitor, who had

been a guest in a score of American cities, observed that it was hard to understand the local pride he

constantly encountered; for in spite of the boasting on the part of leading citizens in the western, eastern, and

southern towns, all American cities seemed to him essentially alike and all equally the results of an industry

I am inclined to think that perhaps all this general discussion was inevitable in connection with the early

Settlements, as they in turn were the inevitable result of theories of social reform, which in their full

enthusiasm reached America by way of England, only in the last decade of the century. There must have been

tough fiber somewhere; for, although the residents of HullHouse were often baffled by the radicalism within

the Social Science Club and harassed by the criticism from outside, we still continued to believe that such

discussion should be carried on, for if the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn

The group of HullHouse residents, which by the end of the decade comprised twentyfive, differed widely

in social beliefs, from the girl direct from the country who looked upon all social unrest as mere anarchy, to

the resident, who had become a socialist when a student in Zurich, and who had long before translated from

the German Engel's "Conditions of the Working Class in England," although at this time she had been read

out of the Socialist Party because the Russian and German Impossibilists suspected her fluent English, as she

always lightly explained. Although thus diversified in social beliefs, the residents became solidly united

through our mutual experience in an industrial quarter, and we became not only convinced of the need for

social control and protective legislation but also of the value of this preliminary argument.

This decade of discussion between 1890 and 1900 already seems remote from the spirit of Chicago of today.

So far as I have been able to reproduce this earlier period, it must reflect the essential provisionality of

everything; "the perpetual moving on to something future which shall supersede the present," that paramount

impression of life itself, which affords us at one and the same time, ground for despair and for endless and

Our very first Christmas at HullHouse, when we as yet knew nothing of child labor, a number of little girls

refused the candy which was offered them as part of the Christmas good cheer, saying simply that they

"worked in a candy factory and could not bear the sight of it." We discovered that for six weeks they had

worked from seven in the morning until nine at night, and they were exhausted as well as satiated. The sharp

consciousness of stern economic conditions was thus thrust upon us in the midst of the season of good will.

During the same winter three boys from a HullHouse club were injured at one machine in a neighboring

factory for lack of a guard which would have cost but a few dollars. When the injury of one of these boys

resulted in his death, we felt quite sure that the owners of the factory would share our horror and remorse, and

that they would do everything possible to prevent the recurrence of such a tragedy. To our surprise they did

nothing whatever, and I made my first acquaintance then with those pathetic documents signed by the parents

of working children, that they will make no claim for damages resulting from "carelessness."

The visits we made in the neighborhood constantly discovered women sewing upon sweatshop work, and

often they were assisted by incredibly small children. I remember a little girl of four who pulled out basting

threads hour after hour, sitting on a stool at the feet of her Bohemian mother, a little bunch of human misery.

But even for that there was no legal redress, for the only childlabor law in Illinois, with any provision for

enforcement, had been secured by the coal miners' unions, and was confined to children employed in mines.

We learned to know many families in which the working children contributed to the support of their parents,

not only because they spoke English better than the older immigrants and were willing to take lower wages,

but because their parents gradually found it easy to live upon their earnings. A South Italian peasant who has

picked olives and packed oranges from his toddling babyhood cannot see at once the difference between the

outdoor healthy work which he had performed in the varying seasons, and the long hours of monotonous

factory life which his child encounters when he goes to work in Chicago. An Italian father came to us in great

grief over the death of his eldest child, a little girl of twelve, who had brought the largest wages into the

family fund. In the midst of his genuine sorrow he said: "She was the oldest kid I had. Now I shall have to go

back to work again until the next one is able to take care of me." The man was only thirtythree and had

hoped to retire from work at least during the winters. No foreman cared to have him in a factory, untrained

and unintelligent as he was. It was much easier for his bright, Englishspeaking little girl to get a chance to

paste labels on a box than for him to secure an opportunity to carry pig iron. The effect on the child was what

no one concerned thought about, in the abnormal effort she made thus prematurely to bear the weight of life.

Another little girl of thirteen, a RussianJewish child employed in a laundry at a heavy task beyond her

strength, committed suicide, because she had borrowed three dollars from a companion which she could not

repay unless she confided the story to her parents and gave up an entire week's wagesbut what could the

family live upon that week in case she did! Her child mind, of course, had no sense of proportion, and

While we found many pathetic cases of child labor and harddriven victims of the sweating system who

could not possibly earn enough in the short busy season to support themselves during the rest of the year, it

became evident that we must add carefully collected information to our general impression of neighborhood

There was at that time no statistical information on Chicago industrial conditions, and Mrs. Florence Kelley,

an early resident of HullHouse, suggested to the Illinois State Bureau of Labor that they investigate the

sweating system in Chicago with its attendant child labor. The head of the Bureau adopted this suggestion

and engaged Mrs. Kelley to make the investigation. When the report was presented to the Illinois Legislature,

a special committee was appointed to look into the Chicago conditions. I well recall that on the Sunday the

members of this commission came to dine at HullHouse, our hopes ran high, and we believed that at last

some of the worst ills under which our neighbors were suffering would be brought to an end.

As a result of its investigations, this committee recommended to the Legislature the provisions which

afterward became those of the first factory law of Illinois, regulating the sanitary conditions of the sweatshop

and fixing fourteen as the age at which a child might be employed. Before the passage of the law could be

secured, it was necessary to appeal to all elements of the community, and a little group of us addressed the

open meetings of tradesunions and of benefit societies, church organizations, and social clubs literally every

evening for three months. Of course the most energetic help as well as intelligent understanding came from

the tradesunions. The central labor body of Chicago, then called the Trades and Labor Assembly, had

previously appointed a committee of investigation to inquire into the sweating system. This committee

consisted of five delegates from the unions and five outside their membership. Two of the latter were

residents of HullHouse, and continued with the unions in their wellconducted campaign until the passage

of Illinois's first Factory Legislation was secured, a statute which has gradually been built upon by many

publicspirited citizens until Illinois stands well among the States, at least in the matter of protecting her

children. The HullHouse residents that winter had their first experience in lobbying. I remember that I very

much disliked the word and still more the prospect of the lobbying itself, and we insisted that wellknown

Chicago women should accompany this first little group of Settlement folk who with tradesunionists moved

upon the state capitol in behalf of factory legislation. The national or, to use its formal name, The General

Federation of Woman's Clubs had been organized in Chicago only the year before this legislation was

secured. The Federation was then timid in regard to all legislation because it was anxious not to frighten its

new membership, although its second president, Mrs. Henrotin, was most untiring in her efforts to secure this

It was, perhaps, a premature effort, though certainly founded upon a genuine need, to urge that a clause

limiting the hours of all women working in factories or workshops to eight a day, or fortyeight a week,

should be inserted in the first factory legislation of the State. Although we had lived at HullHouse but three

years when we urged this legislation, we had known a large number of young girls who were constantly

exhausted by night work; for whatever may be said in defense of night work for men, few women are able to

endure it. A man who works by night sleeps regularly by day, but a woman finds it impossible to put aside

the household duties which crowd upon her, and a conscientious girl finds it hard to sleep with her mother

washing and scrubbing within a few feet of her bed. One of the most painful impressions of those first years

is that of pale, listless girls, who worked regularly in a factory of the vicinity which was then running full

night time. These girls also encountered a special danger in the early morning hours as they returned from

work, debilitated and exhausted, and only too easily convinced that a drink and a little dancing at the end of

the balls in the saloon dance halls, was what they needed to brace them. One of the girls whom we then knew,

whose name, Chloe, seemed to fit her delicate charm, craving a drink to dispel her lassitude before her tired

feet should take the long walk home, had thus been decoyed into a saloon, where the soft drink was followed

by an alcoholic one containing "knockout drops," and she awoke in a disreputable rooming housetoo

Thus confronted by that old conundrum of the interdependence of matter and spirit, the conviction was forced

upon us that long and exhausting hours of work are almost sure to be followed by lurid and exciting

pleasures; that the power to overcome temptation reaches its limit almost automatically with that of physical

resistance. The eighthour clause in this first factory law met with much less opposition in the Legislature

than was anticipated, and was enforced for a year before it was pronounced unconstitutional by the Supreme

Court of Illinois. During the halcyon months when it was a law, a large and enthusiastic EightHour Club of

working women met at HullHouse, to read the literature on the subject and in every way to prepare

themselves to make public sentiment in favor of the measure which meant so much to them. The adverse

decision in the test case, the progress of which they had most intelligently followed, was a matter of great

disappointment. The entire experience left on my mind a mistrust of all legislation which was not preceded

by full discussion and understanding. A premature measure may be carried through a legislature by perfectly

legitimate means and still fail to possess vitality and a sense of maturity. On the other hand, the

administration of an advanced law acts somewhat as a referendum. The people have an opportunity for two

years to see the effects of its operation. If they choose to reopen the matter at the next General Assembly, it

can be discussed with experience and conviction; the very operation of the law has performed the function of

Founded upon some such compunction, the sense that the passage of the child labor law would in many cases

work hardship, was never absent from my mind during the earliest years of its operation. I addressed as many

mothers' meetings and clubs among working women as I could, in order to make clear the object of the law

and the ultimate benefit to themselves as well as to their children. I am happy to remember that I never met

with lack of understanding among the hardworking widows, in whose behalf many prosperous people were

so eloquent. These widowed mothers would say, "Why, of course, that is what I am working forto give the

children a chance. I want them to have more education than I had"; or another, "That is why we came to

America, and I don't want to spoil his start, even although his father is dead"; or "It's different in America. A

boy gets left if he isn't educated." There was always a willingness, even among the poorest women, to keep

on with the hard night scrubbing or the long days of washing for the children's sake.

The bitterest opposition to the law came from the large glass companies, who were so accustomed to use the

labor of children that they were convinced the manufacturing of glass could not be carried on without it.

Fifteen years ago the State of Illinois, as well as Chicago, exhibited many characteristics of the pioneer

country in which untrammeled energy and an "early start" were still the most highly prized generators of

success. Although this first labor legislation was but bringing Illinois into line with the nations in the modern

industrial world, which "have long been obliged for their own sakes to come to the aid of the workers by

which they livethat the child, the young person and the woman may be protected from their own weakness

and necessity?" nevertheless from the first it ran counter to the instinct and tradition, almost to the very

religion of the manufacturers of the state, who were for the most part selfmade men.

This first attempt in Illinois for adequate factory legislation also was associated in the minds of businessmen

with radicalism, because the law was secured during the term of Governor Altgeld and was first enforced

during his administration. While nothing in its genesis or spirit could be further from "anarchy" than factory

legislation, and while the first law in Illinois was still far behind Massachusetts and New York, the fact that

Governor Altgeld pardoned from the state's prison the anarchists who had been sentenced there after the

Haymarket riot, gave the opponents of this most reasonable legislation a quickly utilized opportunity to

couple it with that detested word; the State document which accompanied Governor Altgeld's pardon gave

these ungenerous critics a further opportunity, because a magnanimous action was marred by personal rancor,

betraying for the moment the infirmity of a noble mind. For all of these reasons this first modification of the

undisturbed control of the aggressive captains of industry could not be enforced without resistance marked by

dramatic episodes and revolts. The inception of the law had already become associated with HullHouse, and

when its ministration was also centered there, we inevitably received all the odium which these first efforts

entailed. Mrs. Kelley was appointed the first factory inspector with a deputy and a force of twelve inspectors

to enforce the law. Both Mrs. Kelley and her assistant, Mrs. Stevens, lived at HullHouse; the office was on

Polk Street directly opposite, and one of the most vigorous deputies was the president of the Jane Club. In

addition, one of the early men residents, since dean of a state law school, acted as prosecutor in the cases

Chicago had for years been notoriously lax in the administration of law, and the enforcement of an unpopular

measure was resented equally by the president of a large manufacturing concern and by the former victim of

a sweatshop who had started a place of his own. Whatever the sentiments toward the new law on the part of

the employers, there was no doubt of its enthusiastic reception by the tradesunions, as the securing of the

law had already come from them, and through the years which have elapsed since, the experience of the

HullHouse residents would coincide with that of an English statesman who said that "a common rule for the

standard of life and the condition of labor may be secured by legislation, but it must be maintained by trades

This special value of the tradesunions first became clear to the residents of HullHouse in connection with

the sweating system. We early found that the women in the sewing trades were sorely in need of help. The

trade was thoroughly disorganized, Russian and Polish tailors competing against Englishspeaking tailors,

unskilled Bohemian and Italian women competing against both. These women seem to have been best helped

through the use of the label when unions of specialized workers in the trade are strong enough to insist that

the manufacturers shall "give out work" only to those holding union cards. It was certainly impressive when

the garment makers themselves in this way finally succeeded in organizing six hundred of the Italian women

in our immediate vicinity, who had finished garments at home for the most wretched and precarious wages.

To be sure, the most ignorant women only knew that "you couldn't get clothes to sew" from the places where

they paid the best, unless "you had a card," but through the veins of most of them there pulsed the quickened

blood of a new fellowship, a sense of comfort and aid which had been laid out to them by their

During the fourth year of our residence at HullHouse we found ourselves in a large mass meeting ardently

advocating the passage of a Federal measure called the Sulzer Bill. Even in our short struggle with the evils

of the sweating system it did not seem strange that the center of the effort had shifted to Washington, for by

that time we had realized that the sanitary regulation of sweatshops by city officials, and a careful

enforcement of factory legislation by state factory inspectors will not avail, unless each city and State shall be

able to pass and enforce a code of comparatively uniform legislation. Although the Sulzer Act failed to utilize

the Interstate Commerce legislation for its purpose, many of the national representatives realized for the first

time that only by federal legislation could their constituents in remote country places be protected from

contagious diseases raging in New York or Chicago, for many country doctors testify as to the outbreak of

scarlet fever in rural neighborhoods after the children have begun to wear the winter overcoats and cloaks

Through our efforts to modify the sweating system, the HullHouse residents gradually became committed to

the fortunes of the Consumers' League, an organization which for years has been approaching the question of

the underpaid sewing woman from the point of view of the ultimate responsibility lodged in the consumer. It

becomes more reasonable to make the presentation of the sweatshop situation through this League, as it is

more effectual to work with them for the extension of legal provisions in the slow upbuilding of that code of

legislation which is alone sufficient to protect the home from the dangers incident to the sweating system.

The Consumers' League seems to afford the best method of approach for the protection of girls in department

stores; I recall a group of girls from a neighboring "emporium" who applied to HullHouse for dancing

parties on alternate Sunday afternoons. In reply to our protest they told us they not only worked late every

evening, in spite of the fact that each was supposed to have "two nights a week off," and every Sunday

morning, but that on alternate Sunday afternoons they were required "to sort the stock." Over and over again,

meetings called by the Clerks Union and others have been held at HullHouse protesting against these

incredibly long hours. Little modification has come about, however, during our twenty years of residence,

although one large store in the Bohemian quarter closes all day on Sunday and many of the others for three

nights a week. In spite of the Sunday work, these girls prefer the outlying department stores to those

downtown; there is more social intercourse with the customers, more kindliness and social equality between

the saleswomen and the managers, and above all the girls have the protection naturally afforded by friends

and neighbors and they are free from that suspicion which so often haunts the girls downtown, that their

In the first years of HullHouse we came across no tradesunions among the women workers, and I think,

perhaps, that only one union, composed solely of women, was to be found in Chicago thenthat of the

bookbinders. I easily recall the evening when the president of this pioneer organization accepted an invitation

to take dinner at HullHouse. She came in rather a recalcitrant mood, expecting to be patronized, and so

suspicious of our motives that it was only after she had been persuaded to become a guest of the house for

several weeks in order to find out about us for herself, that she was convinced of our sincerity and of the

ability of "outsiders" to be of any service to working women. She afterward became closely identified with

HullHouse, and her hearty cooperation was assured until she moved to Boston and became a general

The women shirt makers and the women cloak makers were both organized at HullHouse as was also the

Dorcas Federal Labor Union, which had been founded through the efforts of a working woman, then one of

the residents. The latter union met once a month in our drawing room. It was composed of representatives

from all the unions in the city which included women in their membership and also received other women in

sympathy with unionism. It was accorded representation in the central labor body of the city, and later it

joined its efforts with those of others to found the Woman's Union Label League. In what we considered a

praiseworthy effort to unite it with other organizations, the president of a leading Woman's Club applied for

membership. We were so sure of her election that she stood just outside of the drawingroom door, or, in

tradesunion language, "the wicket gate," while her name was voted upon. To our chagrin, she did not

receive enough votes to secure her admission, not because the working girls, as they were careful to state, did

not admire her, but because she "seemed to belong to the other side." Fortunately, the bigminded woman so

thoroughly understood the vote and her interest in working women was so genuine that it was less than a

decade afterward when she was elected to the presidency of the National Woman's Trades Union League.

The incident and the sequel registers, perhaps, the change in Chicago toward the labor movement, the

recognition of the fact that it is a general social movement concerning all members of society and not merely

Some such public estimate of the labor movement was brought home to Chicago during several conspicuous

strikes; at least labor legislation has twice been inaugurated because its need was thus made clear. After the

Pullman strike various elements in the community were unexpectedly brought together that they might

soberly consider and rectify the weakness in the legal structure which the strike had revealed. These citizens

arranged for a large and representative convention to be held in Chicago on Industrial Conciliation and

Arbitration. I served as secretary of the committee from the new Civic Federation having the matter in

charge, and our hopes ran high when, as a result of the agitation, the Illinois legislature passed a law creating

a State Board of Conciliation and Arbitration. But even a state board cannot accomplish more than public

sentiment authorizes and sustains, and we might easily have been discouraged in those early days could we

have foreseen some of the industrial disturbances which have since disgraced Chicago. This law embodied

the best provisions of the then existing laws for the arbitration of industrial disputes. At the time the word

arbitration was still a word to conjure with, and many Chicago citizens were convinced, not only of the

danger and futility involved in the open warfare of opposing social forces, but further believed that the search

for justice and righteousness in industrial relations was made infinitely more difficult thereby.

The Pullman strike afforded much illumination to many Chicago people. Before it, there had been nothing in

my experience to reveal that distinct cleavage of society, which a general strike at least momentarily affords.

Certainly, during all those dark days of the Pullman strike, the growth of class bitterness was most obvious.

The fact that the Settlement maintained avenues of intercourse with both sides seemed to give it opportunity

for nothing but a realization of the bitterness and division along class lines. I had known Mr. Pullman and had

seen his genuine pride and pleasure in the model town he had built with so much care; and I had an

opportunity to talk to many of the Pullman employees during the strike when I was sent from a socalled

"Citizens' Arbitration Committee" to their first meetings held in a hall in the neighboring village of

Kensington, and when I was invited to the modest supper tables laid in the model houses. The employees

then expected a speedy settlement and no one doubted but that all the grievances connected with the "straw

bosses" would be quickly remedied and that the benevolence which had built the model town would not fail

them. They were sure that the "straw bosses" had misrepresented the state of affairs, for this very first

awakening to class consciousness bore many traces of the servility on one side and the arrogance on the other

which had so long prevailed in the model town. The entire strike demonstrated how often the outcome of

farreaching industrial disturbances is dependent upon the personal will of the employer or the temperament

of a strike leader. Those familiar with strikes know only too well how much they are influenced by poignant

domestic situations, by the troubled consciences of the minority directors, by the suffering women and

children, by the keen excitement of the struggle, by the religious scruples sternly suppressed but occasionally

asserting themselves, now on one side and now on the other, and by that undefined psychology of the crowd

which we understand so little. All of these factors also influence the public and do much to determine popular

sympathy and judgment. In the early days of the Pullman strike, as I was coming down in the elevator of the

Auditorium hotel from one of the futile meetings of the Arbitration Committee, I met an acquaintance, who

angrily said "that the strikers ought all to be shot." As I had heard nothing so bloodthirsty as this either from

the most enraged capitalist or from the most desperate of the men, and was interested to find the cause of

such a senseless outbreak, I finally discovered that the first ten thousand dollars which my acquaintance had

ever saved, requiring, he said, years of effort from the time he was twelve years old until he was thirty, had

been lost as the result of a strike; he clinched his argument that he knew what he was talking about, with the

statement that "no one need expect him to have any sympathy with strikers or with their affairs."

A very intimate and personal experience revealed, at least to myself, my constant dread of the spreading ill

will. At the height of the sympathetic strike my oldest sister, who was convalescing from a long illness in a

hospital near Chicago, became suddenly very much worse. While I was able to reach her at once, every

possible obstacle of a delayed and blocked transportation system interrupted the journey of her husband and

children who were hurrying to her bedside from a distant state. As the end drew nearer and I was obliged to

reply to my sister's constant inquiries that her family had not yet come, I was filled with a profound

apprehension lest her last hours should be touched with resentment toward those responsible for the delay;

lest her unutterable longing should at the very end be tinged with bitterness. She must have divined what was

in my mind, for at last she said each time after the repetition of my sad news: "I don't blame any one, I am not

judging them." My heart was comforted and heavy at the same time; but how many more such moments of

sorrow and death were being made difficult and lonely throughout the land, and how much would these

experiences add to the lasting bitterness, that touch of selfrighteousness which makes the spirit of

When I returned to Chicago from the quiet country I saw the Federal troops encamped about the post office;

almost everyone on Halsted Street wearing a white ribbon, the emblem of the strikers' side; the residents at

HullHouse divided in opinion as to the righteousness of this or that measure; and no one able to secure any

real information as to which side was burning the cars. After the Pullman strike I made an attempt to analyze

in a paper which I called The Modern King Lear the inevitable revolt of human nature against the plans Mr.

Pullman had made for his employees, the miscarriage of which appeared to him such black ingratitude. It

seemed to me unendurable not to make some effort to gather together the social implications of the failure of

this benevolent employer and its relation to the demand for a more democratic administration of industry.

Doubtless the paper represented a certain "excess of participation," to use a gentle phrase of Charles Lamb's

in preference to a more emphatic one used by Mr. Pullman himself. The last picture of the Pullman strike

which I distinctly recall was three years later when one of the strike leaders came to see me. Although out of

work for most of the time since the strike, he had been undisturbed for six months in the repair shops of a

streetcar company, under an assumed name, but he had at that moment been discovered and dismissed. He

was a superior type of English workingman, but as he stood there, broken and discouraged, believing himself

so blacklisted that his skill could never be used again, filled with sorrow over the loss of his wife who had

recently died after an illness with distressing mental symptoms, realizing keenly the lack of the respectable

way of living he had always until now been able to maintain, he seemed to me an epitome of the wretched

human waste such a strike implies. I fervently hoped that the new arbitration law would prohibit in Chicago

forever more such brutal and ineffective methods of settling industrial disputes. And yet even as early as

1896, we found the greatest difficulty in applying the arbitration law to the garment workers' strike, although

it was finally accomplished after various mass meetings had urged it. The cruelty and waste of the strike as an

implement for securing the most reasonable demands came to me at another time, during the long strike of

the clothing cutters. They had protested, not only against various wrongs of their own, but against the fact

that the tailors employed by the custom merchants were obliged to furnish their own workshops and thus bore

a burden of rent which belonged to the employer. One of the leaders in this strike, whom I had known for

several years as a sober, industrious, and unusually intelligent man, I saw gradually break down during the

He was a man of sensitive organization under the necessity, as is every leader during a strike, to address the

same body of men day after day with an appeal sufficiently emotional to respond to their sense of injury; to

receive callers at any hour of the day or night; to sympathize with all the distress of the strikers who see their

families daily suffering; he must do it all with the sickening sense of the increasing privation in his own

home, and in this case with the consciousness that failure was approaching nearer each day. This man,

accustomed to the monotony of his workbench and suddenly thrown into a new situation, showed every sign

of nervous fatigue before the final collapse came. He disappeared after the strike and I did not see him for ten

years, but when he returned he immediately began talking about the old grievances which he had repeated so

often that he could talk of nothing else. It was easy to recognize the same nervous symptoms which the

brokendown lecturer exhibits who has depended upon the exploitation of his own experiences to keep

himself going. One of his stories was indeed pathetic. His employer, during the busy season, had met him one

Sunday afternoon in Lincoln Park whither he had taken his three youngest children, one of whom had been

ill. The employer scolded him for thus wasting his time and roughly asked why he had not taken home

enough work to keep himself busy through the day. The story was quite credible because the residents of

HullHouse have had many opportunities to see the worker driven ruthlessly during the season and left in

idleness for long weeks afterward. We have slowly come to realize that periodical idleness as well as the

payment of wages insufficient for maintenance of the manual worker in full industrial and domestic

efficiency, stand economically on the same footing with the "sweated" industries, the overwork of women,

But of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment, and it was inevitable that

we should see much of it in a neighborhood where low rents attracted the poorly paid worker and many

newly arrived immigrants who were first employed in gangs upon railroad extensions and similar

undertakings. The sturdy peasants eager for work were either the victims of the padrone who fleeced them

unmercifully, both in securing a place to work and then in supplying them with food, or they became the

mere sport of unscrupulous employment agencies. HullHouse made an investigation both of the padrone

and of the agencies in our immediate vicinity, and the outcome confirming what we already suspected, we

eagerly threw ourselves into a movement to procure free employment bureaus under State control until a law

authorizing such bureaus and giving the officials intrusted with their management power to regulate private

employment agencies, passed the Illinois Legislature in 1899. The history of these bureaus demonstrates the

tendency we all have to consider a legal enactment in itself an achievement and to grow careless in regard to

its administration and actual results; for an investigation into the situation ten years later discovered that

immigrants were still shamefully imposed upon. A group of Bulgarians were found who had been sent to

work in Arkansas where their services were not needed; they walked back to Chicago only to secure their

next job in Oklahoma and to pay another railroad fare as well as another commission to the agency. Not only

was there no method by which the men not needed in Arkansas could know that there was work in Oklahoma

unless they came back to Chicago to find it out, but there was no certainty that they might not be obliged to

walk back from Oklahoma because the Chicago agency had already sent out too many men.

This investigation of the employment bureau resources of Chicago was undertaken by the League for the

Protection of Immigrants, with whom it is possible for HullHouse to cooperate whenever an investigation of

the immigrant colonies in our immediate neighborhood seems necessary, as was recently done in regard to

the Greek colonies of Chicago. The superintendent of this League, Miss Grace Abbott, is a resident of

HullHouse and all of our later attempts to secure justice and opportunity for immigrants are much more

effective through the League, and when we speak before a congressional committee in Washington

concerning the needs of Chicago immigrants, we represent the League as well as our own neighbors.

It is in connection with the first factory employment of newly arrived immigrants and the innumerable

difficulties attached to their first adjustment that some of the most profound industrial disturbances in

Chicago have come about. Under any attempt at classification these strikes belong more to the general social

movement than to the industrial conflict, for the strike is an implement used most rashly by unorganized labor

who, after they are in difficulties, call upon the tradesunions for organization and direction. They are similar

to those strikes which are inaugurated by the unions on behalf of unskilled labor. In neither case do the

hastily organized unions usually hold after the excitement of the moment has subsided, and the most valuable

result of such strikes is the expanding consciousness of the solidarity of the workers. This was certainly the

result of the Chicago stockyard strike in 1905, inaugurated on behalf of the immigrant laborers and so

conspicuously carried on without violence that, although twentytwo thousand workers were idle during the

entire summer, there were fewer arrests in the stockyards district than the average summer months afford.

However, the story of this strike should not be told from HullHouse, but from the University of Chicago

Settlement, where Miss Mary McDowell performed such signal public service during that trying summer. It

would be interesting to trace how much of the subsequent exposure of conditions and attempts at

governmental control of this huge industry had their genesis in this first attempt of the unskilled workers to

secure a higher standard of living. Certainly the industrial conflict when epitomized in a strike, centers public

attention on conditions as nothing else can do. A strike is one of the most exciting episodes in modern life,

and as it assumes the characteristics of a game, the entire population of a city becomes divided into two

cheering sides. In such moments the fairminded public, who ought to be depended upon as a referee,

practically disappears. Anyone who tries to keep the attitude of nonpartisanship, which is perhaps an

impossible one, is quickly under suspicion by both sides. At least that was the fate of a group of citizens

appointed by the mayor of Chicago to arbitrate during the stormy teamsters' strike which occurred in 1905.

We sat through a long Sunday afternoon in the mayor's office in the City Hall, talking first with the labor men

and then with the group of capitalists. The undertaking was the more futile in that we were all practically the

dupes of a new type of "industrial conspiracy" successfully inaugurated in Chicago by a close compact

between the coal teamsters' union and the coal team owners' association, who had formed a kind of monopoly

The stormy teamsters' strike, ostensibly undertaken in defense of the garment workers, but really arising from

causes so obscure and dishonorable that they have never yet been made public, was the culmination of a type

of tradesunions which had developed in Chicago during the preceding decade in which corruption had

flourished almost as openly as it had previously done in the City Hall. This corruption sometimes took the

form of grafting after the manner of Samuel Parks in New York; sometimes that of political deals in the

"delivery of the labor vote"; and sometimes that of a combination between capital and labor hunting together.

At various times during these years the better type of tradesunionists had made a firm stand against this

corruption and a determined effort to eradicate it from the labor movement, not unlike the general reform

effort of many American cities against political corruption. This reform movement in the Chicago Federation

of Labor had its martyrs, and more than one man nearly lost his life through the "slugging" methods

employed by the powerful corruptionists. And yet even in the midst of these things were found touching

examples of fidelity to the earlier principles of brotherhood totally untouched by the corruption. At one time

the scrubwomen in the downtown office buildings had a union of their own affiliated with the elevator men

and the janitors. Although the union was used merely as a weapon in the fight of the coal teamsters against

the use of natural gas in downtown buildings, it did not prevent the women from getting their first glimpse

into the fellowship and the sense of protection which is the great gift of tradesunionism to the unskilled,

unbefriended worker. I remember in a meeting held at HullHouse one Sunday afternoon, that the president

of a "local" of scrubwomen stood up to relate her experience. She told first of the long years in which the fear

of losing her job and the fluctuating pay were harder to bear than the hard work itself, when she had regarded

all the other women who scrubbed in the same building merely as rivals and was most afraid of the most

miserable, because they offered to work for less and less as they were pressed harder and harder by debt.

Then she told of the change that had come when the elevator men and even the lordly janitors had talked to

her about an organization and had said that they must all stand together. She told how gradually she came to

feel sure of her job and of her regular pay, and she was even starting to buy a house now that she could

"calculate" how much she "could have for sure." Neither she nor any of the other members knew that the

same combination which had organized the scrubwomen into a union later destroyed it during a strike

That a Settlement is drawn into the labor issues of its city can seem remote to its purpose only to those who

fail to realize that so far as the present industrial system thwarts our ethical demands, not only for social

righteousness but for social order, a Settlement is committed to an effort to understand and, as far as possible,

to alleviate it. That in this effort it should be drawn into fellowship with the local efforts of tradesunions is

most obvious. This identity of aim apparently commits the Settlement in the public mind to all the faiths and

works of actual tradesunions. Fellowship has so long implied similarity of creed that the fact that the

Settlement often differs widely from the policy pursued by tradesunionists and clearly expresses that

difference does not in the least change public opinion in regard to its identification. This is especially true in

periods of industrial disturbance, although it is exactly at such moments that the tradesunionists themselves

are suspicious of all but their "own kind." It is during the much longer periods between strikes that the

Settlement's fellowship with tradesunions is most satisfactory in the agitation for labor legislation and

similar undertakings. The first officers of the Chicago Woman's Trades Union League were residents of

Settlements, although they can claim little share in the later record the League made in securing the passage

Nevertheless the reaction of strikes upon Chicago Settlements affords an interesting study in social

psychology. For whether HullHouse is in any wise identified with the strike or not, makes no difference.

When "Labor" is in disgrace we are always regarded as belonging to it and share the opprobrium. In the

public excitement following the Pullman strike HullHouse lost many friends; later the teamsters' strike

caused another such defection, although my office in both cases had been solely that of a duly appointed

There is, however, a certain comfort in the assumption I have often encountered that wherever one's judgment

might place the justice of a given situation, it is understood that one's sympathy is not alienated by

wrongdoing, and that through this sympathy one is still subject to vicarious suffering. I recall an incident

during a turbulent Chicago strike which brought me much comfort. On the morning of the day of a luncheon

to which I had accepted an invitation, the waitress, whom I did not know, said to my prospective hostess that

she was sure I could not come. Upon being asked for her reason she replied that she had seen in the morning

paper that the strikers had killed a "scab" and she was sure that I would feel quite too badly about such a

thing to be able to keep a social engagement. In spite of the confused issues, she evidently realized my

despair over the violence in a strike quite as definitely as if she had been told about it. Perhaps that sort of

suffering and the attempt to interpret opposing forces to each other will long remain a function of the

There has gradually developed between the various Settlements of Chicago a warm fellowship founded upon

a likemindedness resulting from similar experiences, quite as identity of interest and endeavor develop an

enduring relation between the residents of the same Settlement. This sense of comradeship is never stronger

than during the hardships and perplexities of a strike of unskilled workers revolting against the conditions

which drag them even below the level of their European life. At such time the residents in various

Settlements are driven to a standard of life argument running somewhat in this wisethat as the very

existence of the State depends upon the character of its citizens, therefore if certain industrial conditions are

forcing the workers below the standard of decency, it becomes possible to deduce the right of State

regulation. Even as late as the stockyard strike this line of argument was denounced as "socialism" although it

has since been confirmed as wise statesmanship by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States

which was apparently secured through the masterly argument of the Brandeis brief in the Oregon tenhour

In such wise the residents of an industrial neighborhood gradually comprehend the close connection of their

own difficulties with national and even international movements. The residents in the Chicago Settlements

became pioneer members in the American branch of the International League for Labor Legislation, because

their neighborhood experiences had made them only too conscious of the dire need for protective legislation.

In such a league, with its ardent members in every industrial nation of Europe, with its encouraging reports of

the abolition of all night work for women in six European nations, with its careful observations on the results

of employer's liability legislation and protection of machinery, one becomes identified with a movement of

From our very first months at HullHouse we found it much easier to deal with the first generation of

crowded city life than with the second or third, because it is more natural and cast in a simpler mold. The

Italian and Bohemian peasants who live in Chicago still put on their bright holiday clothes on a Sunday and

go to visit their cousins. They tramp along with at least a suggestion of having once walked over plowed

fields and breathed country air. The second generation of city poor too often have no holiday clothes and

consider their relations a "bad lot." I have heard a drunken man in a maudlin stage babble of his good country

mother and imagine he was driving the cows home, and I knew that his little son who laughed loud at him

would be drunk earlier in life and would have no pastoral interlude to his ravings. Hospitality still survives

among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans. One thing seemed

clear in regard to entertaining immigrants; to preserve and keep whatever of value their past life contained

and to bring them in contact with a better type of Americans. For several years, every Saturday evening the

entire families of our Italian neighbors were our guests. These evenings were very popular during our first

winters at HullHouse. Many educated Italians helped us, and the house became known as a place where

Italians were welcome and where national holidays were observed. They come to us with their petty lawsuits,

sad relics of the vendetta, with their incorrigible boys, with their hospital cases, with their aspirations for

An editor of an Italian paper made a genuine connection between us and the Italian colony, not only with the

Neapolitans and the Sicilians of the immediate neighborhood, but with the educated connazionali throughout

the city, until he went south to start an agricultural colony in Alabama, in the establishment of which

Possibly the South Italians more than any other immigrants represent the pathetic stupidity of agricultural

people crowded into city tenements, and we were much gratified when thirty peasant families were induced

to move upon the land which they knew so well how to cultivate. The starting of this colony, however, was a

very expensive affair in spite of the fact that the colonists purchased the land at two dollars an acre; they

needed much more than raw land, and although it was possible to collect the small sums necessary to sustain

them during the hard time of the first two years, we were fully convinced that undertakings of this sort could

be conducted properly only by colonization societies such as England has established, or, better still, by

An evening similar in purpose to the one devoted to the Italians was organized for the Germans, in our first

year. Owing to the superior education of our Teutonic guests and the clever leading of a cultivated German

woman, these evenings reflected something of that cozy social intercourse which is found in its perfection in

the fatherland. Our guests sang a great deal in the tender minor of the German folksong or in the rousing

spirit of the Rhine, and they slowly but persistently pursued a course in German history and literature,

recovering something of that poetry and romance which they had long since resigned with other good things.

We found strong family affection between them and their Englishspeaking children, but their pleasures were

not in common, and they seldom went out together. Perhaps the greatest value of the Settlement to them was

in placing large and pleasant rooms with musical facilities at their disposal, and in reviving their almost

forgotten enthusiams. I have seen sons and daughters stand in complete surprise as their mother's knitting

needles softly beat time to the song she was singing, or her worn face turned rosy under the handclapping as

she made an oldfashioned curtsy at the end of a German poem. It was easy to fancy a growing touch of

respect in her children's manner to her, and a rising enthusiasm for German literature and reminiscence on the

part of all the family, an effort to bring together the old life and the new, a respect for the older cultivation,

This tendency upon the part of the older immigrants to lose the amenities of European life without sharing

those of America has often been deplored by keen observers from the home countries. When Professor

Masurek of Prague gave a course of lectures in the University of Chicago, he was much distressed over the

materialism into which the Bohemians of Chicago had fallen. The early immigrants had been so stirred by the

opportunity to own real estate, an appeal perhaps to the Slavic land hunger, and their energies had become so

completely absorbed in moneymaking that all other interests had apparently dropped away. And yet I recall

a very touching incident in connection with a lecture Professor Masurek gave at HullHouse, in which he had

appealed to his countrymen to arouse themselves from this tendency to fall below their home civilization and

to forget the great enthusiasm which had united them into the PanSlavic Movement. A Bohemian widow

who supported herself and her two children by scrubbing, hastily sent her youngest child to purchase, with

the twentyfive cents which was to have supplied them with food the next day, a bunch of red roses which

she presented to the lecturer in appreciation of his testimony to the reality of the things of the spirit.

An overmastering desire to reveal the humbler immigrant parents to their own children lay at the base of what

has come to be called the HullHouse Labor Museum. This was first suggested to my mind one early spring

day when I saw an old Italian woman, her distaff against her homesick face, patiently spinning a thread by the

simple stick spindle so reminiscent of all southern Europe. I was walking down Polk Street, perturbed in

spirit, because it seemed so difficult to come into genuine relations with the Italian women and because they

themselves so often lost their hold upon their Americanized children. It seemed to me that HullHouse ought

to be able to devise some educational enterprise which should build a bridge between European and

American experiences in such wise as to give them both more meaning and a sense of relation. I meditated

that perhaps the power to see life as a whole is more needed in the immigrant quarter of a large city than

anywhere else, and that the lack of this power is the most fruitful source of misunderstanding between

European immigrants and their children, as it is between them and their American neighbors; and why should

that chasm between fathers and sons, yawning at the feet of each generation, be made so unnecessarily cruel

and impassable to these bewildered immigrants? Suddenly I looked up and saw the old woman with her

distaff, sitting in the sun on the steps of a tenement house. She might have served as a model for one of

Michelangelo's Fates, but her face brightened as I passed and, holding up her spindle for me to see, she called

out that when she had spun a little more yarn, she would knit a pair of stockings for her goddaughter. The

occupation of the old woman gave me the clue that was needed. Could we not interest the young people

working in the neighborhood factories in these older forms of industry, so that, through their own parents and

grandparents, they would find a dramatic representation of the inherited resources of their daily occupation. If

these young people could actually see that the complicated machinery of the factory had been evolved from

simple tools, they might at least make a beginning toward that education which Dr. Dewey defines as "a

continuing reconstruction of experience." They might also lay a foundation for reverence of the past which

My exciting walk on Polk Street was followed by many talks with Dr. Dewey and with one of the teachers in

his school who was a resident at HullHouse. Within a month a room was fitted up to which we might invite

those of our neighbors who were possessed of old crafts and who were eager to use them.

We found in the immediate neighborhood at least four varieties of these most primitive methods of spinning

and three distinct variations of the same spindle in connection with wheels. It was possible to put these seven

into historic sequence and order and to connect the whole with the present method of factory spinning. The

same thing was done for weaving, and on every Saturday evening a little exhibit was made of these various

forms of labor in the textile industry. Within one room a Syrian woman, a Greek, an Italian, a Russian, and an

Irishwoman enabled even the most casual observer to see that there is no break in orderly evolution if we

look at history from the industrial standpoint; that industry develops similarly and peacefully year by year

among the workers of each nation, heedless of differences in language, religion, and political experiences.

And then we grew ambitious and arranged lectures upon industrial history. I remember that after an

interesting lecture upon the industrial revolution in England and a portrayal of the appalling conditions

throughout the weaving districts of the north, which resulted from the hasty gathering of the weavers into the

new towns, a Russian tailor in the audience was moved to make a speech. He suggested that whereas time

had done much to alleviate the first difficulties in the transition of weaving from hand work to steam power,

that in the application of steam to sewing we are still in our first stages, illustrated by the isolated woman

who tries to support herself by hand needlework at home until driven out by starvation, as many of the hand

The historical analogy seemed to bring a certain comfort to the tailor, as did a chart upon the wall showing

the infinitesimal amount of time that steam had been applied to manufacturing processes compared to the

centuries of hand labor. Human progress is slow and perhaps never more cruel than in the advance of

industry, but is not the worker comforted by knowing that other historical periods have existed similar to the

one in which he finds himself, and that the readjustment may be shortened and alleviated by judicious action;

and is he not entitled to the solace which an artistic portrayal of the situation might give him? I remember the

evening of the tailor's speech that I felt reproached because no poet or artist has endeared the sweaters' victim

to us as George Eliot has made us love the belated weaver, Silas Marner. The textile museum is connected

directly with the basket weaving, sewing, millinery, embroidery, and dressmaking constantly being taught at

HullHouse, and so far as possible with the other educational departments; we have also been able to make a

collection of products, of early implements, and of photographs which are full of suggestion. Yet far beyond

its direct educational value, we prize it because it so often puts the immigrants into the position of teachers,

and we imagine that it affords them a pleasant change from the tutelage in which all Americans, including

their own children, are so apt to hold them. I recall a number of Russian women working in a sewing room

near HullHouse, who heard one Christmas week that the House was going to give a party to which they

might come. They arrived one afternoon, when, unfortunately, there was no party on hand and, although the

residents did their best to entertain them with impromptu music and refreshments, it was quite evident that

they were greatly disappointed. Finally it was suggested that they be shown the Labor Museumwhere

gradually the thirty sodden, tired women were transformed. They knew how to use the spindles and were

delighted to find the Russian spinning frame. Many of them had never seen the spinning wheel, which has not

penetrated to certain parts of Russia, and they regarded it as a new and wonderful invention. They turned up

their dresses to show their homespun petticoats; they tried the looms; they explained the difficulty of the old

patterns; in short, from having been stupidly entertained, they themselves did the entertaining. Because of a

direct appeal to former experiences, the immigrant visitors were able for the moment to instruct their

American hostesses in an old and honored craft, as was indeed becoming to their age and experience.

In some such ways as these have the Labor Museum and the shops pointed out the possibilities which

HullHouse has scarcely begun to develop, of demonstrating that culture is an understanding of the

longestablished occupations and thoughts of men, of the arts with which they have solaced their toil. A

yearning to recover for the household arts something of their early sanctity and meaning arose strongly within

me one evening when I was attending a Passover Feast to which I had been invited by a Jewish family in the

neighborhood, where the traditional and religious significance of the woman's daily activity was still retained.

The kosher food the Jewish mother spread before her family had been prepared according to traditional

knowledge and with constant care in the use of utensils; upon her had fallen the responsibility to make all

ready according to Mosaic instructions that the great crisis in a religious history might be fittingly set forth by

her husband and son. Aside from the grave religious significance in the ceremony, my mind was filled with

shifting pictures of woman's labor with which travel makes one familiar; the Indian women grinding grain

outside of their huts as they sing praises to the sun and rain; a file of whiteclad Moorish women whom I had

once seen waiting their turn at a well in Tangiers; south Italian women kneeling in a row along the stream and

beating their wet clothes against the smooth white stones; the milking, the gardening, the marketing in

thousands of hamlets, which are such direct expressions of the solicitude and affection at the basis of all

There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed the charm of woman's primitive

activities. I recall a certain Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same

building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at

the front door while she herself went around to a side door because she did not wish to be too closely

identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her

head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a

group of visitors from the School of Education who much admired the spinning, and she concluded from their

conversation that her mother was "the best stickspindle spinner in America." When she inquired from me as

to the truth of this deduction, I took occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had lived,

something of her free life, and how, because of the opportunity she and the other women of the village had to

drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice, they had developed a skill in spinning beyond that of the

neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that lifehow hard it must be to

exchange it all for a tworoom tenement, and to give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly

department store hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, and that while she

must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways, she also had a right to expect her daughter to know

That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own mind persistently dwelt, was that her

mother's whole life had been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized

observances, until her very religion clung to local sanctitiesto the shrine before which she had always

prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted churchand then suddenly she was torn from it all and

literally put out to sea, straight away from the solid habits of her religious and domestic life, and she now

It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was

new to Angelina, and at least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the

bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly

came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft

A club of necktie workers formerly meeting at HullHouse persistently resented any attempt on the part of

their director to improve their minds. The president once said that she "wouldn't be caught dead at a lecture,"

that she came to the club "to get some fun out of it," and indeed it was most natural that she should crave

recreation after a hard day's work. One evening I saw the entire club listening to quite a stiff lecture in the

Labor Museum and to my rather wicked remark to the president that I was surprised to see her enjoying a

lecture, she replied that she did not call this a lecture, she called this "getting next to the stuff you work with

all the time." It was perhaps the sincerest tribute we have ever received as to the success of the undertaking.

The Labor Museum continually demanded more space as it was enriched by a fine textile exhibit lent by the

Field Museum, and later by carefully selected specimens of basketry from the Philippines. The shops have

finally included a group of three or four women, Irish, Italian, Danish, who have become a permanent

working force in the textile department which has developed into a selfsupporting industry through the sale

These women and a few men, who come to the museum to utilize their European skill in pottery, metal, and

wood, demonstrate that immigrant colonies might yield to our American life something very valuable, if their

resources were intelligently studied and developed. I recall an Italian, who had decorated the doorposts of his

tenement with a beautiful pattern he had previously used in carving the reredos of a Neapolitan church, who

was "fired" by his landlord on the ground of destroying property. His feelings were hurt, not so much that he

had been put out of his house, as that his work had been so disregarded; and he said that when people traveled

in Italy they liked to look at wood carvings but that in America "they only made money out of you."

Sometimes the suppression of the instinct of workmanship is followed by more disastrous results. A

Bohemian whose little girl attended classes at HullHouse, in one of his periodic drunken spells had literally

almost choked her to death, and later had committed suicide when in delirium tremens. His poor wife, who

stayed a week at HullHouse after the disaster until a new tenement could be arranged for her, one day

showed me a gold ring which her husband had made for their betrothal. It exhibited the most exquisite

workmanship, and she said that although in the old country he had been a goldsmith, in America he had for

twenty years shoveled coal in a furnace room of a large manufacturing plant; that whenever she saw one of

his "restless fits," which preceded his drunken periods, "coming on," if she could provide him with a bit of

metal and persuade him to stay at home and work at it, he was all right and the time passed without disaster,

but that "nothing else would do it." This story threw a flood of light upon the dead man's struggle and on the

stupid maladjustment which had broken him down. Why had we never been told? Why had our interest in the

remarkable musical ability of his child blinded us to the hidden artistic ability of the father? We had forgotten

that a longestablished occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a

on the part of their grown children; a young man who day after day attends ceremonies which no longer

express his religious convictions and who makes his vain effort to interest his Russian Jewish father in social

problems; a daughter who might earn much more money as a stenographer could she work from Monday

morning till Saturday night, but who quietly and docilely makes neckties for low wages because she can thus

abstain from work Saturdays to please her father; these young people, like poor Maggie Tulliver, through

many painful experiences have reached the conclusion that pity, memory, and faithfulness are natural ties

This faithfulness, however, is sometimes ruthlessly imposed upon by immigrant parents who, eager for

money and accustomed to the patriarchal authority of peasant households, hold their children in a stern

bondage which requires a surrender of all their wages and concedes no time or money for pleasures.

harshness often results in juvenile delinquency. A Polish boy of seventeen came to HullHouse one day to

ask a contribution of fifty cents "towards a flower piece for the funeral of an old HullHouse club boy." A

few questions made it clear that the object was fictitious, whereupon the boy broke down and halfdefiantly

stated that he wanted to buy two twentyfive cent tickets, one for his girl and one for himself, to a dance of

the Benevolent Social Twos; that he hadn't a penny of his own although he had worked in a brass foundry for

three years and had been advanced twice, because he always had to give his pay envelope unopened to his

Perhaps the girls are held even more rigidly. In a recent investigation of two hundred working girls it was

found that only five per cent had the use of their own money and that sixtytwo per cent turned in all they

earned, literally every penny, to their mothers. It was through this little investigation that we first knew

Marcella, a pretty young German girl who helped her widowed mother year after year to care for a large

family of younger children. She was content for the most part although her mother's oldcountry notions of

dress gave her but an infinitesimal amount of her own wages to spend on her clothes, and she was quite

sophisticated as to proper dressing because she sold silk in a neighborhood department store. Her mother

approved of the young man who was showing her various attentions and agreed that Marcella should accept

his invitation to a ball, but would allow her not a penny toward a new gown to replace one impossibly plain

and shabby. Marcella spent a sleepless night and wept bitterly, although she well knew that the doctor's bill

for the children's scarlet fever was not yet paid. The next day as she was cutting off three yards of shining

pink silk, the thought came to her that it would make her a fine new waist to wear to the ball. She wistfully

saw it wrapped in paper and carelessly stuffed into the muff of the purchaser, when suddenly the parcel fell

upon the floor. No one was looking and quick as a flash the girl picked it up and pushed it into her blouse.

The theft was discovered by the relentless department store detective who, for "the sake of example," insisted

upon taking the case into court. The poor mother wept bitter tears over this downfall of her "frommes

I know a Polish boy whose earnings were all given to his father who gruffly refused all requests for pocket

money. One Christmas his little sisters, having been told by their mother that they were too poor to have any

Christmas presents, appealed to the big brother as to one who was earning money of his own. Flattered by the

implication, but at the same time quite impecunious, the night before Christmas he nonchalantly walked

through a neighboring department store and stole a manicure set for one little sister and a string of beads for

the other. He was caught at the door by the house detective as one of those children whom each local

department store arrests in the weeks before Christmas at the daily rate of eight to twenty. The youngest of

these offenders are seldom taken into court but are either sent home with a warning or turned over to the

officers of the Juvenile Protective Association. Most of these premature law breakers are in search of

Americanized clothing and others are only looking for playthings. They are all distracted by the profusion

and variety of the display, and their moral sense is confused by the general air of openhandedness.

These disastrous efforts are not unlike those of many younger children who are constantly arrested for petty

thieving because they are too eager to take home food or fuel which will relieve the distress and need they so

constantly hear discussed. The coal on the wagons, the vegetables displayed in front of the grocery shops, the

very wooden blocks in the loosened street paving are a challenge to their powers to help out at home. A

Bohemian boy who was out on parole from the old detention home of the Juvenile Court itself, brought back

five stolen chickens to the matron for Sunday dinner, saying that he knew the Committee were "having a hard

time to fill up so many kids and perhaps these fowl would help out." The honest immigrant parents, totally

ignorant of American laws and municipal regulations, often send a child to pick up coal on the railroad tracks

or to stand at three o'clock in the morning before the side door of a restaurant which gives away broken food,

or to collect grain for the chickens at the base of elevators and standing cars. The latter custom accounts for

the large number of boys arrested for breaking the seals on grain freight cars. It is easy for a child thus trained

to accept the proposition of a junk dealer to bring him bars of iron stored in freight yards. Four boys quite

Four fifths of the children brought into the Juvenile Court in Chicago are the children of foreigners. The

Germans are the greatest offenders, Polish next. Do their children suffer from the excess of virtue in those

parents so eager to own a house and lot? One often sees a grasping parent in the court, utterly broken down

when the Americanized youth who has been brought to grief clings as piteously to his peasant father as if he

Many of these children have come to grief through their premature fling into city life, having thrown off

parental control as they have impatiently discarded foreign ways. Boys of ten and twelve will refuse to sleep

at home, preferring the freedom of an old brewery vault or an empty warehouse to the obedience required by

their parents, and for days these boys will live on the milk and bread which they steal from the back porches

after the early morning delivery. Such children complain that there is "no fun" at home. One little chap who

was given a vacant lot to cultivate by the City Garden Association insisted upon raising only popcorn and

tried to present the entire crop to HullHouse "to be used for the parties," with the stipulation that he would

have "to be invited every single time." Then there are little groups of dissipated young men who pride

themselves upon their ability to live without working and who despise all the honest and sober ways of their

immigrant parents. They are at once a menace and a center of demoralization. Certainly the bewildered

parents, unable to speak English and ignorant of the city, whose children have disappeared for days or weeks,

have often come to HullHouse, evincing that agony which fairly separates the marrow from the bone, as if

they had discovered a new type of suffering, devoid of the healing in familiar sorrows. It is as if they did not

know how to search for the children without the assistance of the children themselves. Perhaps the most

pathetic aspect of such cases is their revelation of the premature dependence of the older and wiser upon the

young and foolish, which is in itself often responsible for the situation because it has given the children an

undue sense of their own importance and a false security that they can take care of themselves.

On the other hand, an Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking at the public school will help her mother to

connect the entire family with American food and household habits. That the mother has never baked bread

in Italyonly mixed it in her own house and then taken it out to the village ovenmakes all the more

valuable her daughter's understanding of the complicated cooking stove. The same thing is true of the girl

who learns to sew in the public school, and more than anything else, perhaps, of the girl who receives the first

simple instruction in the care of little childrenthat skillful care which every tenementhouse baby requires

if he is to be pulled through his second summer. As a result of this teaching I recall a young girl who

carefully explained to her Italian mother that the reason the babies in Italy were so healthy and the babies in

Chicago were so sickly, was not, as her mother had firmly insisted, because her babies in Italy had goat's milk

and her babies in America had cow's milk, but because the milk in Italy was clean and the milk in Chicago

was dirty. She said that when you milked your own goat before the door, you knew that the milk was clean,

but when you bought milk from the grocery store after it had been carried for many miles in the country, you

couldn't tell whether it was fit for the baby to drink until the men from the City Hall who had watched it all

Thus through civic instruction in the public schools, the Italian woman slowly became urbanized in the sense

in which the word was used by her own Latin ancestors, and thus the habits of her entire family were

modified. The public schools in the immigrant colonies deserve all the praise as Americanizing agencies

which can be bestowed upon them, and there is little doubt that the fastchanging curriculum in the direction

of the vacationschool experiments will react more directly upon such households.

It is difficult to write of the relation of the older and most foreignlooking immigrants to the children of other

peoplethe Italians whose fruitcarts are upset simply because they are "dagoes," or the Russian peddlers

who are stoned and sometimes badly injured because it has become a code of honor in a gang of boys to thus

express their derision. The members of a Protective Association of Jewish Peddlers organized at HullHouse

related daily experiences in which old age had been treated with such irreverence, cherished dignity with such

disrespect, that a listener caught the passion of Lear in the old texts, as a platitude enunciated by a man who

discovers in it his own experience thrills us as no unfamiliar phrases can possibly do. The Greeks are filled

with amazed rage when their very name is flung at them as an opprobrious epithet. Doubtless these

difficulties would be much minimized in America, if we faced our own race problem with courage and

intelligence, and these very Mediterranean immigrants might give us valuable help. Certainly they are less

conscious than the AngloSaxon of color distinctions, perhaps because of their traditional familiarity with

Carthage and Egypt. They listened with respect and enthusiasm to a scholarly address delivered by Professor

Du Bois at HullHouse on a Lincoln's birthday, with apparently no consciousness of that race difference

which color seems to accentuate so absurdly, and upon my return from various conferences held in the

interest of "the advancement of colored people," I have had many illuminating conversations with my

The celebration of national events has always been a source of new understanding and companionship with

the members of the contiguous foreign colonies not only between them and their American neighbors but

between them and their own children. One of our earliest Italian events was a rousing commemoration of

Garibaldi's birthday, and his imposing bust, presented to HullHouse that evening, was long the chief

ornament of our front hall. It called forth great enthusiasm from the connazionali whom Ruskin calls, not the

"common people" of Italy, but the "companion people" because of their power for swift sympathy.

A huge Hellenic meeting held at HullHouse, in which the achievements of the classic period were set forth

both in Greek and English by scholars of wellknown repute, brought us into a new sense of fellowship with

all our Greek neighbors. As the mayor of Chicago was seated upon the right hand of the dignified senior

priest of the Greek Church and they were greeted alternately in the national hymns of America and Greece,

one felt a curious sense of the possibility of transplanting to new and crude Chicago some of the traditions of

The Greeks indeed gravely consider their traditions as their most precious possession and more than once in

meetings of protest held by the Greek colony against the aggressions of the Bulgarians in Macedonia, I have

heard it urged that the Bulgarians are trying to establish a protectorate, not only for their immediate

advantage, but that they may claim a glorious history for the "barbarous country." It is said that on the basis

of this protectorate, they are already teaching in their schools that Alexander the Great was a Bulgarian and

that it will be but a short time before they claim Aristotle himself, an indignity the Greeks will never suffer!

To me personally the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Mazzini's birth was a matter of great

interest. Throughout the world that day Italians who believed in a United Italy came together. They recalled

the hopes of this man who, with all his devotion to his country was still more devoted to humanity and who

dedicated to the workingmen of Italy, an appeal so philosophical, so filled with a yearning for righteousness,

that it transcended all national boundaries and became a bugle call for "The Duties of Man." A copy of this

document was given to every school child in the public schools of Italy on this one hundredth anniversary,

and as the Chicago branch of the Society of Young Italy marched into our largest hall and presented to

HullHouse an heroic bust of Mazzini, I found myself devoutly hoping that the Italian youth, who have

committed their future to America, might indeed become "the Apostles of the fraternity of nations" and that

our American citizenship might be built without disturbing these foundations which were laid of old time.

The administration of charity in Chicago during the winter following the World's Fair had been of necessity

most difficult, for, although large sums had been given to the temporary relief organization which endeavored

to care for the thousands of destitute strangers stranded in the city, we all worked under a sense of desperate

need and a paralyzing consciousness that our best efforts were most inadequate to the situation.

During the many relief visits I paid that winter in tenement houses and miserable lodgings, I was constantly

shadowed by a certain sense of shame that I should be comfortable in the midst of such distress. This resulted

at times in a curious reaction against all the educational and philanthropic activities in which I had been

engaged. In the face of the desperate hunger and need, these could not but seem futile and superficial. The

hard winter in Chicago had turned the thoughts of many of us to these stern matters. A young friend of mine

who came daily to HullHouse consulted me in regard to going into the paper warehouse belonging to her

father that she might there sort rags with the Polish girls; another young girl took a place in a sweatshop for a

month, doing her work so simply and thoroughly that the proprietor had no notion that she had not been

driven there by need; still two others worked in a shoe factory;and all this happened before such

adventures were undertaken in order to procure literary material. It was in the following winter that the

pioneer effort in this direction, Walter Wyckoff's account of his vain attempt to find work in Chicago,

compelled even the sternest businessman to drop his assertion that "any man can find work if he wants it."

The dealing directly with the simplest human wants may have been responsible for an impression which I

carried about with me almost constantly for a period of two years and which culminated finally in a visit to

Tolstoythat the Settlement, or HullHouse at least, was a mere pretense and travesty of the simple impulse

"to live with the poor," so long as the residents did not share the common lot of hard labor and scant fare.

Actual experience had left me in much the same state of mind I had been in after reading Tolstoy's "What to

Do," which is a description of his futile efforts to relieve the unspeakable distress and want in the Moscow

winter of 1881, and his inevitable conviction that only he who literally shares his own shelter and food with

Doubtless it is much easier to see "what to do" in rural Russia, where all the conditions tend to make the

contrast as broad as possible between peasant labor and noble idleness, than it is to see "what to do" in the

interdependencies of the modern industrial city. But for that very reason perhaps, Tolstoy's clear statement is

valuable for that type of conscientious person in every land who finds it hard, not only to walk in the path of

I had read the books of Tolstoy steadily all the years since "My Religion" had come into my hands

immediately after I left college. The reading of that book had made clear that men's poor little efforts to do

right are put forth for the most part in the chill of selfdistrust; I became convinced that if the new social

order ever came, it would come by gathering to itself all the pathetic human endeavor which had indicated the

forward direction. But I was most eager to know whether Tolstoy's undertaking to do his daily share of the

physical labor of the world, that labor which is "so disproportionate to the unnourished strength" of those by

I had time to review carefully many things in my mind during the long days of convalescence following an

illness of typhoid fever which I suffered in the autumn of 1895. The illness was so prolonged that my health

was most unsatisfactory during the following winter, and the next May I went abroad with my friend, Miss

The prospect of seeing Tolstoy filled me with the hope of finding a clue to the tangled affairs of city poverty.

I was but one of thousands of our contemporaries who were turning toward this Russian, not as to a seerhis

message is much too confused and contradictory for thatbut as to a man who has had the ability to lift his

Our first few weeks in England were most stimulating. A dozen years ago London still showed traces of "that

exciting moment in the life of the nation when its youth is casting about for new enthusiasms," but it evinced

still more of that British capacity to perform the hard work of careful research and selfexamination which

must precede any successful experiments in social reform. Of the varied groups and individuals whose

suggestions remained with me for years, I recall perhaps as foremost those members of the new London

County Council whose farreaching plans for the betterment of London could not but enkindle enthusiasm. It

was a most striking expression of that effort which would place beside the refinement and pleasure of the

rich, a new refinement and a new pleasure born of the commonwealth and the common joy of all the citizens,

that at this moment they prized the municipal pleasure boats upon the Thames no less than the extensive

schemes for the municipal housing of the poorest people. Ben Tillet, who was then an alderman, "the docker

sitting beside the duke," took me in a rowboat down the Thames on a journey made exciting by the hundreds

of dockers who cheered him as we passed one wharf after another on our way to his home at Greenwich;

John Burns showed us his wonderful civic accomplishments at Battersea, the plant turning street sweepings

into cement pavements, the technical school teaching boys brick laying and plumbing, and the public bath in

which the children of the Board School were receiving a swimming lessonthese measures anticipating our

achievements in Chicago by at least a decade and a half. The new Education Bill which was destined to drag

on for twelve years before it developed into the children's charter, was then a storm center in the House of

Commons. Miss Smith and I were much pleased to be taken to tea on the Parliament terrace by its author, Sir

John Gorst, although we were quite bewildered by the arguments we heard there for church schools versus

We heard Keir Hardie before a large audience of workingmen standing in the open square of Canning Town

outline the great things to be accomplished by the then new Labor Party, and we joined the vast body of men

finding it hard to realize that we were attending a political meeting. It seemed that moment as if the hopes of

democracy were more likely to come to pass on English soil than upon our own. Robert Blatchford's stirring

pamphlets were in everyone's hands, and a reception given by Karl Marx's daughter, Mrs. Aveling, to

Liebknecht before he returned to Germany to serve a prison term for his lese majeste speech in the Reichstag,

gave us a glimpse of the oldfashioned orthodox Socialist who had not yet begun to yield to the biting

Octavia Hill kindly demonstrated to us the principles upon which her wellfounded business of rent

collecting was established, and with pardonable pride showed us the Red Cross Square with its cottages

marvelously picturesque and comfortable, on two sides, and on the third a public hall and common drawing

room for the use of all the tenants; the interior of the latter had been decorated by pupils of Walter Crane with

While all this was warmly human, we also had opportunities to see something of a group of men and women

who were approaching the social problem from the study of economics; among others Mr. and Mrs. Sidney

Webb who were at work on their Industrial Democracy; Mr. John Hobson who was lecturing on the evolution

We followed factory inspectors on a round of duties performed with a thoroughness and a trained intelligence

which were a revelation of the possibilities of public service. When it came to visiting Settlements, we were

at least reassured that they were not falling into identical lines of effort. Canon Ingram, who has since

become Bishop of London, was then warden of Oxford House and in the midst of an experiment which

pleased me greatly, the more because it was carried on by a churchman. Oxford House had hired all the

concert hallsvaudeville shows we later called them in Chicagowhich were found in Bethnal Green, for

every Saturday night. The residents had censored the programs, which they were careful to keep popular, and

any workingman who attended a show in Bethnal Green on a Saturday night, and thousands of them did,

One evening in University Hall Mrs. Humphry Ward, who had just returned from Italy, described the effect

of the Italian salt tax in a talk which was evidently one in a series of lectures upon the economic wrongs

which pressed heaviest upon the poor; at Browning House, at the moment, they were giving prizes to those of

their costermonger neighbors who could present the best caredfor donkeys, and the warden, Herbert Stead,

exhibited almost the enthusiasm of his wellknown brother, for that crop of kindliness which can be garnered

most easily from the acreage where human beings grow the thickest; at the Bermondsey Settlement they were

rejoicing that their University Extension students had successfully passed the examinations for the University

of London. The entire impression received in England of research, of scholarship, of organized public spirit,

was in marked contrast to the impressions of my next visit in 1900, when the South African War had

absorbed the enthusiasm of the nation and the wrongs at "the heart of the empire" were disregarded and

London, of course, presented sharp differences to Russia where social conditions were written in black and

white with little shading, like a demonstration of the Chinese proverb, "Where one man lives in luxury,

The fair of NijniNovgorod seemed to take us to the very edge of civilization so remote and eastern that the

merchants brought their curious goods upon the backs of camels or on strange craft riding at anchor on the

broad Volga. But even here our letter of introduction to Korolenko, the novelist, brought us to a realization of

that strange mingling of a remote past and a selfconscious present which Russia presents on every hand.

This same contrast was also shown by the pilgrims trudging on pious errands to monasteries, to tombs, and to

the Holy Land itself, with their bleeding feet bound in rags and thrust into bast sandals, and, on the other

hand, by the revolutionists even then advocating a Republic which should obtain not only in political but also

We had letters of introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Aylmer Maude of Moscow, since well known as the

translators of "Resurrection" and other of Tolstoy's later works, who at that moment were on the eve of

leaving Russia in order to form an agricultural colony in South England where they might support themselves

by the labor of their hands. We gladly accepted Mr. Maude's offer to take us to Yasnaya Polyana and to

introduce us to Count Tolstoy, and never did a disciple journey toward his master with more enthusiasm than

did our guide. When, however, Mr. Maude actually presented Miss Smith and myself to Count Tolstoy,

knowing well his master's attitude toward philanthropy, he endeavored to make HullHouse appear much

Tolstoy, standing by clad in his peasant garb, listened gravely but, glancing distrustfully at the sleeves of my

traveling gown which unfortunately at that season were monstrous in size, he took hold of an edge and

pulling out one sleeve to an interminable breadth, said quite simply that "there was enough stuff on one arm

to make a frock for a little girl," and asked me directly if I did not find "such a dress" a "barrier to the

people." I was too disconcerted to make a very clear explanation, although I tried to say that monstrous as my

sleeves were they did not compare in size with those of the working girls in Chicago and that nothing would

more effectively separate me from "the people" than a cotton blouse following the simple lines of the human

form; even if I had wished to imitate him and "dress as a peasant," it would have been hard to choose which

peasant among the thirtysix nationalities we had recently counted in our ward. Fortunately the countess

came to my rescue with a recital of her former attempts to clothe hypothetical little girls in yards of material

cut from a train and other superfluous parts of her best gown until she had been driven to a firm stand which

she advised me to take at once. But neither Countess Tolstoy nor any other friend was on hand to help me out

of my predicament later, when I was asked who "fed" me, and how did I obtain "shelter"? Upon my reply that

a farm a hundred miles from Chicago supplied me with the necessities of life, I fairly anticipated the next

scathing question: "So you are an absentee landlord? Do you think you will help the people more by adding

yourself to the crowded city than you would by tilling your own soil?" This new sense of discomfort over a

failure to till my own soil was increased when Tolstoy's second daughter appeared at the fiveo'clock tea

table set under the trees, coming straight from the harvest field where she had been working with a group of

peasants since five o'clock in the morning, not pretending to work but really taking the place of a peasant

woman who had hurt her foot. She was plainly much exhausted, but neither expected nor received sympathy

from the members of a family who were quite accustomed to see each other carry out their convictions in

spite of discomfort and fatigue. The martyrdom of discomfort, however, was obviously much easier to bear

than that to which, even to the eyes of the casual visitor, Count Tolstoy daily subjected himself, for his study

in the basement of the conventional dwelling, with its short shelf of battered books and its scythe and spade

leaning against the wall, had many times lent itself to that ridicule which is the most difficult form of

That summer evening as we sat in the garden with a group of visitors from Germany, from England and

America, who had traveled to the remote Russian village that they might learn of this man, one could not

forbear the constant inquiry to one's self, as to why he was so regarded as sage and saint that this party of

people should be repeated each day of the year. It seemed to me then that we were all attracted by this sermon

of the deed, because Tolstoy had made the one supreme personal effort, one might almost say the one frantic

personal effort, to put himself into right relations with the humblest people, with the men who tilled his soil,

blacked his boots, and cleaned his stables. Doubtless the heaviest burden of our contemporaries is a

consciousness of a divergence between our democratic theory on the one hand, that working people have a

right to the intellectual resources of society, and the actual fact on the other hand, that thousands of them are

so overburdened with toil that there is no leisure nor energy left for the cultivation of the mind. We constantly

suffer from the strain and indecision of believing this theory and acting as if we did not believe it, and this

man who years before had tried "to get off the backs of the peasants," who had at least simplified his life and

Doubtless all of the visitors sitting in the Tolstoy garden that evening had excused themselves from laboring

with their hands upon the theory that they were doing something more valuable for society in other ways. No

one among our contemporaries has dissented from this point of view so violently as Tolstoy himself, and yet

no man might so easily have excused himself from hard and rough work on the basis of his genius and of his

intellectual contributions to the world. So far, however, from considering his time too valuable to be spent in

labor in the field or in making shoes, our great host was too eager to know life to be willing to give up this

companionship of mutual labor. One instinctively found reasons why it was easier for a Russian than for the

rest of us to reach this conclusion; the Russian peasants have a proverb which says: "Labor is the house that

love lives in," by which they mean that no two people nor group of people can come into affectionate

relations with each other unless they carry on together a mutual task, and when the Russian peasant talks of

labor he means labor on the soil, or, to use the phrase of the great peasant, Bondereff, "bread labor." Those

monastic orders founded upon agricultural labor, those philosophical experiments like Brook Farm and many

another have attempted to reduce to action this same truth. Tolstoy himself has written many times his own

convictions and attempts in this direction, perhaps never more tellingly than in the description of Lavin's

morning spent in the harvest field, when he lost his sense of grievance and isolation and felt a strange new

brotherhood for the peasants, in proportion as the rhythmic motion of his scythe became one with theirs.

At the long dinner table laid in the garden were the various traveling guests, the grownup daughters, and the

younger children with their governess. The countess presided over the usual European dinner served by men,

but the count and the daughter, who had worked all day in the fields, ate only porridge and black bread and

drank only kvas, the fare of the haymaking peasants. Of course we are all accustomed to the fact that those

who perform the heaviest labor eat the coarsest and simplest fare at the end of the day, but it is not often that

we sit at the same table with them while we ourselves eat the more elaborate supper without remark or

comment upon the food his family and guests preferred to eat, assuming that they, as well as he, had settled

The Tolstoy household that evening was much interested in the fate of a young Russian spy who had recently

come to Tolstoy in the guise of a country schoolmaster, in order to obtain a copy of "Life," which had been

interdicted by the censor of the press. After spending the night in talk with Tolstoy, the spy had gone away

with a copy of the forbidden manuscript but, unfortunately for himself, having become converted to Tolstoy's

views he had later made a full confession to the authorities and had been exiled to Siberia. Tolstoy, holding

that it was most unjust to exile the disciple while he, the author of the book, remained at large, had pointed

out this inconsistency in an open letter to one of the Moscow newspapers. The discussion of this incident, of

course, opened up the entire subject of nonresidence, and curiously enough I was disappointed in Tolstoy's

position in the matter. It seemed to me that he made too great a distinction between the use of physical force

and that moral energy which can override another's differences and scruples with equal ruthlessness.

With that inner sense of mortification with which one finds one's self at difference with the great authority, I

recalled the conviction of the early HullHouse residents; that whatever of good the Settlement had to offer

should be put into positive terms, that we might live with opposition to no man, with recognition of the good

in every man, even the most wretched. We had often departed from this principle, but had it not in every case

been a confession of weakness, and had we not always found antagonism a foolish and unwarrantable

The conversation at dinner and afterward, although conducted with animation and sincerity, for the moment

stirred vague misgivings within me. Was Tolstoy more logical than life warrants? Could the wrongs of life be

reduced to the terms of unrequited labor and all be made right if each person performed the amount necessary

to satisfy his own wants? Was it not always easy to put up a strong case if one took the naturalistic view of

life? But what about the historic view, the inevitable shadings and modifications which life itself brings to its

own interpretation? Miss Smith and I took a night train back to Moscow in that tumult of feeling which is

always produced by contact with a conscience making one more of those determined efforts to probe to the

very foundations of the mysterious world in which we find ourselves. A horde of perplexing questions,

concerning those problems of existence of which in happier moments we catch but fleeting glimpses and at

which we even then stand aghast, pursued us relentlessly on the long journey through the great wheat plains

of South Russia, through the crowded Ghetto of Warsaw, and finally into the smiling fields of Germany

where the peasant men and women were harvesting the grain. I remember that through the sight of those

toiling peasants, I made a curious connection between the bread labor advocated by Tolstoy and the comfort

the harvest fields are said to have once brought to Luther when, much perturbed by many theological

difficulties, he suddenly forgot them all in a gush of gratitude for mere bread, exclaiming, "How it stands,

that golden yellow corn, on its fine tapered stem; the meek earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once

again!" At least the toiling poor had this comfort of bread labor, and perhaps it did not matter that they gained

it unknowingly and painfully, if only they walked in the path of labor. In the exercise of that curious power

possessed by the theorist to inhibit all experiences which do not enhance his doctrine, I did not permit myself

to recall that which I knew so wellthat exigent and unremitting labor grants the poor no leisure even in the

supreme moments of human suffering and that "all griefs are lighter with bread."

I may have wished to secure this solace for myself at the cost of the least possible expenditure of time and

energy, for during the next month in Germany, when I read everything of Tolstoy's that had been translated

into English, German, or French, there grew up in my mind a conviction that what I ought to do upon my

return to HullHouse was to spend at least two hours every morning in the little bakery which we had

recently added to the equipment of our coffeehouse. Two hours' work would be but a wretched compromise,

but it was hard to see how I could take more time out of each day. I had been taught to bake bread in my

childhood not only as a household accomplishment, but because my father, true to his miller's tradition, had

insisted that each one of his daughters on her twelfth birthday must present him with a satisfactory wheat loaf

of her own baking, and he was most exigent as to the quality of this test loaf. What could be more in keeping

with my training and tradition than baking bread? I did not quite see how my activity would fit in with that of

the German union baker who presided over the HullHouse bakery, but all such matters were secondary and

certainly could be arranged. It may be that I had thus to pacify my aroused conscience before I could settle

down to hear Wagner's "Ring" at Beyreuth; it may be that I had fallen a victim to the phrase, "bread labor";

but at any rate I held fast to the belief that I should do this, through the entire journey homeward, on land and

sea, until I actually arrived in Chicago when suddenly the whole scheme seemed to me as utterly

preposterous as it doubtless was. The half dozen people invariably waiting to see me after breakfast, the piles

of letters to be opened and answered, the demand of actual and pressing wantswere these all to be pushed

aside and asked to wait while I saved my soul by two hours' work at baking bread?

Although my resolution was abandoned, this may be the best place to record the efforts of more doughty

souls to carry out Tolstoy's conclusions. It was perhaps inevitable that Tolstoy colonies should be founded,

although Tolstoy himself has always insisted that each man should live his life as nearly as possible in the

place in which he was born. The visit Miss Smith and I made a year or two later to a colony in one of the

southern States portrayed for us most vividly both the weakness and the strange august dignity of the Tolstoy

position. The colonists at Commonwealth held but a short creed. They claimed in fact that the difficulty is not

to state truth but to make moral conviction operative upon actual life, and they announced it their intention

"to obey the teachings of Jesus in all matters of labor and the use of property." They would thus transfer the

vindication of creed from the church to the open field, from dogma to experience.

The day Miss Smith and I visited the Commonwealth colony of threescore souls, they were erecting a house

for the family of a onelegged man, consisting of a wife and nine children who had come the week before in

a forlorn prairie schooner from Arkansas. As this was the largest family the little colony contained, the new

house was to be the largest yet erected. Upon our surprise at this literal giving "to him that asketh," we

inquired if the policy of extending food and shelter to all who applied, without test of creed or ability, might

not result in the migration of all the neighboring poorhouse population into the colony. We were told that this

actually had happened during the winter until the colony fare of corn meal and cow peas had proved so

unattractive that the paupers had gone back, for even the poorest of the southern poorhouses occasionally

supplied bacon with the pone if only to prevent scurvy from which the colonists themselves had suffered. The

difficulty of the poorhouse people had thus settled itself by the sheer poverty of the situation, a poverty so

biting that the only ones willing to face it were those sustained by a conviction of its righteousness. The fields

and gardens were being worked by an editor, a professor, a clergyman, as well as by artisans and laborers, the

fruit thereof to be eaten by themselves and their families or by any other families who might arrive from

Arkansas. The colonists were very conventional in matters of family relationship and had broken with society

only in regard to the conventions pertaining to labor and property. We had a curious experience at the end of

the day, when we were driven into the nearest town. We had taken with us as a guest the wife of the president

of the colony, wishing to give her a dinner at the hotel, because she had girlishly exclaimed during a

conversation that at times during the winter she had become so eager to hear good music that it had seemed to

her as if she were actually hungry for it, almost as hungry as she was for a beefsteak. Yet as we drove away

we had the curious sensation that while the experiment was obviously coming to an end, in the midst of its

privations it yet embodied the peace of mind which comes to him who insists upon the logic of life whether it

is reasonable or notthe fanatic's joy in seeing his own formula translated into action. At any rate, as we

reached the commonplace southern town of workaday men and women, for one moment its substantial

buildings, its solid brick churches, its ordered streets, divided into those of the rich and those of the poor,

seemed much more unreal to us than the little struggling colony we had left behind. We repeated to each

other that in all the practical judgments and decisions of life, we must part company with logical

demonstration; that if we stop for it in each case, we can never go on at all; and yet, in spite of this, when

conscience does become the dictator of the daily life of a group of men, it forces our admiration as no other

modern spectacle has power to do. It seemed but a mere incident that this group should have lost sight of the

facts of life in their earnest endeavor to put to the test the things of the spirit.

I knew little about the colony started by Mr. Maude at Purleigh containing several of Tolstoy's followers who

were not permitted to live in Russia, and we did not see Mr. Maude again until he came to Chicago on his

way from Manitoba, whither he had transported the second group of Dukhobors, a religious sect who had

interested all of Tolstoy's followers because of their literal acceptance of nonresistance and other Christian

doctrines which are so strenuously advocated by Tolstoy. It was for their benefit that Tolstoy had finished

and published "Resurrection," breaking through his longkept resolution against novel writing. After the

Dukhobors were settled in Canada, of the five hundred dollars left from the "Resurrection" funds, one half

was given to HullHouse. It seemed possible to spend this fund only for the relief of the most primitive wants

One of the striking features of our neighborhood twenty years ago, and one to which we never became

reconciled, was the presence of huge wooden garbage boxes fastened to the street pavement in which the

undisturbed refuse accumulated day by day. The system of garbage collecting was inadequate throughout the

city but it became the greatest menace in a ward such as ours, where the normal amount of waste was much

increased by the decayed fruit and vegetables discarded by the Italian and Greek fruit peddlers, and by the

residuum left over from the piles of filthy rags which were fished out of the city dumps and brought to the

The children of our neighborhood twenty years ago played their games in and around these huge garbage

boxes. They were the first objects that the toddling child learned to climb; their bulk afforded a barricade and

their contents provided missiles in all the battles of the older boys; and finally they became the seats upon

which absorbed lovers held enchanted converse. We are obliged to remember that all children eat everything

which they find and that odors have a curious and intimate power of entwining themselves into our tenderest

memories, before even the residents of HullHouse can understand their own early enthusiasm for the

removal of these boxes and the establishment of a better system of refuse collection.

It is easy for even the most conscientious citizen of Chicago to forget the foul smells of the stockyards and

the garbage dumps, when he is living so far from them that he is only occasionally made conscious of their

existence but the residents of a Settlement are perforce constantly surrounded by them. During our first three

years on Halsted Street, we had established a small incinerator at HullHouse and we had many times

reported the untoward conditions of the ward to the city hall. We had also arranged many talks for the

immigrants, pointing out that although a woman may sweep her own doorway in her native village and allow

the reuse to innocently decay in the open air and sunshine, in a crowded city quarter, if the garbage is not

properly collected and destroyed, a tenementhouse mother may see her children sicken and die, and that the

immigrants must therefore not only keep their own houses clean, but must also help the authorities to keep

Possibly our efforts slightly modified the worst conditions, but they still remained intolerable, and the fourth

summer the situation became for me absolutely desperate when I realized in a moment of panic that my

delicate little nephew for whom I was guardian, could not be with me at HullHouse at all unless the

sickening odors were reduced. I may well be ashamed that other delicate children who were torn from their

families, not into boarding school but into eternity, had not long before driven me to effective action. Under

the direction of the first man who came as a resident to HullHouse we began a systematic investigation of

the city system of garbage collection, both as to its efficiency in other wards and its possible connection with

The HullHouse Woman's Club had been organized the year before by the resident kindergartner who had

first inaugurated a mother's meeting. The new members came together, however, in quite a new way that

summer when we discussed with them the high death rate so persistent in our ward. After several club

meetings devoted to the subject, despite the fact that the death rate rose highest in the congested foreign

colonies and not in the streets in which most of the Irish American club women lived, twelve of their number

undertook in connection with the residents, to carefully investigate the conditions of the alleys. During

August and September the substantiated reports of violations of the law sent in from HullHouse to the

health department were one thousand and thirtyseven. For the club woman who had finished a long day's

work of washing or ironing followed by the cooking of a hot supper, it would have been much easier to sit on

her doorstep during a summer evening than to go up and down illkept alleys and get into trouble with her

neighbors over the condition of their garbage boxes. It required both civic enterprise and moral conviction to

be willing to do this three evenings a week during the hottest and most uncomfortable months of the year.

Nevertheless, a certain number of women persisted, as did the residents, and three city inspectors in

succession were transferred from the ward because of unsatisfactory services. Still the death rate remained

high and the condition seemed little improved throughout the next winter. In sheer desperation, the following

spring when the city contracts were awarded for the removal of garbage, with the backing of two wellknown

business men, I put in a bid for the garbage removal of the nineteenth ward. My paper was thrown out on a

technicality but the incident induced the mayor to appoint me the garbage inspector of the ward.

The salary was a thousand dollars a year, and the loss of that political "plum" made a great stir among the

politicians. The position was no sinecure whether regarded from the point of view of getting up at six in the

morning to see that the men were early at work; or of following the loaded wagons, uneasily dropping their

contents at intervals, to their dreary destination at the dump; or of insisting that the contractor must increase

the number of his wagons from nine to thirteen and from thirteen to seventeen, although he assured me that

he lost money on every one and that the former inspector had let him off with seven; or of taking careless

landlords into court because they would not provide the proper garbage receptacles; or of arresting the tenant

With the two or three residents who nobly stood by, we set up six of those doleful incinerators which are

supposed to burn garbage with the fuel collected in the alley itself. The one factory in town which could

utilize old tin cans was a window weight factory, and we deluged that with ten times as many tin cans as it

could usemuch less would pay for. We made desperate attempts to have the dead animals removed by the

contractor who was paid most liberally by the city for that purpose but who, we slowly discovered, always

made the police ambulances do the work, delivering the carcasses upon freight cars for shipment to a soap

factory in Indiana where they were sold for a good price although the contractor himself was the largest

stockholder in the concern. Perhaps our greatest achievement was the discovery of a pavement eighteen

inches under the surface in a narrow street, although after it was found we triumphantly discovered a record

of its existence in the city archives. The Italians living on the street were much interested but displayed little

astonishment, perhaps because they were accustomed to see buried cities exhumed. This pavement became

the casus belli between myself and the street commissioner when I insisted that its restoration belonged to

him, after I had removed the first eight inches of garbage. The matter was finally settled by the mayor

himself, who permitted me to drive him to the entrance of the street in what the children called my "garbage

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, who had done some excellent volunteer inspection in both

Chicago and Pittsburg, became my deputy and performed the work in a most thoroughgoing manner for three

years. During the last two she was under the regime of civil service for in 1895, to the great joy of many

Many of the foreignborn women of the ward were much shocked by this abrupt departure into the ways of

men, and it took a great deal of explanation to convey the idea even remotely that if it were a womanly task to

go about in tenement houses in order to nurse the sick, it might be quite as womanly to go through the same

district in order to prevent the breeding of socalled "filth diseases." While some of the women

enthusiastically approved the slowly changing conditions and saw that their housewifely duties logically

extended to the adjacent alleys and streets, they yet were quite certain that "it was not a lady's job." A

revelation of this attitude was made one day in a conversation which the inspector heard vigorously carried

on in a laundry. One of the employees was leaving and was expressing her mind concerning the place in no

measured terms, summing up her contempt for it as follows: "I would rather be the girl who goes about in the

And yet the spectacle of eight hours' work for eight hours' pay, the evenhanded justice to all citizens

irrespective of "pull," the dividing of responsibility between landlord and tenant, and the readiness to enforce

obedience to law from both, was, perhaps, one of the most valuable demonstrations which could have been

made. Such daily living on the part of the office holder is of infinitely more value than many talks on civics

for, after all, we credit most easily that which we see. The careful inspection combined with other causes,

brought about a great improvement in the cleanliness and comfort of the neighborhood and one happy day,

when the death rate of our ward was found to have dropped from third to seventh in the list of city wards and

was so reported to our Woman's Club, the applause which followed recorded the genuine sense of

participation in the result, and a public spirit which had "made good." But the cleanliness of the ward was

becoming much too popular to suit our allpowerful alderman and, although we felt fatuously secure under

the regime of civil service, he found a way to circumvent us by eliminating the position altogether. He

introduced an ordinance into the city council which combined the collection of refuse with the cleaning and

repairing of the streets, the whole to be placed under a ward superintendent. The office of course was to be

filled under civil service regulations but only men were eligible to the examination. Although this latter

regulation was afterwards modified in favor of one woman, it was retained long enough to put the nineteenth

Of course our experience in inspecting only made us more conscious of the wretched housing conditions over

which we had been distressed from the first. It was during the World's Fair summer that one of the

HullHouse residents in a public address upon housing reform used as an example of indifferent landlordism

a large block in the neighborhood occupied by small tenements and stables unconnected with a street sewer,

as was much similar property in the vicinity. In the lecture the resident spared neither a description of the

property nor the name of the owner. The young man who owned the property was justly indignant at this

public method of attack and promptly came to investigate the condition of the property. Together we made a

careful tour of the houses and stables and in the face of the conditions that we found there, I could not but

agree with him that supplying South Italian peasants with sanitary appliances seemed a difficult undertaking.

Nevertheless he was unwilling that the block should remain in its deplorable state, and he finally cut through

the dilemma with the rash proposition that he would give a free lease of the entire tract to HullHouse,

accompanying the offer, however, with the warning remark, that if we should choose to use the income from

Even when we decided that the houses were so bad that we could not undertake the task of improving them,

he was game and stuck to his proposition that we should have a free lease. We finally submitted a plan that

the houses should be torn down and the entire tract turned into a playground, although cautious advisers

intimated that it would be very inconsistent to ask for subscriptions for the support of HullHouse when we

were known to have thrown away an income of two thousand dollars a year. We, however, felt that a

spectacle of inconsistency was better than one of bad landlordism and so the worst of the houses were

demolished, the best three were sold and moved across the street under careful provision that they might

never be used for junk shops or saloons, and a public playground was finally established. HullHouse

became responsible for its management for ten years, at the end of which time it was turned over to the City

Playground Commission although from the first the city detailed a policeman who was responsible for its

During fifteen years this publicspirited owner of the property paid all the taxes, and when the block was

finally sold he made possible the playground equipment of a nearby schoolyard. On the other hand, the

dispossessed tenants, a group of whom had to be evicted by legal process before their houses could be torn

down, have never ceased to mourn their former estates. Only the other day I met upon the street an old Italian

harness maker, who said that he had never succeeded so well anywhere else nor found a place that "seemed

Festivities of various sorts were held on this early playground, always a May day celebration with its

Maypole dance and its May queen. I remember that one year that honor of being queen was offered to the

little girl who should pick up the largest number of scraps of paper which littered all the streets and alleys.

The children that spring had been organized into a league, and each member had been provided with a stiff

piece of wire upon the sharpened point of which stray bits of paper were impaled and later soberly counted

off into a large box in the HullHouse alley. The little Italian girl who thus won the scepter took it very

gravely as the just reward of hard labor, and we were all so absorbed in the desire for clean and tidy streets

that we were wholly oblivious to the incongruity of thus selecting "the queen of love and beauty."

It was at the end of the second year that we received a visit from the warden of Toynbee Hall and his wife, as

they were returning to England from a journey around the world. They had lived in East London for many

years, and had been identified with the public movements for its betterment. They were much shocked that, in

a new country with conditions still plastic and hopeful, so little attention had been paid to experiments and

methods of amelioration which had already been tried; and they looked in vain through our library for blue

books and governmental reports which recorded painstaking study into the conditions of English cities.

They were the first of a long line of English visitors to express the conviction that many things in Chicago

were untoward not through paucity of public spirit but through a lack of political machinery adapted to

modern city life. This was not all of the situation but perhaps no casual visitor could be expected to see that

these matters of detail seemed unimportant to a city in the first flush of youth, impatient of correction and

convinced that all would be well with its future. The most obvious faults were those connected with the

congested housing of the immigrant population, nine tenths of them from the country, who carried on all sorts

of traditional activities in the crowded tenements. That a group of Greeks should be permitted to slaughter

sheep in a basement, that Italian women should be allowed to sort over rags collected from the city dumps,

not only within the city limits but in a court swarming with little children, that immigrant bakers should

continue unmolested to bake bread for their neighbors in unspeakably filthy spaces under the pavement,

appeared incredible to visitors accustomed to careful city regulations. I recall two visits made to the Italian

quarter by John Burnsthe second, thirteen years after the first. During the latter visit it seemed to him

unbelievable that a certain house owned by a rich Italian should have been permitted to survive. He

remembered with the greatest minuteness the positions of the houses on the court, with the exact space

between the front and rear tenements, and he asked at once whether we had been able to cut a window into a

dark hall as he had recommended thirteen years before. Although we were obliged to confess that the

landlord would not permit the window to be cut, we were able to report that a City Homes Association had

existed for ten years; that following a careful study of tenement conditions in Chicago, the text of which had

been written by a HullHouse resident, the association had obtained the enactment of a model

tenementhouse code, and that their secretary had carefully watched the administration of the law for years

so that its operation might not be minimized by the granting of too many exceptions in the city council. Our

progress still seemed slow to Mr. Burns because in Chicago, the actual houses were quite unchanged,

embodying features long since declared illegal in London. Only this year could we have reported to him, had

he again come to challenge us, that the provisions of the law had at last been extended to existing houses and

that a conscientious corps of inspectors under an efficient chief, were fast remedying the most glaring evils,

while a band of nurses and doctors were following hard upon the "trail of the white hearse."

The mere consistent enforcement of existing laws and efforts for their advance often placed HullHouse, at

least temporarily, into strained relations with its neighbors. I recall a continuous warfare against local

landlords who would move wrecks of old houses as a nucleus for new ones in order to evade the provisions

of the building code, and a certain Italian neighbor who was filled with bitterness because his new rear

tenement was discovered to be illegal. It seemed impossible to make him understand that the health of the

Nevertheless many evils constantly arise in Chicago from congested housing which wiser cities forestall and

prevent; the inevitable boarders crowded into a dark tenement already too small for the use of the immigrant

family occupying it; the surprisingly large number of delinquent girls who have become criminally involved

with their own fathers and uncles; the school children who cannot find a quiet spot in which to read or study

and who perforce go into the streets each evening; the tuberculosis superinduced and fostered by the

inadequate rooms and breathing spaces. One of the HullHouse residents, under the direction of a Chicago

physician who stands high as an authority on tuberculosis and who devotes a large proportion of his time to

our vicinity, made an investigation into housing conditions as related to tuberculosis with a result as startling

It is these subtle evils of wretched and inadequate housing which are often the most disastrous. In the summer

of 1902 during an epidemic of typhoid fever in which our ward, although containing but one thirtysixth of

the population of the city, registered one sixth of the total number of deaths, two of the HullHouse residents

made an investigation of the methods of plumbing in the houses adjacent to conspicuous groups of fever

cases. They discovered among the people who had been exposed to the infection, a widow who had lived in

the ward for a number of years, in a comfortable little house of her own. Although the Italian immigrants

were closing in all around her, she was not willing to sell her property and to move away until she had

finished the education of her children. In the meantime she held herself quite aloof from her Italian neighbors

and could never be drawn into any of the public efforts to secure a better code of tenementhouse sanitation.

Her two daughters were sent to an eastern college. One June when one of them had graduated and the other

still had two years before she took her degree, they came to the spotless little house and their selfsacrificing

mother for the summer holiday. They both fell ill with typhoid fever and one daughter died because the

mother's utmost efforts could not keep the infection out of her own house. The entire disaster affords,

perhaps, a fair illustration of the futility of the individual conscience which would isolate a family from the

The careful information collected concerning the juxtaposition of the typhoid cases to the various systems of

plumbing and nonplumbing was made the basis of a bacteriological study by another resident, Dr. Alice

Hamilton, as to the possibility of the infection having been carried by flies. Her researches were so

convincing that they have been incorporated into the body of scientific data supporting that theory, but there

were also practical results from the investigation. It was discovered that the wretched sanitary appliances

through which alone the infection could have become so widely spread, would not have been permitted to

remain, unless the city inspector had either been criminally careless or open to the arguments of favored

The agitation finally resulted in a long and stirring trial before the civil service board of half of the employees

in the Sanitary Bureau, with the final discharge of eleven out of the entire force of twentyfour. The inspector

in our neighborhood was a kindly old man, greatly distressed over the affair, and quite unable to understand

why he should have not used his discretion as to the time when a landlord should be forced to put in modern

appliances. If he was "very poor," or "just about to sell his place," or "sure that the house would be torn down

to make room for a factory," why should one "inconvenience" him? The old man died soon after the trial,

feeling persecuted to the very last and not in the least understanding what it was all about. We were amazed

at the commercial ramifications which graft in the city hall involved and at the indignation which interference

with it produced. HullHouse lost some large subscriptions as the result of this investigation, a loss which, if

not easy to bear, was at least comprehensible. We also uncovered unexpected graft in connection with the

plumbers' unions, and but for the fearless testimony of one of their members, could never have brought the

Inevitable misunderstanding also developed in connection with the attempt on the part of HullHouse

residents to prohibit the sale of cocaine to minors, which brought us into sharp conflict with many druggists. I

recall an Italian druggist living on the edge of the neighborhood, who finally came with a committee of his

countryman to see what HullHouse wanted of him, thoroughly convinced that no such effort could be

disinterested. One dreary trial after another had been lost through the inadequacy of the existing legislation

and after many attempts to secure better legal regulation of its sale, a new law with the cooperation of many

agencies was finally secured in 1907. Through all this the Italian druggist, who had greatly profited by the

sale of cocaine to boys, only felt outraged and abused. And yet the thought of this campaign brings before my

mind with irresistible force, a young Italian boy who died,a victim of the drug at the age of seventeen. He

had been in our kindergarten as a handsome merry child, in our clubs as a vivacious boy, and then gradually

there was an eclipse of all that was animated and joyous and promising, and when I at last saw him in his

coffin, it was impossible to connect that haggard shriveled body with what I had known before.

A midwife investigation, undertaken in connection with the Chicago Medical Society, while showing the

great need of further state regulation in the interest of the most ignorant mothers and helpless children,

brought us into conflict with one of the most venerable of all customs. Was all this a part of the unending

struggle between the old and new, or were these oppositions so unexpected and so unlooked for merely a

reminder of that old bit of wisdom that "there is no guarding against interpretations"? Perhaps more subtle

still, they were due to that very superrefinement of disinterestedness which will not justify itself, that it may

feel superior to public opinion. Some of our investigations of course had no such untoward results, such as

"An Intensive Study of Truancy" undertaken by a resident of HullHouse in connection with the compulsory

education department of the Board of Education and the Visiting Nurses Association. The resident, Mrs.

Britton, who, having had charge of our children's clubs for many years, knew thousands of children in the

neighborhood, made a detailed study of three hundred families tracing back the habitual truancy of the child

to economic and social causes. This investigation preceded a most interesting conference on truancy held

under a committee of which I was a member from the Chicago Board of Education. It left lasting results upon

the administration of the truancy law as well as the cooperation of volunteer bodies.

We continually conduct small but careful investigations at HullHouse, which may guide us in our

immediate doings such as two recently undertaken by Mrs. Britton, one upon the reading of school children

before new books were bought for the children's club libraries, and another on the proportion of tuberculosis

among school children, before we opened a little experimental outdoor school on one of our balconies. Some

of the HullHouse investigations are purely negative in result; we once made an attempt to test the fatigue of

factory girls in order to determine how far overwork superinduced the tuberculosis to which such a surprising

number of them were victims. The one scientific instrument it seemed possible to use was an ergograph, a

complicated and expensive instrument kindly lent to us from the physiological laboratory of the University of

Chicago. I remember the imposing procession we made from HullHouse to the factory full of working

women, in which the proprietor allowed us to make the tests; first there was the precious instrument on a

hand truck guarded by an anxious student and the young physician who was going to take the tests every

afternoon; then there was Dr. Hamilton the resident in charge of the investigation, walking with a scientist

who was interested to see that the instrument was properly installed; I followed in the rear to talk once more

to the proprietor of the factory to be quite sure that he would permit the experiment to go on. The result of all

this preparation, however, was to have the instrument record less fatigue at the end of the day than at the

beginning, not because the girls had not worked hard and were not "dog tired" as they confessed, but because

For many years we have administered a branch station of the federal post office at HullHouse, which we

applied for in the first instance because our neighbors lost such a large percentage of the money they sent to

Europe, through the commissions to middle men. The experience in the post office constantly gave us data

for urging the establishment of postal savings as we saw one perplexed immigrant after another turning away

in bewilderment when he was told that the United States post office did not receive savings.

We find increasingly, however, that the best results are to be obtained in investigations as in other

undertakings, by combining our researches with those of other public bodies or with the State itself. When all

the Chicago Settlements found themselves distressed over the condition of the newsboys who, because they

are merchants and not employees, do not come under the provisions of the Illinois child labor law, they

united in the investigation of a thousand young newsboys, who were all interviewed on the streets during the

same twentyfour hours. Their school and domestic status was easily determined later, for many of the boys

lived in the immediate neighborhoods of the ten Settlements which had undertaken the investigation. The

report embodying the results of the investigation recommended a city ordinance containing features from the

Boston and Buffalo regulations, and although an ordinance was drawn up and a strenuous effort was made to

bring it to the attention of the aldermen, none of them would introduce it into the city council without

newspaper backing. We were able to agitate for it again at the annual meeting of the National Child Labor

Committee which was held in Chicago in 1908, and which was of course reported in papers throughout the

entire country. This meeting also demonstrated that local measures can sometimes be urged most effectively

when joined to the efforts of a national body. Undoubtedly the best discussions ever held upon the operation

and status of the Illinois law were those which took place then. The needs of the Illinois children were

regarded in connection with the children of the nation and advanced health measures for Illinois were

The investigations of HullHouse thus tend to be merged with those of larger organizations, from the

investigation of the social value of saloons made for the Committee of Fifty in 1896, to the one on infant

mortality in relation to nationality, made for the American Academy of Science in 1909. This is also true of

HullHouse activities in regard to public movements, some of which are inaugurated by the residents of other

Settlements, as the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, founded by the splendid efforts of Dr.

Graham Taylor for many years head of Chicago Commons. All of our recent investigations into housing have

been under the department of investigation of this school with which several of the HullHouse residents are

identified, quite as our active measures to secure better housing conditions have been carried on with the City

Homes Association and through the cooperation of one of our residents who several years ago was appointed

Perhaps Dr. Taylor himself offers the best possible example of the value of Settlement experience to public

undertakings, in his manifold public activities of which one might instance his work at the moment upon a

commission recently appointed by the governor of Illinois to report upon the best method of Industrial

Insurance or Employer's Liability Acts, and his influence in securing another to study into the subject of

Industrial Diseases. The actual factory investigation under the latter is in charge of Dr. Hamilton, of

HullHouse, whose long residence in an industrial neighborhood as well as her scientific attainment, give her

And so a Settlement is led along from the concrete to the abstract, as may easily be illustrated. Many years

ago a tailors' union meeting at HullHouse asked our cooperation in tagging the various parts of a man's coat

in such wise as to show the money paid to the people who had made it; one tag for the cutting and another for

the buttonholes, another for the finishing and so on, the resulting total to be compared with the selling price

of the coat itself. It quickly became evident that we had no way of computing how much of this larger

balance was spent for salesmen, commercial travelers, rent and management, and the poor tagged coat was

finally left hanging limply in a closet as if discouraged with the attempt. But the desire of the manual worker

to know the relation of his own labor to the whole is not only legitimate but must form the basis of any

intelligent action for his improvement. It was therefore with the hope of reform in the sewing trades that the

HullHouse residents testified before the Federal Industrial Commission in 1900, and much later with

genuine enthusiasm joined with tradesunionists and other publicspirited citizens in an industrial exhibit

which made a graphic presentation of the conditions and rewards of labor. The large casino building in which

it was held was filled every day and evening for two weeks, showing how popular such information is, if it

can be presented graphically. As an illustration of this same moving from the smaller to the larger, I might

instance the efforts of Miss McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement and others in urging upon

Congress the necessity for a special investigation into the conditions of women and children in industry

because we had discovered the insuperable difficulties of smaller investigations, notably one undertaken for

the Illinois Bureau of Labor by Mrs. Van der Vaart of Neighborhood House and by Miss Breckinridge of the

University of Chicago. This investigation made clear that it was as impossible to detach the girls working in

the stockyards from their sisters in industry as it was to urge special legislation on their behalf.

In the earlier years of the American Settlements, the residents were sometimes impatient with the accepted

methods of charitable administration and hoped, through residence in an industrial neighborhood, to discover

more cooperative and advanced methods of dealing with the problems of poverty which are so dependent

upon industrial maladjustment. But during twenty years, the Settlements have seen the charitable people,

through their very knowledge of the poor, constantly approach nearer to those methods formerly designated

as radical. The residents, so far from holding aloof from organized charity, find testimony, certainly in the

National Conferences, that out of the most persistent and intelligent efforts to alleviate poverty will in all

probability arise the most significant suggestions for eradicating poverty. In the hearing before a

congressional committee for the establishment of a Children's Bureau, residents in American Settlements

joined their fellow philanthropists in urging the need of this indispensable instrument for collecting and

disseminating information which would make possible concerted intelligent action on behalf of children.

Mr. Howells has said that we are all so besotted with our novel reading that we have lost the power of seeing

certain aspects of life with any sense of reality because we are continually looking for the possible romance.

The description might apply to the earlier years of the American settlement, but certainly the later years are

filled with discoveries in actual life as romantic as they are unexpected. If I may illustrate one of these

romantic discoveries from my own experience, I would cite the indications of an internationalism as sturdy

and virile as it is unprecedented which I have seen in our cosmopolitan neighborhood: when a South Italian

Catholic is forced by the very exigencies of the situation to make friends with an Austrian Jew representing

another nationality and another religion, both of which cut into all his most cherished prejudices, he finds it

harder to utilize them a second time and gradually loses them. He thus modifies his provincialism, for if an

old enemy working by his side has turned into a friend, almost anything may happen. When, therefore, I

became identified with the peace movement both in its International and National Conventions, I hoped that

this internationalism engendered in the immigrant quarters of American cities might be recognized as an

effective instrument in the cause of peace. I first set it forth with some misgiving before the Convention held

in Boston in 1904 and it is always a pleasure to recall the hearty assent given to it by Professor William

I have always objected to the phrase "sociological laboratory" applied to us, because Settlements should be

something much more human and spontaneous than such a phrase connotes, and yet it is inevitable that the

residents should know their own neighborhoods more thoroughly than any other, and that their experiences

Years ago I was much entertained by a story told at the Chicago Woman's Club by one of its ablest members

in the discussion following a paper of mine on "The Outgrowths of Toynbee Hall." She said that when she

was a little girl playing in her mother's garden, she one day discovered a small toad who seemed to her very

forlorn and lonely, although she did not in the least know how to comfort him, she reluctantly left him to his

fate; later in the day, quite at the other end of the garden, she found a large toad, also apparently without

family and friends. With a heart full of tender sympathy, she took a stick and by exercising infinite patience

and some skill, she finally pushed the little toad through the entire length of the garden into the company of

the big toad, when, to her inexpressible horror and surprise, the big toad opened his mouth and swallowed the

little one. The moral of the tale was clear applied to people who lived "where they did not naturally belong,"

although I protested that was exactly what we wantedto be swallowed and digested, to disappear into the

Twenty years later I am willing to testify that something of the sort does take place after years of

One of the first lessons we learned at HullHouse was that private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal

with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited. We also quickly came to realize that there are certain types of

wretchedness from which every private philanthropy shrinks and which are cared for only in those wards of

the county hospital provided for the wrecks of vicious living or in the city's isolation hospital for smallpox

I have heard a brokenhearted mother exclaim when her erring daughter came home at last too broken and

diseased to be taken into the family she had disgraced, "There is no place for her but the top floor of the

County Hospital; they will have to take her there," and this only after every possible expedient had been tried

or suggested. This aspect of governmental responsibility was unforgettably borne in upon me during the

smallpox epidemic following the World's Fair, when one of the residents, Mrs. Kelley, as State Factory

Inspector, was much concerned in discovering and destroying clothing which was being finished in houses

containing unreported cases of smallpox. The deputy most successful in locating such cases lived at

HullHouse during the epidemic because he did not wish to expose his own family. Another resident, Miss

Lathrop, as a member of the State Board of Charities, went back and forth to the crowded pest house which

had been hastily constructed on a stretch of prairie west of the city. As HullHouse was already so exposed,

it seemed best for the special smallpox inspectors from the Board of Health to take their meals and change

their clothing there before they went to their respective homes. All of these officials had accepted without

question and as implicit in public office the obligation to carry on the dangerous and difficult undertakings

for which private philanthropy is unfitted, as if the commonalty of compassion represented by the State was

It was as early as our second winter on Halsted Street that one of the HullHouse residents received an

appointment from the Cook County agent as a county visitor. She reported at the agency each morning, and

all the cases within a radius of ten blocks from HullHouse were given to her for investigation. This gave her

a legitimate opportunity for knowing the poorest people in the neighborhood and also for understanding the

county method of outdoor relief. The commissioners were at first dubious of the value of such a visitor and

predicted that a woman would be a perfect "coal chute" for giving away county supplies, but they gradually

In 1893 this same resident, Miss Julia C. Lathrop, was appointed by the governor a member of the Illinois

State Board of Charities. She served in this capacity for two consecutive terms and was later reappointed to a

third term. Perhaps her most valuable contribution toward the enlargement and reorganization of the

charitable institutions of the State came through her intimate knowledge of the beneficiaries, and her

experience demonstrated that it is only through long residence among the poor that an official could have

learned to view public institutions as she did, from the standpoint of the inmates rather than from that of the

managers. Since that early day, residents of HullHouse have spent much time in working for the civil

service methods of appointment for employees in the county and State institutions; for the establishment of

State colonies for the care of epileptics; and for a dozen other enterprises which occupy that borderland

between charitable effort and legislation. In this borderland we cooperate in many civic enterprises for I think

we may claim that HullHouse has always held its activities lightly, ready to hand them over to whosoever

Miss Starr had early made a collection of framed photographs, largely of the paintings studied in her art class,

which became the basis of a loan collection first used by the HullHouse students and later extended to the

public schools. It may be fair to suggest that this effort was the nucleus of the Public School Art Society

which was later formed in the city and of which Miss Starr was the first president.

In our first two summers we had maintained three baths in the basement of our own house for the use of the

neighborhood, and they afforded some experience and argument for the erection of the first public bathhouse

in Chicago, which was built on a neighboring street and opened under the city Board of Health. The lot upon

which it was erected belonged to a friend of HullHouse who offered it to the city without rent, and this

enabled the city to erect the first public bath from the small appropriation of ten thousand dollars. Great fear

was expressed by the public authorities that the baths would not be used, and the old story of the bathtubs in

model tenements which had been turned into coal bins was often quoted to us. We were supplied, however,

with the incontrovertible argument that in our adjacent third square mile there were in 1892 but three bathtubs

and that this fact was much complained of by many of the tenementhouse dwellers. Our contention was

justified by the immediate and overflowing use of the public baths, as we had before been sustained in the

contention that an immigrant population would respond to opportunities for reading when the Public Library

We also quickly discovered that nothing brought us so absolutely into comradeship with our neighbors as

mutual and sustained effort such as the paving of a street, the closing of a gambling house, or the restoration

Several of these earlier attempts at civic cooperation were undertaken in connection with the HullHouse

Men's Club, which had been organized in the spring of 1893, had been incorporated under a State charter of

its own, and had occupied a club room in the gymnasium building. This club obtained an early success in one

of the political struggles in the ward and thus fastened upon itself a specious reputation for political power. It

was at last so torn by the dissensions of two political factions which attempted to capture it that, although it is

still an existing organization, it has never regained the prestige of its first five years. Its early political success

came in a campaign HullHouse had instigated against a powerful alderman who has held office for more

than twenty years in the nineteenth ward, and who, although notoriously corrupt, is still firmly intrenched

HullHouse has had to do with three campaigns organized against him. In the first one he was apparently

only amused at our "Sunday School" effort and did little to oppose the election to the aldermanic office of a

member of the HullHouse Men's Club who thus became his colleague in the city council. When

HullHouse, however, made an effort in the following spring against the reelection of the alderman himself,

we encountered the most determined and skillful opposition. In these campaigns we doubtless depended too

much upon the idealistic appeal for we did not yet comprehend the element of reality always brought into the

political struggle in such a neighborhood where politics deal so directly with getting a job and earning a

We soon discovered that approximately one out of every five voters in the nineteenth ward at that time held a

job dependent upon the good will of the alderman. There were no civil service rules to interfere, and the

unskilled voter swept the street and dug the sewer, as secure in his position as the more sophisticated voter

who tended a bridge or occupied an office chair in the city hall. The alderman was even more fortunate in

finding places with the franchiseseeking corporations; it took us some time to understand why so large a

proportion of our neighbors were streetcar employees and why we had such a large club composed solely of

telephone girls. Our powerful alderman had various methods of entrenching himself. Many people were

indebted to him for his kindly services in the police station and the justice courts, for in those days Irish

constituents easily broke the peace, and before the establishment of the Juvenile Court, boys were arrested for

very trivial offenses; added to these were hundreds of constituents indebted to him for personal kindness,

from the peddler who received a free license to the businessman who had a railroad pass to New York. Our

third campaign against him, when we succeeded in making a serious impression upon his majority, evoked

from his henchmen the same sort of hostility which a striker so inevitably feels against the man who would

take his job, even sharpened by the sense that the movement for reform came from an alien source.

Another result of the campaign was an expectation on the part of our new political friends that HullHouse

would perform like offices for them, and there resulted endless confusion and misunderstanding because in

many cases we could not even attempt to do what the alderman constantly did with a right good will. When

he protected a law breaker from the legal consequences of his act, his kindness appeared, not only to himself

but to all beholders, like the deed of a powerful and kindly statesman. When HullHouse on the other hand

insisted that a law must be enforced, it could but appear like the persecution of the offender. We were

certainly not anxious for consistency nor for individual achievement, but in a desire to foster a higher

political morality and not to lower our standards, we constantly clashed with the existing political code. We

also unwittingly stumbled upon a powerful combination of which our alderman was the political head, with

its banking, its ecclesiastical, and its journalistic representatives, and as we followed up the clue and naively

told all we discovered, we of course laid the foundations for opposition which has manifested itself in many

forms; the most striking expression of it was an attack upon HullHouse lasting through weeks and months

During the third campaign I received many anonymous lettersthose from the men often obscene, those

from the women revealing that curious connection between prostitution and the lowest type of politics which

every city tries in vain to hide. I had offers from the men in the city prison to vote properly if released;

various communications from lodginghouse keepers as to the prices of the vote they were ready to deliver;

everywhere appeared that animosity which is evoked only when a man feels that his means of livelihood is

As I look back, I am reminded of the state of mind of Kipling's newspapermen who witnessed a volcanic

eruption at sea, in which unbelievable deepsea creatures were expelled to the surface, among them an

enormous white serpent, blind and smelling of musk, whose death throes thrashed the sea into a fury. With

professional instinct unimpaired, the journalists carefully observed the uncanny creature never designed for

the eyes of men; but a few days later, when they found themselves in a comfortable secondclass carriage,

traveling from Southampton to London between trim hedgerows and smug English villages, they concluded

that the experience was too sensational to be put before the British public, and it became improbable even to

Many subsequent years of living in kindly neighborhood fashion with the people of the nineteenth ward has

produced upon my memory the soothing effect of the secondclass railroad carriage and many of these

political experiences have not only become remote but already seem improbable. On the other hand, these

campaigns were not without their rewards; one of them was a quickened friendship both with the more

substantial citizens in the ward and with a group of fine young voters whose devotion to HullHouse has

never since failed; another was a sense of identification with publicspirited men throughout the city who

contributed money and time to what they considered a gallant effort against political corruption. I remember a

young professor from the University of Chicago who with his wife came to live at HullHouse, traveling the

long distance every day throughout the autumn and winter that he might qualify as a nineteenthward voter

in the spring campaign. He served as a watcher at the polls and it was but a poor reward for his devotion that

he was literally set upon and beaten up, for in those good old days such things frequently occurred. Many

another case of devotion to our standard so recklessly raised might be cited, but perhaps more valuable than

any of these was the sense of identification we obtained with the rest of Chicago.

So far as a Settlement can discern and bring to local consciousness neighborhood needs which are common

needs, and can give vigorous help to the municipal measures through which such needs shall be met, it fulfills

its most valuable function. To illustrate from our first effort to improve the street paving in the vicinity, we

found that when we had secured the consent of the majority of the property owners on a given street for a

new paving, the alderman checked the entire plan through his kindly service to one man who had appealed to

him to keep the assessments down. The street long remained a shocking mass of wet, dilapidated cedar

blocks, where children were sometimes mired as they floated a surviving block in the water which speedily

filled the holes whence other blocks had been extracted for fuel. And yet when we were able to demonstrate

that the street paving had thus been reduced into cedar pulp by the heavily loaded wagons of an adjacent

factory, that the expense of its repaving should be borne from a general fund and not by the poor property

owners, we found that we could all unite in advocating reform in the method of repaving assessments, and the

alderman himself was obliged to come into such a popular movement. The Nineteenth Ward Improvement

Association which met at HullHouse during two winters, was the first body of citizens able to make a real

impression upon the local paving situation. They secured an expert to watch the paving as it went down to be

sure that their half of the paving money was well expended. In the belief that property values would be thus

enhanced, the common aim brought together the more prosperous people of the vicinity, somewhat as the

I remember that during the second campaign against our alderman, Governor Pingree of Michigan came to

visit at HullHouse. He said that the stronghold of such a man was not the place in which to start municipal

regeneration; that good aldermen should be elected from the promising wards first, until a majority of honest

men in the city council should make politics unprofitable for corrupt men. We replied that it was difficult to

divide Chicago into good and bad wards, but that a new organization called the Municipal Voters' League

was attempting to give to the wellmeaning voter in each ward throughout the city accurate information

concerning the candidates and their relation, past and present, to vital issues. One of our trustees who was

most active in inaugurating this League always said that his nineteenthward experience had convinced him

of the unity of city politics, and that he constantly used our campaign as a challenge to the unaroused citizens

Certainly the need for civic cooperation was obvious in many directions, and in none more strikingly than in

that organized effort which must be carried on unceasingly if young people are to be protected from the

darker and coarser dangers of the city. The cooperation between HullHouse and the Juvenile Protective

Association came about gradually, and it seems now almost inevitably. From our earliest days we saw many

boys constantly arrested, and I had a number of most enlightening experiences in the police station with an

Irish lad whose mother upon her deathbed had begged me "to look after him." We were distressed by the

gangs of very little boys who would sally forth with an enterprising leader in search of old brass and iron,

sometimes breaking into empty houses for the sake of the faucets or lead pipe which they would sell for a

good price to a junk dealer. With the money thus obtained they would buy cigarettes and beer or even candy,

which could be conspicuously consumed in the alleys where they might enjoy the excitement of being seen

and suspected by the "coppers." From the third year of HullHouse, one of the residents held a semiofficial

position in the nearest police station; at least, the sergeant agreed to give her provisional charge of every boy

Mrs. Stevens, who performed this work for several years, became the first probation officer of the Juvenile

Court when it was established in Cook County in 1899. She was the sole probation officer at first, but at the

time of her death, which occurred at HullHouse in 1900, she was the senior officer of a corps of six. Her

entire experience had fitted her to deal wisely with wayward children. She had gone into a New England

cotton mill at the age of thirteen, where she had promptly lost the index finger of her right hand, through

"carelessness" she was told, and no one then seemed to understand that freedom from care was the

prerogative of childhood. Later she became a typesetter and was one of the first women in America to

become a member of the typographical union, retaining her "card" through all the later years of editorial

work. As the Juvenile Court developed, the committee of publicspirited citizens who first supplied only

Mrs. Stevens' salary later maintained a corps of twentytwo such officers; several of these were HullHouse

residents who brought to the house for many years a sad little procession of children struggling against all

sorts of handicaps. When legislation was secured which placed the probation officers upon the payroll of the

county, it was a challenge to the efficiency of the civil service method of appointment to obtain by

examination men and women fitted for this delicate human task. As one of five people asked by the civil

service commission to conduct this first examination for probation officers, I became convinced that we were

but at the beginning of the nonpolitical method of selecting public servants, but even stiff and unbending as

In 1907, the Juvenile Court was housed in a model court building of its own, containing a detention home and

equipped with a competent staff. The committee of citizens largely responsible for this result thereupon

turned their attention to the conditions which the records of the court indicated had led to the alarming

amount of juvenile delinquency and crime. They organized the Juvenile Protective Association, whose

twentytwo officers meet weekly at HullHouse with their executive committee to report what they have

found and to discuss city conditions affecting the lives of children and young people.

The association discovers that there are certain temptations into which children so habitually fall that it is

evident that the average child cannot withstand them. An overwhelming mass of data is accumulated showing

the need of enforcing existing legislation and of securing new legislation, but it also indicates a hundred other

directions in which the young people who so gaily walk our streets, often to their own destruction, need

The effort of the association to treat the youth of the city with consideration and understanding has rallied the

most unexpected forces to its standard. Quite as the basic needs of life are supplied solely by those who make

money out of the business, so the modern city has assumed that the craving for pleasure must be ministered to

only by the sordid. This assumption, however, in a large measure broke down as soon as the Juvenile

Protective Association courageously put it to the test. After persistent prosecutions, but also after many

friendly interviews, the Druggists' Association itself prosecutes those of its members who sell indecent postal

cards; the Saloon Keepers' Protective Association not only declines to protect members who sell liquor to

minors, but now takes drastic action to prevent such sales; the Retail Grocers' Association forbids the selling

of tobacco to minors; the Association of Department Store Managers not only increased the vigilance in their

waiting rooms by supplying more matrons, but as a body they have become regular contributors to the

association; the special watchmen in all the railroad yards agree not to arrest trespassing boys but to report

them to the association; the firms manufacturing moving picture films not only submit their films to a

volunteer inspection committee, but ask for suggestions in regard to new matter; and the FiveCent Theaters

arrange for "stunts" which shall deal with the subject of public health and morals, when the lecturers provided

It is not difficult to arouse the impulse of protection for the young, which would doubtless dictate the daily

acts of many a bartender and poolroom keeper if they could only indulge it without giving their rivals an

advantage. When this difficulty is removed by an evenhanded enforcement of the law, that simple

kindliness which the innocent always evoke goes from one to another like a slowly spreading flame of good

will. Doubtless the most rewarding experience in any such undertaking as that of the Juvenile Protective

Association is the warm and intelligent cooperation coming from unexpected sourcesofficial and

commercial as well as philanthropic. Upon the suggestion of the association, social centers have been opened

in various parts of the city, disused buildings turned into recreation rooms, vacant lots made into gardens,

hiking parties organized for country excursions, bathing beaches established on the lake front, and public

schools opened for social purposes. Through the efforts of publicspirited citizens a medical clinic and a

Psychopathic Institute have become associated with the Juvenile Court of Chicago, in addition to which an

exhaustive study of courtrecords has been completed. To this carefully collected data concerning the

abnormal child, the Juvenile Protective Association hopes in time to add knowledge of the normal child who

It was not without hope that I might be able to forward in the public school system the solution of some of

these problems of delinquency so dependent upon truancy and illadapted education that I became a member

of the Chicago Board of Education in July, 1905. It is impossible to write of the situation as it became

dramatized in half a dozen strong personalities, but the entire experience was so illuminating as to the

difficulties and limitations of democratic government that it would be unfair in a chapter on Civic

Even the briefest statement, however, necessitates a review of the preceding few years. For a decade the

Chicago school teachers, or rather a majority of them who were organized into the Teachers' Federation, had

been engaged in a conflict with the Board of Education both for more adequate salaries and for more

selfdirection in the conduct of the schools. In pursuance of the first object, they had attacked the tax dodger

along the entire line of his defense, from the curbstone to the Supreme Court. They began with an intricate

investigation which uncovered the fact that in 1899, $235,000,000 of value of public utility corporations paid

nothing in taxes. The Teachers' Federation brought a suit which was prosecuted through the Supreme Court

of Illinois and resulted in an order entered against the State Board of Equalization, demanding that it tax the

corporations mentioned in the bill. In spite of the fact that the defendant companies sought federal aid and

obtained an order which restrained the payment of a portion of the tax, each year since 1900, the Chicago

Board of Education has benefited to the extent of more than a quarter of a million dollars. Although this

result had been attained through the unaided efforts of the teachers, to their surprise and indignation their

salaries were not increased. The Teachers' Federation, therefore, brought a suit against the Board of

Education for the advance which had been promised them three years earlier but never paid. The decision of

the lower court was in their favor, but the Board of Education appealed the case, and this was the situation

when the seven new members appointed by Mayor Dunne in 1905 took their seats. The conservative public

suspected that these new members were merely representatives of the Teachers' Federation. This opinion was

founded upon the fact that Judge Dunne had rendered a favorable decision in the teachers' suit and that the

teachers had been very active in the campaign which had resulted in his election as mayor of the city. It

seemed obvious that the teachers had entered into politics for the sake of securing their own representatives

on the Board of Education. These suspicions were, of course, only confirmed when the new board voted to

withdraw the suit of their predecessors from the Appellate Court and to act upon the decision of the lower

court. The teachers, on the other hand, defended their long effort in the courts, the State Board of

Equalization, and the Legislature against the charge of "dragging the schools into politics," and declared that

the exposure of the indifference and cupidity of the politicians was a welldeserved rebuke, and that it was

the politicians who had brought the schools to the verge of financial ruin; they further insisted that the levy

and collection of taxes, tenure of office, and pensions to civil servants in Chicago were all entangled with the

traction situation, which in their minds at least had come to be an example of the struggle between the

democratic and plutocratic administration of city affairs. The new appointees to the School Board represented

no concerted policy of any kind, but were for the most part adherents to the new education. The teachers,

confident that their cause was identical with the principles advocated by such educators as Colonel Parker,

were therefore sure that the plans of the "new education" members would of necessity coincide with the plans

of the Teachers' Federation. In one sense the situation was an epitome of Mayor Dunne's entire

administration, which was founded upon the belief that if those citizens representing social ideals and reform

During my tenure of office I many times talked to the officers of the Teachers' Federation, but I was seldom

able to follow their suggestions and, although I gladly cooperated in their plans for a better pension system

and other matters, only once did I try to influence the policy of the Federation. When the withheld salaries

were finally paid to the representatives of the Federation who had brought suit and were divided among the

members who had suffered both financially and professionally during this long legal struggle, I was most

anxious that the division should voluntarily be extended to all of the teachers who had experienced a loss of

salary although they were not members of the Federation. It seemed to me a striking opportunity to refute the

charge that the Federation was selfseeking and to put the whole long effort in the minds of the public,

exactly where it belonged, as one of devoted public service. But it was doubtless much easier for me to urge

this altruistic policy than it was for those who had borne the heat and burden of the day to act upon it.

The second object of the Teachers' Federation also entailed much stress and storm. At the time of the

financial stringency, and largely as a result of it, the Board had made the first substantial advance in a

teacher's salary dependent upon a socalled promotional examination, half of which was upon academic

subjects entailing a long and severe preparation. The teachers resented this upon two lines of argument: first,

that the scheme was unprofessional in that the teacher was advanced on her capacity as a student rather than

on her professional ability; and, second, that it added an intolerable and unnecessary burden to her already

overfull day. The administration, on the other hand, contended with much justice that there was a constant

danger in a great public school system that teachers lose pliancy and the open mind, and that many of them

had obviously grown mechanical and indifferent. The conservative public approved the promotional

examinations as the symbol of an advancing educational standard, and their sympathy with the superintendent

was increased because they continually resented the affiliation of the Teachers' Federation with the Chicago

Federation of Labor, which had taken place several years before the election of Mayor Dunne on his traction

This much talked of affiliation between the teachers and the tradesunionists had been, at least in the first

instance, but one more tactic in the long struggle against the taxdodging corporations. The Teachers'

Federation had won in their first skirmish against that public indifference which is generated in the

accumulation of wealth and which has for its nucleus successful commercial men. When they found

themselves in need of further legislation to keep the offending corporations under control, they naturally

turned for political influence and votes to the organization representing workingmen. The affiliation had none

of the sinister meaning so often attached to it. The Teachers' Federation never obtained a charter from the

American Federation of Labor, and its main interest always centered in the legislative committee.

And yet this statement of the difference between the majority of the gradeschool teachers and the Chicago

School Board is totally inadequate, for the difficulties were stubborn and lay far back in the long effort of

public school administration in America to free itself from the rule and exploitation of politics. In every city

for many years the politician had secured positions for his friends as teachers and janitors; he had received a

rakeoff in the contract for every new building or coal supply or adoption of schoolbooks. In the long

struggle against this political corruption, the one remedy continually advocated was the transfer of authority

in all educational matters from the Board to the superintendent. The one cure for "pull" and corruption was

the authority of the "expert." The rules and records of the Chicago Board of Education are full of relics of this

long struggle honestly waged by honest men, who unfortunately became content with the ideals of an

"efficient business administration." These businessmen established an able superintendent with a large salary,

with his tenure of office secured by State law so that he would not be disturbed by the wrath of the balked

politician. They instituted impersonal examinations for the teachers both as to entrance into the system and

promotion, and they proceeded "to hold the superintendent responsible" for smoothrunning schools. All this,

however, dangerously approximated the commercialistic ideal of high salaries only for the management with

In this long struggle for a quarter of a century to free the public schools from political interference, in

Chicago at least, the high wall of defense erected around the school system in order "to keep the rascals out"

unfortunately so restricted the teachers inside the system that they had no space in which to move about

freely and the more adventurous of them fairly panted for light and air. Any attempt to lower the wall for the

sake of the teachers within was regarded as giving an opportunity to the politicians without, and they were

often openly accused, with a show of truth, of being in league with each other. Whenever the Dunne members

of the Board attempted to secure more liberty for the teachers, we were warned by tales of former difficulties

with the politicians, and it seemed impossible that the struggle so long the focus of attention should recede

into the dullness of the achieved and allow the energy of the Board to be free for new effort.

The whole situation between the superintendent supported by a majority of the Board and the Teachers'

Federation had become an epitome of the struggle between efficiency and democracy; on one side a

wellintentioned expression of the bureaucracy necessary in a large system but which under pressure had

become unnecessarily selfassertive, and on the other side a fairly militant demand for selfgovernment

made in the name of freedom. Both sides inevitably exaggerated the difficulties of the situation, and both felt

I certainly played a most inglorious part in this unnecessary conflict; I was chairman of the School

Management Committee during one year when a majority of the members seemed to me exasperatingly

conservative, and during another year when they were frustratingly radical, and I was of course highly

unsatisfactory to both. Certainly a plan to retain the undoubted benefit of required study for teachers in such

wise as to lessen its burden, and various schemes devised to shift the emphasis from scholarship to

professional work, were mostly impatiently repudiated by the Teachers' Federation, and when one badly

mutilated plan finally passed the Board, it was most reluctantly administered by the superintendent.

I at least became convinced that partisans would never tolerate the use of steppingstones. They are much too

impatient to look on while their beloved scheme is unstably balanced, and they would rather see it tumble

into the stream at once than to have it brought to dry land in any such halfhearted fashion. Before my

School Board experience, I thought that life had taught me at least one hardearned lesson, that existing

arrangements and the hoped for improvements must be mediated and reconciled to each other, that the new

must be dovetailed into the old as it were, if it were to endure; but on the School Board I discerned that all

such efforts were looked upon as compromising and unworthy, by both partisans. In the general disorder and

public excitement resulting from the illegal dismissal of a majority of the "Dunne" board and their

reinstatement by a court decision, I found myself belonging to neither party. During the months following the

upheaval and the loss of my most vigorous colleagues, under the regime of men representing the leading

Commercial Club of the city who honestly believed that they were rescuing the schools from a condition of

chaos, I saw one beloved measure after another withdrawn. Although the new president scrupulously gave me

the floor in the defense of each, it was impossible to consider them upon their merits in the lurid light which

at the moment enveloped all the plans of the "uplifters." Thus the building of smaller schoolrooms, such as in

New York mechanically avoid overcrowding, the extension of the truant rooms so successfully inaugurated,

the multiplication of school playgrounds, and many another cherished plan was thrown out or at least

The final discrediting of Mayor Dunne's appointees to the School Board affords a very interesting study in

social psychology; the newspapers had so constantly reflected and intensified the ideals of a business Board,

and had so persistently ridiculed various administration plans for the municipal ownership of street railways,

that from the beginning any attempt the new Board made to discuss educational matters only excited their

derision and contempt. Some of these discussions were lengthy and disorderly and deserved the discipline of

ridicule, but others which were well conducted and in which educational problems were seriously set forth by

men of authority were ridiculed quite as sharply. I recall the surprise and indignation of a University

professor who had consented to speak at a meeting arranged in the Board rooms, when next morning his

nonpartisan and careful disquisition had been twisted into the most arrant uplift nonsense and so connected

with a fake newspaper report of a trial marriage address delivered, not by himself, but by a colleague, that a

leading clergyman of the city, having read the newspaper account, felt impelled to preach a sermon, calling

upon all decent people to rally against the doctrines which were being taught to the children by an immoral

School Board. As the bewildered professor had lectured in response to my invitation, I endeavored to find the

animus of the complication, but neither from editor in chief nor from the reporter could I discover anything

more sinister than that the public expected a good story out of these School Board "talk fests," and that any

man who even momentarily allied himself with a radical administration must expect to be ridiculed by those

papers which considered the traction policy of the administration both foolish and dangerous.

As I myself was treated with uniform courtesy by the leading papers, I may perhaps here record my

discouragement over this complicated difficulty of open discussion, for democratic government is founded

upon the assumption that differing policies shall be freely discussed and that each party shall have an

opportunity for at least a partisan presentation of its contentions. This attitude of the newspapers was

doubtless intensified because the Dunne School Board had instituted a lawsuit challenging the validity of the

lease for the school ground occupied by a newspaper building. This suit has since been decided in favor of

the newspaper, and it may be that in their resentment they felt justified in doing everything possible to

minimize the prosecuting School Board. I am, however, inclined to think that the newspapers but reflected an

opinion honestly held by many people, and that their constant and partisan presentation of this opinion clearly

demonstrates one of the greatest difficulties of governmental administration in a city grown too large for

It is difficult to close this chapter without a reference to the efforts made in Chicago to secure the municipal

franchise for women. During two long periods of agitation for a new city charter, a representative body of

women appealed to the public, to the charter convention, and to the Illinois legislature for this very

reasonable provision. During the campaign when I acted as chairman of the federation of a hundred women's

organizations, nothing impressed me so forcibly as the fact that the response came from bodies of women

representing the most varied traditions. We were joined by a church society of hundreds of Lutheran women,

because Scandinavian women had exercised the municipal franchise since the seventeenth century and had

found American cities strangely conservative; by organizations of working women who had keenly felt the

need of the municipal franchise in order to secure for their workshops the most rudimentary sanitation and the

consideration which the vote alone obtains for workingmen; by federations of mothers' meetings, who were

interested in clean milk and the extension of kindergartens; by propertyowning women, who had been

powerless to protest against unjust taxation; by organizations of professional women, of university students,

and of collegiate alumnae; and by women's clubs interested in municipal reforms. There was a complete

absence of the traditional women's rights clamor, but much impressive testimony from busy and useful

women that they had reached the place where they needed the franchise in order to carry on their own affairs.

A striking witness as to the need of the ballot, even for the women who are restricted to the most primitive

and traditional activities, occurred when some Russian women waited upon me to ask whether under the new

charter they could vote for covered markets and so get rid of the shocking Chicago grime upon all their food;

and when some neighboring Italian women sent me word that they would certainly vote for public

washhouses if they ever had the chance to vote at all. It was all so human, so spontaneous, and so direct that it

really seemed as if the time must be ripe for political expression of that public concern on the part of women

which had so long been forced to seek indirection. None of these busy women wished to take the place of

men nor to influence them in the direction of men's affairs, but they did seek an opportunity to cooperate

directly in civic life through the use of the ballot in regard to their own affairs.

A Municipal Museum which was established in the Chicago public library building several years ago, largely

through the activity of a group of women who had served as jurors in the departments of social economy, of

education, and of sanitation in the World's Fair at St. Louis, showed nothing more clearly than that it is

impossible to divide any of these departments from the political life of the modern city which is constantly

From the early days at HullHouse, social clubs composed of English speaking American born young people

grew apace. So eager were they for social life that no mistakes in management could drive them away. I

remember one enthusiastic leader who read aloud to a club a translation of "Antigone," which she had

selected because she believed that the great themes of the Greek poets were best suited to young people. She

came into the club room one evening in time to hear the president call the restive members to order with the

statement, "You might just as well keep quiet for she is bound to finish it, and the quicker she gets to reading,

the longer time we'll have for dancing." And yet the same club leader had the pleasure of lending four copies

of the drama to four of the members, and one young man almost literally committed the entire play to

On the whole we were much impressed by the great desire for selfimprovement, for study and debate,

exhibited by many of the young men. This very tendency, in fact, brought one of the most promising of our

earlier clubs to an untimely end. The young men in the club, twenty in number, had grown much irritated by

the frivolity of the girls during their long debates, and had finally proposed that three of the most "frivolous"

be expelled. Pending a final vote, the three culprits appealed to certain of their friends who were members of

the HullHouse Men's Club, between whom and the debating young men the incident became the cause of a

quarrel so bitter that at length it led to a shooting. Fortunately the shot missed fire, or it may have been true

that it was "only intended for a scare," but at any rate, we were all thoroughly frightened by this manifestation

of the hot blood which the defense of woman has so often evoked. After many efforts to bring about a

reconciliation, the debating club of twenty young men and the seventeen young women, who either were or

pretended to be sober minded, rented a hall a mile west of HullHouse severing their connection with us

because their ambitious and rightminded efforts had been unappreciated, basing this on the ground that we

had not urged the expulsion of the socalled "tough" members of the Men's Club, who had been involved in

the difficulty. The seceding club invited me to the first meeting in their new quarters that I might present to

them my version of the situation and set forth the incident from the standpoint of HullHouse. The discussion

I had with the young people that evening has always remained with me as one of the moments of illumination

which life in a Settlement so often affords. In response to my position that a desire to avoid all that was

"tough" meant to walk only in the paths of smug selfseeking and personal improvement leading straight into

the pit of selfrighteousness and petty achievement and was exactly what the Settlement did not stand for,

they contended with much justice that ambitious young people were obliged for their own reputation, if not

for their own morals, to avoid all connection with that which bordered on the tough, and that it was quite

another matter for the HullHouse residents who could afford a more generous judgment. It was in vain I

urged that life teaches us nothing more inevitably than that right and wrong are most confusingly

confounded; that the blackest wrong may be within our own motives, and that at the best, right will not

dazzle us by its radiant shining and can only be found by exerting patience and discrimination. They still

maintained their wholesome bourgeois position, which I am now quite ready to admit was most reasonable.

Of course there were many disappointments connected with these clubs when the rewards of political and

commercial life easily drew the members away from the principles advocated in club meetings. One of the

young men who had been a shining light in the advocacy of municipal reform deserted in the middle of a

reform campaign because he had been offered a lucrative office in the city hall; another even after a course of

lectures on business morality, "worked" the club itself to secure orders for custommade clothing from

samples of cloth he displayed, although the orders were filled by readymade suits slightly refitted and

delivered at double their original price. But nevertheless, there was much to cheer us as we gradually became

acquainted with the daily living of the vigorous young men and women who filled to overflowing all the

We have been much impressed during our twenty years, by the ready adaptation of city young people to the

prosperity arising from their own increased wages or from the commercial success of their families. This

quick adaptability is the great gift of the city child, his one reward for the hurried changing life which he has

always led. The working girl has a distinct advantage in the task of transforming her whole family into the

ways and connections of the prosperous when she works down town and becomes conversant with the

manners and conditions of a cosmopolitan community. Therefore having lived in a Settlement twenty years, I

see scores of young people who have successfully established themselves in life, and in my travels in the city

and outside, I am constantly cheered by greetings from the rising young lawyer, the scholarly rabbi, the

successful teacher, the prosperous young matron buying clothes for blooming children. "Don't you remember

me? I used to belong to a HullHouse club." I once asked one of these young people, a man who held a good

position on a Chicago daily, what special thing HullHouse had meant to him, and he promptly replied, "It

was the first house I had ever been in where books and magazines just lay around as if there were plenty of

them in the world. Don't you remember how much I used to read at that little round table at the back of the

library? To have people regard reading as a reasonable occupation changed the whole aspect of life to me and

Among the young men of the social clubs a large proportion of the Jewish ones at least obtain the advantages

of a higher education. The parents make every sacrifice to help them through the high school after which the

young men attend universities and professional schools, largely through their own efforts. From time to time

they come back to us with their honors thick upon them; I remember one who returned with the prize in

oratory from a contest between several western State universities, proudly testifying that he had obtained his

confidence in our Henry Clay Club; another came back with a degree from Harvard University saying that he

had made up his mind to go there the summer I read Royce's "Aspects of Modern Philosophy" with a group

of young men who had challenged my scathing remark that Herbert Spencer was not the only man who had

ventured a solution of the riddles of the universe. Occasionally one of these learned young folk does not like

to be reminded he once lived in our vicinity, but that happens rarely, and for the most part they are loyal to us

in much the same spirit as they are to their own families and traditions. Sometimes they go further and tell us

that the standards of tastes and code of manners which HullHouse has enabled them to form, have made a

very great difference in their perceptions and estimates of the larger world as well as in their own reception

there. Five out of one club of twentyfive young men who had held together for eleven years, entered the

University of Chicago but although the rest of the Club called them the "intellectuals," the old friendships

In addition to these rising young people given to debate and dramatics, and to the members of the public

school alumni associations which meet in our rooms, there are hundreds of others who for years have come to

HullHouse frankly in search of that pleasure and recreation which all young things crave and which those

who have spent long hours in a factory or shop demand as a right. For these young people all sorts of pleasure

clubs have been cherished, and large dancing classes have been organized. One supreme gayety has come to

be an annual event of such importance that it is talked of from year to year. For six weeks before St. Patrick's

day, a small group of residents put their best powers of invention and construction into preparation for a

cotillion which is like a pageant in its gayety and vigor. The parents sit in the gallery, and the mothers

appreciate more than anyone else perhaps, the value of this ball to which an invitation is so highly prized;

although their standards of manners may differ widely from the conventional, they know full well when the

As an illustration of this difference in standard, I may instance an early HullHouse picnic arranged by a club

of young people, who found at the last moment that the club director could not go and accepted the offer of

the mother of one of the club members to take charge of them. When they trooped back in the evening, tired

and happy, they displayed a photograph of the group wherein each man's arm was carefully placed about a

girl; no feminine waist lacked an arm save that of the proud chaperon, who sat in the middle smiling upon all.

Seeing that the photograph somewhat surprised us, the chaperon stoutly explained, "This may look queer to

you, but there wasn't one thing about that picnic that wasn't nice," and her statement was a perfectly truthful

Although more conventional customs are carefully enforced at our many parties and festivities, and while the

dancing classes are as highly prized for the opportunity they afford for enforcing standards as for their

ostensible aim, the residents at HullHouse, in their efforts to provide opportunities for clean recreation,

receive the most valued help from the experienced wisdom of the older women of the neighborhood. Bowen

Hall is constantly used for dancing parties with soft drinks established in its foyer. The parties given by the

HullHouse clubs are by invitation and the young people themselves carefully maintain their standard of

entrance so that the most cautious mother may feel safe when her daughter goes to one of our parties. No club

festivity is permitted without the presence of a director; no young man under the influence of liquor is

allowed; certain types of dancing often innocently started are strictly prohibited; and above all, early closing

is insisted upon. This standardizing of pleasure has always seemed an obligation to the residents of

HullHouse, but we are, I hope, saved from that priggishness which young people so heartily resent, by the

Mardi Gras dance and other festivities which the residents themselves arrange and successfully carry out.

In spite of our belief that the standards of a ball may be almost as valuable to those without as to those within,

the residents are constantly concerned for those many young people in the neighborhood who are too

hedonistic to submit to the discipline of a dancing class or even to the claim of a pleasure club, but who go

about in freebooter fashion to find pleasure wherever it may be cheaply on sale.

Such young people, well meaning but impatient of control, become the easy victims of the worst type of

public dance halls, and of even darker places, whose purposes are hidden under music and dancing. We were

thoroughly frightened when we learned that during the year which ended last December, more than

twentyfive thousand young people under the age of twentyfive passed through the Juvenile and Municipal

Courts of Chicagoapproximately one out of every eighty of the entire population, or one out of every

fiftytwo of those under twentyfive years of age. One's heart aches for these young people caught by the

outside glitter of city gayety, who make such a feverish attempt to snatch it for themselves. The young people

in our clubs are comparatively safe, but many instances come to the knowledge of HullHouse residents

which make us long for the time when the city, through more small parks, municipal gymnasiums, and

schoolrooms open for recreation, can guard from disaster these young people who walk so carelessly on the

The heedless girls believe that if they lived in big houses and possessed pianos and jewelry, the coveted

social life would come to them. I know a Bohemian girl who surreptitiously saved her overtime wages until

she had enough money to hire for a week a room with a piano in it where young men might come to call, as

they could not do in her crowded untidy home. Of course she had no way of knowing the sort of young men

Another girl of American parentage who had come to Chicago to seek her fortune, found at the end of a year

that sorting shipping receipts in a dark corner of a warehouse not only failed to accumulate riches but did not

even bring the "attentions" which her quiet country home afforded. By dint of long sacrifice she had saved

fifteen dollars; with five she bought an imitation sapphire necklace, and the balance she changed into a ten

dollar bill. The evening her pathetic little snare was set, she walked home with one of the clerks in the

establishment, told him that she had come into a fortune, and was obliged to wear the heirloom necklace to

insure its safety, permitted him to see that she carried ten dollars in her glove for carfare, and conducted him

to a handsome Prairie Avenue residence. There she gayly bade him goodby and ran up the steps shutting

herself in the vestibule from which she did not emerge until the dazzled and bewildered young man had

Then there is the everrecurring difficulty about dress; the insistence of the young to be gayly bedecked to

the utter consternation of the hardworking parents who are paying for a house and lot. The Polish girl who

stole five dollars from her employer's till with which to buy a white dress for a church picnic was turned

away from home by her indignant father who replaced the money to save the family honor, but would harbor

no "thief" in a household of growing children who, in spite of the sister's revolt, continued to be dressed in

dark heavy clothes through all the hot summer. There are a multitude of working girls who for hours carry

hair ribbons and jewelry in their pockets or stockings, for they can wear them only during the journey to and

from work. Sometimes this desire to taste pleasure, to escape into a world of congenial companionship takes

more elaborate forms and often ends disastrously. I recall a charming young girl, the oldest daughter of a

respectable German family, whom I first saw one spring afternoon issuing from a tall factory. She wore a

blue print gown which so deepened the blue of her eyes that Wordsworth's line fairly sung itself:

I was grimly reminded of that moment a year later when I heard the tale of this seventeenyearold girl, who

had worked steadily in the same factory for four years before she resolved "to see life." In order not to arouse

her parents' suspicions, she borrowed thirty dollars from one of those loan sharks who require no security

from a pretty girl, so that she might start from home every morning as if to go to work. For three weeks she

spent the first part of each dearly bought day in a department store where she lunched and unfortunately made

some dubious acquaintances; in the afternoon she established herself in a theater and sat contentedly hour

after hour watching the endless vaudeville until the usual time for returning home. At the end of each week

she gave her parents her usual wage, but when her thirty dollars was exhausted it seemed unendurable that

she should return to the monotony of the factory. In the light of her newly acquired experience she had

That more such girls do not come to grief is due to those mothers who understand the insatiable demand for a

good time, and if all of the mothers did understand, those pathetic statistics which show that four fifths of all

prostitutes are under twenty years of age would be marvelously changed. We are told that "the will to live" is

aroused in each baby by his mother's irresistible desire to play with him, the physiological value of joy that a

child is born, and that the high death rate in institutions is increased by "the discontented babies" whom no

one persuades into living. Something of the same sort is necessary in that second birth at adolescence. The

young people need affection and understanding each one for himself, if they are to be induced to live in an

inheritance of decorum and safety and to understand the foundations upon which this orderly world rests. No

one comprehends their needs so sympathetically as those mothers who iron the flimsy starched finery of their

grownup daughters late into the night, and who pay for a red velvet parlor set on the installment plan,

although the younger children may sadly need new shoes. These mothers apparently understand the sharp

demand for social pleasure and do their best to respond to it, although at the same time they constantly

minister to all the physical needs of an exigent family of little children. We often come to a realization of the

truth of Walt Whitman's statement, that one of the surest sources of wisdom is the mother of a large family.

It is but natural, perhaps, that the members of the HullHouse Woman's Club whose prosperity has given

them some leisure and a chance to remove their own families to neighborhoods less full of temptations,

should have offered their assistance in our attempt to provide recreation for these restless young people. In

many instances their experience in the club itself has enabled them to perceive these needs. One day a

Juvenile Court officer told me that a woman's club member, who has a large family of her own and one boy

sufficiently difficult, had undertaken to care for a ward of the Juvenile Court who lived only a block from her

house, and that she had kept him in the path of rectitude for six months. In reply to my congratulations upon

this successful bit of reform to the club woman herself, she said that she was quite ashamed that she had not

undertaken the task earlier for she had for years known the boy's mother who scrubbed a downtown office

building, leaving home every evening at five and returning at eleven during the very time the boy could most

easily find opportunities for wrongdoing. She said that her obligation toward this boy had not occurred to her

until one day when the club members were making pillowcases for the Detention Home of the Juvenile

Court, it suddenly seemed perfectly obvious that her share in the salvation of wayward children was to care

for this particular boy and she had asked the Juvenile Court officer to commit him to her. She invited the boy

to her house to supper every day that she might know just where he was at the crucial moment of twilight,

and she adroitly managed to keep him under her own roof for the evening if she did not approve of the plans

he had made. She concluded with the remark that it was queer that the sight of the boy himself hadn't

appealed to her, but that the suggestion had come to her in such a roundabout way.

She was, of course, reflecting upon a common trait in human nature,that we much more easily see the duty

at hand when we see it in relation to the social duty of which it is a part. When she knew that an effort was

being made throughout all the large cities in the United States to reclaim the wayward boy, to provide him

with reasonable amusement, to give him his chance for growth and development, and when she became ready

to take her share in that movement, she suddenly saw the concrete case which she had not recognized before.

We are slowly learning that social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it

does upon a sense of duty, and of this one could cite many illustrations. I was at one time chairman of the

Child Labor Committee in the General Federation of Woman's Clubs, which sent out a schedule asking each

club in the United States to report as nearly as possible all the working children under fourteen living in its

vicinity. A Florida club filled out the schedule with an astonishing number of Cuban children who were at

work in sugar mills, and the club members registered a complaint that our committee had sent the schedule

too late, for if they had realized the conditions earlier, they might have presented a bill to the legislature

which had now adjourned. Of course the children had been working in the sugar mills for years, and had

probably gone back and forth under the very eyes of the club women, but the women had never seen them,

much less felt any obligation to protect them, until they joined a club, and the club joined a Federation, and

the Federation appointed a Child Labor Committee who sent them a schedule. With their quickened

perceptions they then saw the rescue of these familiar children in the light of a social obligation. Through

some such experiences the members of the HullHouse Woman's Club have obtained the power of seeing the

Very early in its history the club formed what was called "A Social Extension Committee." Once a month this

committee gives parties to people in the neighborhood who for any reason seem forlorn and without much

social pleasure. One evening they invited only Italian women, thereby crossing a distinct social "gulf," for

there certainly exists as great a sense of social difference between the prosperous IrishAmerican women and

the SouthItalian peasants as between any two sets of people in the city of Chicago. The Italian women, who

were almost eastern in their habits, all stayed at home and sent their husbands, and the social extension

committee entered the drawing room to find it occupied by rows of Italian workingmen, who seemed to

prefer to sit in chairs along the wall. They were quite ready to be "socially extended," but plainly puzzled as

to what it was all about. The evening finally developed into a very successful party, not so much because the

Untiring pairs of them danced the tarantella; they sang Neapolitan songs; one of them performed some of

those wonderful sleightofhand tricks so often seen on the streets of Naples; they explained the coral finger

of St. Januarius which they wore; they politely ate the strange American refreshments; and when the evening

was over, one of the committee said to me, "Do you know I am ashamed of the way I have always talked

about 'dagos,' they are quite like other people, only one must take a little more pains with them. I have been

nagging my husband to move off M Street because they are moving in, but I am going to try staying awhile

and see if I can make a real acquaintance with some of them." To my mind at that moment the speaker had

passed from the region of the uncultivated person into the possibilities of the cultivated person. The former is

bounded by a narrow outlook on life, unable to overcome differences of dress and habit, and his interests are

slowly contracting within a circumscribed area; while the latter constantly tends to be more a citizen of the

world because of his growing understanding of all kinds of people with their varying experiences. We send

our young people to Europe that they may lose their provincialism and be able to judge their fellows by a

more universal test, as we send them to college that they may attain the cultural background and a larger

outlook; all of these it is possible to acquire in other ways, as this member of the woman's club had

This social extension committee under the leadership of an expresident of the Club, a HullHouse resident

with a wide acquaintance, also discover many of those lonely people of which every city contains so large a

number. We are only slowly apprehending the very real danger to the individual who fails to establish some

sort of genuine relation with the people who surround him. We are all more or less familiar with the results of

isolation in rural districts; the Bronte sisters have portrayed the hideous immorality and savagery of the

remote dwellers on the bleak moorlands of northern England; Miss Wilkins has written of the overdeveloped

will of the solitary New Englander; but tales still wait to be told of the isolated city dweller. In addition to the

lonely young man recently come to town, and the country family who have not yet made their connections,

are many other people who, because of temperament or from an estimate of themselves which will not permit

them to make friends with the "people around here," or who, because they are victims to a combination of

circumstances, lead a life as lonely and untouched by the city about them as if they were in remote country

districts. The very fact that it requires an effort to preserve isolation from the tenementhouse life which

flows all about them, makes the character stiffer and harsher than mere country solitude could do.

Many instances of this come into my mind; the faded, ladylike hairdresser, who came and went to her work

for twenty years, carefully concealing her dwelling place from the "other people in the shop," moving

whenever they seemed too curious about it, and priding herself that no neighbor had ever "stepped inside her

door," and yet when discovered through an asthma which forced her to crave friendly offices, she was most

responsive and even gay in a social atmosphere. Another woman made a long effort to conceal the poverty

resulting from her husband's inveterate gambling and to secure for her children the educational advantages to

which her family had always been accustomed. Her five children, who are now university graduates, do not

realize how hard and solitary was her early married life when we first knew her, and she was beginning to

regret the isolation in which her children were being reared, for she saw that their lack of early

companionship would always cripple their power to make friends. She was glad to avail herself of the social

The leader of the social extension committee has also been able, through her connection with the vacant lot

garden movement in Chicago, to maintain a most flourishing "friendly club" largely composed of people who

cultivate these garden plots. During the club evening at least, they regain something of the ease of the man

who is being estimated by the bushels per acre of potatoes he has raised, and not by that flimsy city judgment

so often based upon store clothes. Their jollity and enthusiasm are unbounded, expressing itself in clog

dances and rousing old songs often in sharp contrast to the overworked, worn aspects of the members.

Of course there are surprising possibilities discovered through other clubs, in one of Greek women or in the

"circolo Italiano," for a social club often affords a sheltered space in which the gentler social usages may be

exercised, as the more vigorous clubs afford a point of departure into larger social concerns.

The experiences of the HullHouse Woman's Club constantly react upon the family life of the members.

Their husbands come with them to the annual midwinter reception, to club concerts and entertainments; the

little children come to the May party, with its dancing and games; the older children, to the day in June when

prizes are given to those sons and daughters of the members who present a good school record as graduates

It seemed, therefore, but a fit recognition of their efforts when the president of the club erected a building

planned especially for their needs, with their own library and a hall large enough for their various social

undertakings, although of course Bowen Hall is constantly put to many other uses.

It was under the leadership of this same able president that the club achieved its wider purposes and took its

place with the other forces for city betterment. The club had begun, as nearly all women's clubs do, upon the

basis of selfimprovement, although the foundations for this later development had been laid by one of their

earliest presidents, who was the first probation officer of the Juvenile Court, and who had so shared her

experiences with the club that each member felt the truth as well as the pathos of the lines inscribed on her

Each woman had discovered opportunities in her own experience for this same tender understanding, and

under its succeeding president, Mrs. Pelham, in its determination to be of use to the needy and distressed, the

club developed many philanthropic undertakings from the humble beginnings of a linen chest kept constantly

filled with clothing for the sick and poor. It required, however, an adequate knowledge of adverse city

conditions so productive of juvenile delinquency and a sympathy which could enkindle itself in many others

of divers faiths and training, to arouse the club to its finest public spirit. This was done by a later president,

Mrs. Bowen, who, as head of the Juvenile Protective Association, had learned that the moralized energy of a

group is best fitted to cope with the complicated problems of a city; but it required ability of an unusual order

to evoke a sense of social obligation from the very knowledge of adverse city conditions which the club

members possessed, and to connect it with the many civic and philanthropic organizations of the city in such

wise as to make it socially useful. This financial and representative connection with outside organizations, is

valuable to the club only as it expresses its sympathy and kindliness at the same time in concrete form. A

group of members who lunch with Mrs. Bowen each week at HullHouse discuss, not only topics of public

interest, sometimes with experts whom they have long known through their mutual undertakings, but also

Thus the value of social clubs broadens out in one's mind to an instrument of companionship through which

many may be led from a sense of isolation to one of civic responsibility, even as another type of club

provides recreational facilities for those who have had only meaningless excitements, or, as a third type,

The entire organization of the social life at HullHouse, while it has been fostered and directed by residents

and others, has been largely pushed and vitalized from within by the club members themselves. Sir Walter

Besant once told me that HullHouse stood in his mind more nearly for the ideal of the "Palace of Delight"

than did the "London People's Palace" because we had depended upon the social resources of the people

using it. He begged me not to allow HullHouse to become too educational. He believed it much easier to

develop a polytechnic institute than a large recreational center, but he doubted whether the former was as

The social clubs form a basis of acquaintanceship for many people living in other parts of the city. Through

friendly relations with individuals, which is perhaps the sanest method of approach, they are thus brought into

contact, many of them for the first time, with the industrial and social problems challenging the moral

resources of our contemporary life. During our twenty years hundreds of these nonresidents have directed

clubs and classes, and have increased the number of Chicago citizens who are conversant with adverse social

conditions and conscious that only by the unceasing devotion of each, according to his strength, shall the

compulsions and hardships, the stupidities and cruelties of life be overcome. The number of people thus

informed is constantly increasing in all our American cities, and they may in time remove the reproach of

social neglect and indifference which has so long rested upon the citizens of the new world. I recall the

experience of an Englishman who, not only because he was a member of the Queen's Cabinet and bore a title,

but also because he was an able statesman, was entertained with great enthusiasm by the leading citizens of

Chicago. At a large dinner party he asked the lady sitting next to him what our tenementhouse legislation

was in regard to the cubic feet of air required for each occupant of a tenement bedroom; upon her disclaiming

any knowledge of the subject, the inquiry was put to all the diners at the long table, all of whom showed

surprise that they should be expected to possess this information. In telling me the incident afterward, the

English guest said that such indifference could not have been found among the leading citizens of London,

whose public spirit had been aroused to provide such housing conditions as should protect tenement dwellers

at least from wanton loss of vitality and lowered industrial efficiency. When I met the same Englishman in

London five years afterward, he immediately asked me whether Chicago citizens were still so indifferent to

the conditions of the poor that they took no interest in their proper housing. I was quick with that defense

which an American is obliged to use so often in Europe, that our very democracy so long presupposed that

each citizen could care for himself that we are slow to develop a sense of social obligation. He smiled at the

familiar phrases and was still inclined to attribute our indifference to sheer ignorance of social conditions.

The entire social development of HullHouse is so unlike what I predicted twenty years ago, that I venture to

The first building erected for HullHouse contained an art gallery well lighted for day and evening use, and

our first exhibit of loaned pictures was opened in June, 1891, by Mr. And Mrs. Barnett of London. It is

always pleasant to associate their hearty sympathy with that first exhibit, and thus to connect it with their

pioneer efforts at Toynbee Hall to secure for working people the opportunity to know the best art, and with

their establishment of the first permanent art gallery in an industrial quarter.

We took pride in the fact that our first exhibit contained some of the best pictures Chicago afforded, and we

conscientiously insured them against fire and carefully guarded them by night and day.

We had five of these exhibits during two years, after the gallery was completed: two of oil paintings, one of

old engravings and etchings, one of water colors, and one of pictures especially selected for use in the public

schools. These exhibits were surprisingly well attended and thousands of votes were cast for the most popular

pictures. Their value to the neighborhood of course had to be determined by each one of us according to the

value he attached to beauty and the escape it offers from dreary reality into the realm of the imagination. Miss

Starr always insisted that the arts should receive adequate recognition at HullHouse and urged that one must

always remember "the hungry individual soul which without art will have passed unsolaced and unfed,

The exhibits afforded pathetic evidence that the older immigrants do not expect the solace of art in this

country; an Italian expressed great surprise when he found that we, although Americans, still liked pictures,

and said quite naively that he didn't know that Americans cared for anything but dollarsthat looking at

The extreme isolation of the Italian colony was demonstrated by the fact that he did not know that there was a

public art gallery in the city nor any houses in which pictures were regarded as treasures.

A Greek was much surprised to see a photograph of the Acropolis at HullHouse because he had lived in

Chicago for thirteen years and had never before met any Americans who knew about this foremost glory of

the world. Before he left Greece he had imagined that Americans would be most eager to see pictures of

Athens, and as he was a graduate of a school of technology, he had prepared a book of colored drawings and

had made a collection of photographs which he was sure Americans would enjoy. But although from his fruit

stand near one of the large railroad stations he had conversed with many Americans and had often tried to

lead the conversation back to ancient Greece, no one had responded, and he had at last concluded that "the

The loan exhibits were continued until the Chicago Art Institute was opened free to the public on Sunday

afternoons and parties were arranged at HullHouse and conducted there by a guide. In time even these

parties were discontinued as the galleries became better known in all parts of the city and the Art Institute

From the first a studio was maintained at HullHouse which has developed through the changing years under

the direction of Miss Benedict, one of the residents who is a member of the faculty in the Art Institute.

Buildings on the HullHouse quadrangle furnish studios for artists who find something of the same spirit in

the contiguous Italian colony that the French artist is traditionally supposed to discover in his beloved Latin

Quarter. These artists uncover something of the picturesque in the foreign colonies, which they have

reproduced in painting, etching, and lithography. They find their classes filled not only by young people

possessing facility and sometimes talent, but also by older people to whom the studio affords the one

opportunity of escape from dreariness; a widow with four children who supplemented a very inadequate

income by teaching the piano, for six years never missed her weekly painting lesson because it was "her one

pleasure"; another woman, whose youth and strength had gone into the care of an invalid father, poured into

her afternoon in the studio once a week, all of the longing for selfexpression which she habitually

Perhaps the most satisfactory results of the studio have been obtained through the classes of young men who

are engaged in the commercial arts, and who are glad to have an opportunity to work out their own ideas.

This is true of young engravers and lithographers; of the men who have to do with posters and illustrations in

various ways. The little pile of stones and the lithographer's handpress in a corner of the studio have been

used in many an experiment, as has a set of beautiful type loaned to HullHouse by a bibliophile.

The work of the studio almost imperceptibly merged into the crafts and well within the first decade a shop

was opened at HullHouse under the direction of several residents who were also members of the Chicago

Arts and Crafts Society. This shop is not merely a school where people are taught and then sent forth to use

their teaching in art according to their individual initiative and opportunity, but where those who have already

been carefully trained, may express the best they can in wood or metal. The Settlement soon discovers how

difficult it is to put a fringe of art on the end of a day spent in a factory. We constantly see young people

doing overhurried work. Wrapping bars of soap in pieces of paper might at least give the pleasure of accuracy

and repetition if it could be done at a normal pace, but when paid for by the piece, speed becomes the sole

requirement and the last suggestion of human interest is taken away. In contrast to this the HullHouse shop

affords many examples of the restorative power in the exercise of a genuine craft; a young Russian who, like

too many of his countrymen, had made a desperate effort to fit himself for a learned profession, and who had

almost finished his course in a night law school, used to watch constantly the work being done in the metal

shop at HullHouse. One evening in a moment of sudden resolve, he took off his coat, sat down at one of the

benches, and began to work, obviously as a very clever silversmith. He had long concealed his craft because

he thought it would hurt his efforts as a lawyer and because he imagined an office more honorable and "more

American" than a shop. As he worked on during his two leisure evenings each week, his entire bearing and

conversation registered the relief of one who abandons the effort he is not fitted for and becomes a man on

Miss Starr at length found herself quite impatient with her role of lecturer on the arts, while all the handicraft

about her was untouched by beauty and did not even reflect the interest of the workman. She took a training

in bookbinding in London under Mr. CobdenSanderson and established her bindery at HullHouse in which

design and workmanship, beauty and thoroughness are taught to a small number of apprentices.

From the very first winter, concerts which are still continued were given every Sunday afternoon in the

HullHouse drawingroom and later, as the audiences increased, in the larger halls. For these we are

indebted to musicians from every part of the city. Mr. William Tomlins early trained large choruses of adults

as his assistants did of children, and the response to all of these showed that while the number of people in

our vicinity caring for the best music was not large, they constituted a steady and appreciative group. It was

in connection with these first choruses that a publicspirited citizen of Chicago offered a prize for the best

labor song, competition to be open to the entire country. The responses to the offer literally filled three large

barrels and speaking at least for myself as one of the bewildered judges, we were more disheartened by their

quality than even by their overwhelming bulk. Apparently the workers of America are not yet ready to sing,

although I recall a creditable chorus trained at HullHouse for a large meeting in sympathy with the

seemed to relieve the tension of the moment. Miss Eleanor Smith, the head of the HullHouse Music School,

who had put the words to music, performed the same office for the "Sweatshop" of the Yiddish poet, the

translation of which presents so graphically the bewilderment and tedium of the New York shop that it might

It may be that this plaint explains the lack of labor songs in this period of industrial maladjustment when the

worker is overmastered by his very tools. In addition to sharing with our neighborhood the best music we

could procure, we have conscientiously provided careful musical instruction that at least a few young people

might understand those old usages of art; that they might master its trade secrets, for after all it is only

through a careful technique that artistic ability can express itself and be preserved.

From the beginning we had classes in music, and the HullHouse Music School, which is housed in quarters

of its own in our quieter court, was opened in 1893. The school is designed to give a thorough musical

instruction to a limited number of children. From the first lessons they are taught to compose and to reduce to

order the musical suggestions which may come to them, and in this wise the school has sometimes been able

to recover the songs of the immigrants through their children. Some of these folk songs have never been

committed to paper, but have survived through the centuries because of a touch of undying poetry which the

world has always cherished; as in the song of a Russian who is digging a post hole and finds his task dull and

difficult until he strikes a stratum of red sand, which in addition to making digging easy, reminds him of the

red hair of his sweetheart, and all goes merrily as the song lifts into a joyous melody. I recall again the almost

hilarious enjoyment of the adult audience to whom it was sung by the children who had revived it, as well as

the more sober appreciation of the hymns taken from the lips of the cantor, whose father before him had

The recitals and concerts given by the school are attended by large and appreciative audiences. On the

Sunday before Christmas the program of Christmas songs draws together people of the most diverging faiths.

In the deep tones of the memorial organ erected at HullHouse, we realize that music is perhaps the most

potent agent for making the universal appeal and inducing men to forget their differences.

Some of the pupils in the music school have developed during the years into trained musicians and are

supporting themselves in their chosen profession. On the other hand, we constantly see the most promising

musical ability extinguished when the young people enter industries which so sap their vitality that they

cannot carry on serious study in the scanty hours outside of factory work. Many cases indisputably illustrate

this: a Bohemian girl, who, in order to earn money for pressing family needs, first ruined her voice in a six

months' constant vaudeville engagement, returned to her trade working overtime in a vain effort to continue

the vaudeville income; another young girl whom HullHouse had sent to the high school so long as her

parents consented, because we realized that a beautiful voice is often unavailable through lack of the

informing mind, later extinguished her promise in a tobacco factory; a third girl who had supported her little

sisters since she was fourteen, eagerly used her fine voice for earning money at entertainments held late after

her day's work, until exposure and fatigue ruined her health as well as a musician's future; a young man

whose musicloving family gave him every possible opportunity, and who produced some charming and

even joyous songs during the long struggle with tuberculosis which preceded his death, had made a brave

beginning, not only as a teacher of music but as a composer. In the little service held at HullHouse in his

memory, when the children sang his composition, "How Sweet is the Shepherd's Sweet Lot," it was hard to

realize that such an interpretive pastoral could have been produced by one whose childhood had been passed

Even that bitter experience did not prepare us for the sorrowful year when six promising pupils out of a class

of fifteen, developed tuberculosis. It required but little penetration to see that during the eight years the class

of fifteen school children had come together to the music school, they had approximately an even chance, but

as soon as they reached the legal working age only a scanty moiety of those who became selfsupporting

could endure the strain of long hours and bad air. Thus the average human youth, "With all the sweetness of

the common dawn," is flung into the vortex of industrial life wherein the everyday tragedy escapes us save

when one of them becomes conspicuously unfortunate. Twice in one year we were compelled

It has been pointed out many times that Art lives by devouring her own offspring and the world has come to

justify even that sacrifice, but we are unfortified and unsolaced when we see the children of Art devoured, not

by her, but by the uncouth stranger, Modern Industry, who, needlessly ruthless and brutal to her own

children, is quickly fatal to the offspring of the gentler mother. And so schools in art for those who go to

work at the age when more fortunate young people are still sheltered and educated, constantly epitomize one

of the haunting problems of life; why do we permit the waste of this most precious human faculty, this

consummate possession of civilization? When we fail to provide the vessel in which it may be treasured, it

The universal desire for the portrayal of life lying quite outside of personal experience evinces itself in many

forms. One of the conspicuous features of our neighborhood, as of all industrial quarters, is the persistency

with which the entire population attends the theater. The very first day I saw Halsted Street a long line of

young men and boys stood outside the gallery entrance of the Bijou Theater, waiting for the Sunday matinee

to begin at two o'clock, although it was only high noon. This waiting crowd might have been seen every

Sunday afternoon during the twenty years which have elapsed since then. Our first Sunday evening in

HullHouse, when a group of small boys sat on our piazza and told us "about things around here," their talk

was all of the theater and of the astonishing things they had seen that afternoon.

But quite as it was difficult to discover the habits and purposes of this group of boys because they much

preferred talking about the theater to contemplating their own lives, so it was all along the line; the young

men told us their ambitions in the phrases of stage heroes, and the girls, so far as their romantic dreams could

be shyly put into words, possessed no others but those soiled by long use in the melodrama. All of these

young people looked upon an afternoon a week in the gallery of a Halsted Street theater as their one

opportunity to see life. The sort of melodrama they see there has recently been described as "the ten

commandments written in red fire." Certainly the villain always comes to a violent end, and the young and

handsome hero is rewarded by marriage with a beautiful girl, usually the daughter of a millionaire, but after

all that is not a portrayal of the morality of the ten commandments any more than of life itself.

Nevertheless the theater, such as it was, appeared to be the one agency which freed the boys and girls from

that destructive isolation of those who drag themselves up to maturity by themselves, and it gave them a

glimpse of that order and beauty into which even the poorest drama endeavors to restore the bewildering facts

of life. The most prosaic young people bear testimony to this overmastering desire. A striking illustration of

this came to us during our second year's residence on Halsted Street through an incident in the Italian colony,

where the men have always boasted that they were able to guard their daughters from the dangers of city life,

and until evil Italians entered the business of the "white slave traffic," their boast was well founded. The first

Italian girl to go astray known to the residents of HullHouse, was so fascinated by the stage that on her way

home from work she always loitered outside a theater before the enticing posters. Three months after her

elopement with an actor, her distracted mother received a picture of her dressed in the men's clothes in which

she appeared in vaudeville. Her family mourned her as dead and her name was never mentioned among them

nor in the entire colony. In further illustration of an overmastering desire to see life as portrayed on the stage

are two young girls whose sober parents did not approve of the theater and would allow no money for such

foolish purposes. In sheer desperation the sisters evolved a plot that one of them would feign a toothache, and

while she was having her tooth pulled by a neighboring dentist the other would steal the gold crowns from his

table, and with the money thus procured they could attend the vaudeville theater every night on their way

home from work. Apparently the pain and wrongdoing did not weigh for a moment against the anticipated

pleasure. The plan was carried out to the point of selling the gold crowns to a pawnbroker when the

All this effort to see the play took place in the years before the fivecent theaters had become a feature of

every crowded city thoroughfare and before their popularity had induced the attendance of two and a quarter

million people in the United States every twentyfour hours. The eagerness of the penniless children to get

into these magic spaces is responsible for an entire crop of petty crimes made more easy because two children

are admitted for one nickel at the last performance when the hour is late and the theater nearly deserted. The

HullHouse residents were aghast at the early popularity of these mimic shows, and in the days before the

inspection of films and the present regulations for the fivecent theaters we established at HullHouse a

moving picture show. Although its success justified its existence, it was so obviously but one in the midst of

hundreds that it seemed much more advisable to turn our attention to the improvement of all of them or rather

to assist as best we could, the successful efforts in this direction by the Juvenile Protective Association.

However, long before the fivecent theater was even heard of, we had accumulated much testimony as to the

power of the drama, and we would have been dull indeed if we had not availed ourselves of the use of the

play at HullHouse, not only as an agent of recreation and education, but as a vehicle of selfexpression for

Long before the HullHouse theater was built we had many plays, first in the drawingroom and later in the

gymnasium. The young people's clubs never tired of rehearsing and preparing for these dramatic occasions,

and we also discovered that older people were almost equally ready and talented. We quickly learned that no

celebration at Thanksgiving was so popular as a graphic portrayal on the stage of the Pilgrim Fathers, and we

were often put to it to reduce to dramatic effects the great days of patriotism and religion.

At one of our early Christmas celebrations Longfellow's "Golden Legend" was given, the actors portraying it

with the touch of the miracle play spirit which it reflects. I remember an old blind man, who took the part of a

shepherd, said, at the end of the last performance, "Kind Heart," a name by which he always addressed me,

"it seems to me that I have been waiting all my life to hear some of these things said. I am glad we had so

many performances, for I think I can remember them to the end. It is getting hard for me to listen to reading,

but the different voices and all made this very plain." Had he not perhaps made a legitimate demand upon the

drama, that it shall express for us that which we have not been able to formulate for ourselves, that it shall

warm us with a sense of companionship with the experiences of others; does not every genuine drama present

our relations to each other and to the world in which we find ourselves in such wise as may fortify us to the

The immigrants in the neighborhood of HullHouse have utilized our little stage in an endeavor to reproduce

the past of their own nations through those immortal dramas which have escaped from the restraining bond of

A large colony of Greeks near HullHouse, who often feel that their history and classic background are

completely ignored by Americans, and that they are easily confused with the more ignorant immigrants from

other parts of southeastern Europe, welcome an occasion to present Greek plays in the ancient text. With

expert help in the difficulties of staging and rehearsing a classic play, they reproduced the Ajax of Sophocles

upon the HullHouse stage. It was a genuine triumph to the actors who felt that they were "showing forth the

glory of Greece" to "ignorant Americans." The scholar who came with a copy of Sophocles in hand and

followed the play with real enjoyment, did not in the least realize that the revelation of the love of Greek

poets was mutual between the audience and the actors. The Greeks have quite recently assisted an enthusiast

in producing "Electra," while the Lithuanians, the Poles, and other Russian subjects often use the HullHouse

stage to present plays in their own tongue, which shall at one and the same time keep alive their sense of

participation in the great Russian revolution and relieve their feelings in regard to it. There is something still

more appealing in the yearning efforts the immigrants sometimes make to formulate their situation in

America. I recall a play written by an Italian playwright of our neighborhood, which depicted the insolent

break between Americanized sons and old country parents, so touchingly that it moved to tears all the older

Italians in the audience. Did the tears of each express relief in finding that others had had the same experience

as himself, and did the knowledge free each one from a sense of isolation and an injured belief that his

This effort to understand life through its dramatic portrayal, to see one's own participation intelligibly set

forth, becomes difficult when one enters the field of social development, but even here it is not impossible if

A labor story appearing in the Atlantic Monthly was kindly dramatized for us by the author who also

superintended its presentation upon the HullHouse stage. The little drama presented the untutored effort of a

tradesunion man to secure for his side the beauty of selfsacrifice, the glamour of martyrdom, which so

often seems to belong solely to the nonunion forces. The presentation of the play was attended by an audience

of tradesunionists and employers and those other people who are supposed to make public opinion.

Together they felt the moral beauty of the man's conclusion that "it's the side that suffers most that will win

out in this warthe saints is the only ones that has got the world under their feetwe've got to do the way

they done if the unions is to stand," so completely that it seemed quite natural that he should forfeit his life

The dramatic arts have gradually been developed at HullHouse through amateur companies, one of which

has held together for more than fifteen years. The members were originally selected from the young people

who had evinced talent in the plays the social clubs were always giving, but the association now adds to itself

only as a vacancy occurs. Some of them have developed almost a professional ability, although contrary to all

predictions and in spite of several offers, none of them have taken to a stage career. They present all sorts of

plays from melodrama and comedy to those of Shaw, Ibsen, and Galsworthy. The latter are surprisingly

popular, perhaps because of their sincere attempt to expose the shams and pretenses of contemporary life and

to penetrate into some of its perplexing social and domestic situations. Through such plays the stage may

I have come to believe, however, that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral

instruction will not endure the test of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form

will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it

was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.

This function of the stage, as a reconstructing and reorganizing agent of accepted moral truths, came to me

with overwhelming force as I listened to the Passion Play at Oberammergau one beautiful summer's day in

1900. The peasants who portrayed exactly the successive scenes of the wonderful Life, who used only the

very words found in the accepted version of the Gospels, yet curiously modernized and reorientated the

message. They made clear that the opposition to the young Teacher sprang from the merchants whose traffic

in the temple He had disturbed and from the Pharisees who were dependent upon them for support. Their

query was curiously familiar, as they demanded the antecedents of the Radical who dared to touch vested

interests, who presumed to dictate the morality of trade, and who insulted the marts of honest merchants by

calling them "a den of thieves." As the play developed, it became clear that this powerful opposition had

friends in Church and State, that they controlled influences which ramified in all directions. They obviously

believed in their statement of the case and their very wealth and position in the community gave their words

such weight that finally all of their hearers were convinced that the young Agitator must be done away with

in order that the highest interests of society might be conserved. These simple peasants made it clear that it

was the money power which induced one of the Agitator's closest friends to betray him, and the villain of the

piece, Judas himself, was only a man who was so dazzled by money, so under the domination of all it

represented, that he was perpetually blind to the spiritual vision unrolling before him. As I sat through the

long summer day, seeing the shadows on the beautiful mountain back of the open stage shift from one side to

the other and finally grow long and pointed in the soft evening light, my mind was filled with perplexing

questions. Did the dramatization of the life of Jesus set forth its meaning more clearly and conclusively than

talking and preaching could possibly do as a shadowy following of the command "to do the will"?

The peasant actors whom I had seen returning from mass that morning had prayed only to portray the life as

He had lived it and, behold, out of their simplicity and piety arose this modern version which even Harnack

was only then venturing to suggest to his advanced colleagues in Berlin. Yet the Oberammergau fold were

very like thousands of immigrant men and women of Chicago, both in their experiences and in their

familiarity with the hard facts of life, and throughout that day as my mind dwelt on my faraway neighbors, I

Of course such a generally uplifted state comes only at rare moments, while the development of the little

theater at HullHouse has not depended upon the moods of any one, but upon the genuine enthusiasm and

sustained effort of a group of residents, several of them artists who have ungrudgingly given their time to it

year after year. This group has long fostered junior dramatic associations, through which it seems possible to

give a training in manners and morals more directly than through any other medium. They have learned to

determine very cleverly the ages at which various types of the drama are most congruous and expressive of

the sentiments of the little troupes, from the fairy plays such as "SnowWhite" and "PussinBoots" which

appeal to the youngest children, to the heroic plays of "William Tell," "King John," and "Wat Tyler" for the

older lads, and to the romances and comedies which set forth in stately fashion the elaborated life which so

many young people admire. A group of Jewish boys gave a dramatic version of the story of Joseph and his

brethren and again of Queen Esther. They had almost a sense of proprietorship in the fine old lines and were

pleased to bring from home bits of Talmudic lore for the stage setting. The same club of boys at one time will

buoyantly give a roaring comedy and five years later will solemnly demand a drama dealing with modern

industrial conditions. The HullHouse theater is also rented from time to time to members of the Young

People's Socialist League who give plays both in Yiddish and English which reduce their propaganda to

conversation. Through such humble experiments as the HullHouse stage, as well as through the more

ambitious reforms which are attempted in various parts of the country, the theatre may at last be restored to

There have been times when our little stage was able to serve the theatre libre. A Chicago troupe, finding it

difficult to break into a trust theater, used it one winter twice a week for the presentation of Ibsen and old

French comedy. A visit from the Irish poet Yeats inspired us to do our share towards freeing the stage from

its slavery to expensive scene setting, and a forest of stiff conventional trees against a gilt sky still remains

This group of HullHouse artists have filled our little foyer with a series of charming playbills and by dint of

painting their own scenery and making their own costumes have obtained beguiling results in stage setting.

Sometimes all the artistic resources of the House unite in a Wagnerian combination; thus, the text of the

"Troll's Holiday" was written by one resident, set to music by another; sung by the Music School, and placed

upon the stage under the careful direction and training of the dramatic committee; and the little brown trolls

could never have tumbled about so gracefully in their gleaming caves unless they had been taught in the

Some such synthesis takes place every year at the HullHouse annual exhibition, when an effort is made to

bring together in a spirit of holiday the nine thousand people who come to the House every week during

duller times. Curiously enough the central feature at the annual exhibition seems to be the brass band of the

boys' club which apparently dominates the situation by sheer size and noise, but perhaps their fresh boyish

As the stage of our little theater had attempted to portray the heroes of many lands, so we planned one early

spring seven years ago, to carry out a scheme of mural decoration upon the walls of the theater itself, which

should portray those cosmopolitan heroes who have become great through identification with the common

lot, in preference to the heroes of mere achievement. In addition to the group of artists living at HullHouse

several others were in temporary residence, and they all threw themselves enthusiastically into the plan. The

series began with Tolstoy plowing his field which was painted by an artist of the Glasgow school, and the

next was of the young Lincoln pushing his flatboat down the Mississippi River at the moment he received his

first impression of the "great iniquity." This was done by a promising young artist of Chicago, and the wall

spaces nearest to the two selected heroes were quickly filled with their immortal sayings.

A spirited discussion thereupon ensued in regard to the heroes for the two remaining large wall spaces, when

to the surprise of all of us the group of twentyfive residents who had lived in unbroken harmony for more

than ten years, suddenly broke up into cults and even camps of hero worship. Each cult exhibited drawings of

its own hero in his most heroic moment, and of course each drawing received enthusiastic backing from the

neighborhood, each according to the nationality of the hero. Thus Phidias standing high on his scaffold as he

finished the heroic head of Athene; the young David dreamily playing his harp as he tended his father's sheep

at Bethlehem; St. Francis washing the feet of the leper; the young slave Patrick guiding his master through

the bogs of Ireland, which he later rid of their dangers; the poet Hans Sachs cobbling shoes; Jeanne d'Arc

dropping her spindle in startled wonder before the heavenly visitants, naturally all obtained such enthusiastic

following from our cosmopolitan neighborhood that it was certain to give offense if any two were selected.

Then there was the cult of residents who wished to keep the series contemporaneous with the two heroes

already painted, and they advocated William Morris at his loom, Walt Whitman tramping the open road,

Pasteur in his laboratory, or Florence Nightingale seeking the wounded on the field of battle. But beyond the

socialists, few of the neighbors had heard of William Morris, and the fame of Walt Whitman was still more

apocryphal; Pasteur was considered merely a clever scientist without the romance which evokes popular

affection and in the provisional drawing submitted for votes, gentle Florence Nightingale was said "to look

more as if she were robbing the dead than succoring the wounded." The remark shows how high the feeling

ran, and then, as something must be done quickly, we tried to unite upon strictly local heroes such as the

famous fire marshal who had lived for many years in our neighborhood but why prolong this description

which demonstrates once more that art, if not always the handmaid of religion, yet insists upon serving those

deeper sentiments for which we unexpectedly find ourselves ready to fight. When we were all fatigued and

hopeless of compromise, we took refuge in a series of landscapes connected with our two heroes by a

quotation from Wordsworth slightly distorted to meet our dire need, but still stating his impassioned belief in

the efficacious spirit capable of companionship with man which resides in "particular spots." Certainly peace

emanates from the particular folding of the hills in one of our treasured mural landscapes, yet occasionally

when a guest with a bewildered air looks from one side of the theater to the other, we are forced to conclude

In spite of its stormy career this attempt at mural decoration connects itself quite naturally with the spirit of

our earlier efforts to make HullHouse as beautiful as we could, which had in it a desire to embody in the

outward aspect of the House something of the reminiscence and aspiration of the neighborhood life.

As the House enlarged for new needs and mellowed through slowgrowing associations, we endeavored to

fashion it from without, as it were, as well as from within. A tiny wall fountain modeled in classic pattern, for

us penetrates into the world of the past, but for the Italian immigrant it may defy distance and barriers as he

dimly responds to that typical beauty in which Italy has ever written its message, even as classic art knew no

region of the gods which was not also sensuous, and as the art of Dante mysteriously blended the material

Perhaps the early devotion of the HullHouse residents to the preRaphaelites recognized that they above all

English speaking poets and painters reveal "the sense of the expressiveness of outward things" which is at

The residents of HullHouse have always seen many evidences of the Russian Revolution; a forlorn family

of little children whose parents have been massacred at Kishinev are received and supported by their relatives

in our Chicago neighborhood; or a Russian woman, her face streaming with tears of indignation and pity,

asks you to look at the scarred back of her sister, a young girl, who has escaped with her life from the whips

of the Cossack soldiers; or a studious young woman suddenly disappears from the HullHouse classes

because she has returned to Kiev to be near her brother while he is in prison, that she may earn money for the

nourishing food which alone will keep him from contracting tuberculosis; or we attend a protest meeting

against the newest outrages of the Russian government in which the speeches are interrupted by the groans of

those whose sons have been sacrificed and by the hisses of others who cannot repress their indignation. At

such moments an American is acutely conscious of our ignorance of this greatest tragedy of modern times,

and at our indifference to the waste of perhaps the noblest human material among our contemporaries.

Certain it is, as the distinguished Russian revolutionists have come to Chicago, they have impressed me, as

no one else ever has done, as belonging to that noble company of martyrs who have ever and again poured

forth blood that human progress might be advanced. Sometimes these men and women have addressed

audiences gathered quite outside the Russian colony and have filled to overflowing Chicago's largest halls

with American citizens deeply touched by this message of martyrdom. One significant meeting was

addressed by a member of the Russian Duma and by one of Russia's oldest and sanest revolutionists; another

by Madame Breshkovsky, who later languished a prisoner in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.

In this wonderful procession of revolutionists, Prince Kropotkin, or, as he prefers to be called, Peter

Kropotkin, was doubtless the most distinguished. When he came to America to lecture, he was heard

throughout the country with great interest and respect; that he was a guest of HullHouse during his stay in

Chicago attracted little attention at the time, but two years later, when the assassination of President

McKinley occurred, the visit of this kindly scholar, who had always called himself an "anarchist" and had

certainly written fiery tracts in his younger manhood, was made the basis of an attack upon HullHouse by a

daily newspaper, which ignored the fact that while Prince Kropotkin had addressed the Chicago Arts and

Crafts Society at HullHouse, giving a digest of his remarkable book on "Fields, Factories, and Workshops,"

he had also spoken at the State Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin and before the leading literary and

scientific societies of Chicago. These institutions and societies were not, therefore, called anarchistic.

HullHouse had doubtless laid itself open to this attack through an incident connected with the imprisonment

of the editor on an anarchistic paper, who was arrested in Chicago immediately after the assassination of

President McKinley. In the excitement following the national calamity and the avowal by the assassin of the

influence of the anarchistic lecture to which he had listened, arrests were made in Chicago of every one

suspected of anarchy, in the belief that a widespread plot would be uncovered. The editor's house was

searched for incriminating literature, his wife and daughter taken to a police station, and his son and himself,

with several other suspected anarchists, were placed in the disused cells in the basement of the city hall.

It is impossible to overstate the public excitement of the moment and the unfathomable sense of horror with

which the community regarded an attack upon the chief executive of the nation, as a crime against

government itself which compels an instinctive recoil from all lawabiding citizens. Doubtless both the

horror and recoil have their roots deep down in human experience; the earliest forms of government implied a

group which offered competent resistance to outsiders, but assuming no protection was necessary between

any two of its own members, promptly punished with death the traitor who had assaulted anyone within. An

anarchistic attack against an official thus furnishes an accredited basis both for unreasoning hatred and for

prompt punishment. Both the hatred and the determination to punish reached the highest pitch in Chicago

after the assassination of President McKinley, and the group of wretched men detained in the oldfashioned,

scarcely habitable cells, had not the least idea of their ultimate fate. They were not allowed to see an attorney

and were kept "in communicado" as their excited friends called it. I had seen the editor and his family only

during Prince Kropotkin's stay at HullHouse, when they had come to visit him several times. The editor had

impressed me as a quiet, scholarly man, challenging the social order by the philosophic touchstone of

Bakunin and of Herbert Spencer, somewhat startled by the radicalism of his fiery young son and much

comforted by the German domesticity of his wife and daughter. Perhaps it was but my hysterical symptom of

the universal excitement, but it certainly seemed to me more than I could bear when a group of his

individualistic friends, who had come to ask for help, said: "You see what becomes of your boasted law; the

authorities won't even allow an attorney, nor will they accept bail for these men, against whom nothing can

be proved, although the veriest criminals are not denied such a right." Challenged by an anarchist, one is

always sensitive for the honor of legally constituted society, and I replied that of course the men could have

an attorney, that the assassin himself would eventually be furnished with one, that the fact that a man was an

anarchist had nothing to do with his rights before the law! I was met with the retort that that might do for a

theory, but that the fact still remained that these men had been absolutely isolated, seeing no one but

policemen, who constantly frightened them with tales of public clamor and threatened lynching.

The conversation took place on Saturday night and, as the final police authority rests in the mayor, with a

friend who was equally disturbed over the situation, I repaired to his house on Sunday morning to appeal to

him in the interest of a law and order that should not yield to panic. We contended that to the anarchist above

all men it must be demonstrated that law is impartial and stands the test of every strain. The mayor heard us

through with the ready sympathy of the successful politician. He insisted, however, that the men thus far had

merely been properly protected against lynching, but that it might now be safe to allow them to see some one;

he would not yet, however, take the responsibility of permitting an attorney, but if I myself chose to see them

on the humanitarian errand of an assurance of fair play, he would write me a permit at once. I promptly fell

into the trap, if trap it was, and within half an hour was in a corridor in the city hall basement, talking to the

distracted editor and surrounded by a cordon of police, who assured me that it was not safe to permit him out

of his cell. The editor, who had grown thin and haggard under his suspense, asked immediately as to the

whereabouts of his wife and daughter, concerning whom he had heard not a word since he had seen them

arrested. Gradually he became composed as he learned, not that his testimony had been believed to the effect

that he had never seen the assassin but once and had then considered him a foolish halfwitted creature, but

that the most thoroughgoing "dragnet" investigations on the part of the united police of the country had failed

to discover a plot and that the public was gradually becoming convinced that the dastardly act was that of a

The entire conversation was simple and did not seem to me unlike, in motive or character, interviews I had

had with many another forlorn man who had fallen into prison. I had scarce returned to HullHouse,

however, before it was filled with reporters, and I at once discovered that whether or not I had helped a

brother out of a pit, I had fallen into a deep one myself. A period of sharp public opprobrium followed, traces

of which, I suppose, will always remain. And yet in the midst of the letters of protest and accusation which

made my mail a horror every morning came a few letters of another sort, one from a federal judge whom I

had never seen and another from a distinguished professor in the constitutional law, who congratulated me on

Although one or two ardent young people rushed into print to defend me from the charge of "abetting

anarchy," it seemed to me at the time that mere words would not avail. I had felt that the protection of the law

itself extended to the most unpopular citizen was the only reply to the anarchistic argument, to the effect that

this moment of panic revealed the truth of their theory of government; that the custodians of law and order

have become the government itself quite as the armed men hired by the medieval guilds to protect them in the

peaceful pursuit of their avocations, through sheer possession of arms finally made themselves rulers of the

city. At that moment I was firmly convinced that the public could only be convicted of the blindness of its

course, when a body of people with a hundredfold of the moral energy possessed by a Settlement group,

should make clear that there is no method by which any community can be guarded against sporadic efforts

on the part of half crazed, discouraged men, save by a sense of mutual rights and securities which will

It seemed to me then that in the millions of words uttered and written at that time, no one adequately urged

that publicspirited citizens set themselves the task of patiently discovering how these sporadic acts of

violence against government may be understood and averted. We do not know whether they occur among the

discouraged and unassimilated immigrants who might be cared for in such a way as enormously to lessen the

probability of these acts, or whether they are the result of anarchistic teaching. By hastily concluding that the

latter is the sole explanation for them, we make no attempt to heal and cure the situation. Failure to make a

proper diagnosis may mean treatment of a disease which does not exist, or it may furthermore mean that the

dire malady from which the patient is suffering be permitted to develop unchecked. And yet as the details of

the meager life of the President's assassin were disclosed, they were a challenge to the forces for social

betterment in American cities. Was it not an indictment to all those whose business it is to interpret and

solace the wretched, that a boy should have grown up in an American city so uncared for, so untouched by

higher issues, his wounds of life so unhealed by religion that the first talk he ever heard dealing with life's

wrongs, although anarchistic and violent, should yet appear to point a way of relief?

The conviction that a sense of fellowship is the only implement which will break into the locked purpose of a

halfcrazed creature bent upon destruction in the name of justice, came to me through an experience recited

He was a German cobbler who, through all the changes in the manufacturing of shoes, had steadily clung to

his little shop on a Chicago thoroughfare, partly as an expression of his individualism and partly because he

preferred bitter poverty in a place of his own to good wages under a disciplinary foreman. The assassin of

President McKinley on his way through Chicago only a few days before he committed his dastardly deed had

visited all the anarchists whom he could find in the city, asking them for "the password" as he called it. They,

of course, possessed no such thing, and had turned him away, some with disgust and all with a certain degree

of impatience, as a type of the illbalanced man who, as they put it, was always "hanging around the

movement, without the slightest conception of its meaning." Among other people, he visited the German

cobbler, who treated him much as the others had done, but who, after the event had made clear the identity of

his visitor, was filled with the most bitter remorse that he had failed to utilize his chance meeting with the

assassin to deter him from his purpose. He knew as well as any psychologist who has read the history of such

solitary men that the only possible way to break down such a persistent and secretive purpose, was by the

kindliness which might have induced confession, which might have restored the future assassin into

In the midst of his remorse, the cobbler told me a tale of his own youth; that years before, when an ardent

young fellow in Germany, newly converted to the philosophy of anarchism, as he called it, he had made up

his mind that the Church, as much as the State, was responsible for human oppression, and that this fact could

best be set forth "in the deed" by the public destruction of a clergyman or priest; that he had carried firearms

for a year with this purpose in mind, but that one pleasant summer evening, in a moment of weakness, he had

confided his intention to a friend, and that from that moment he not only lost all desire to carry it out, but it

seemed to him the most preposterous thing imaginable. In concluding the story he said; "That poor fellow sat

just beside me on my bench; if I had only put my hand on his shoulder and said, 'Now, look here, brother,

what is on your mind? What makes you talk such nonsense? Tell me. I have seen much of life, and

understand all kinds of men. I have been young and hotheaded and foolish myself,' if he had told me of his

purpose then and there, he would never have carried it out. The whole nation would have been spared this

horror." As he concluded he shook his gray head and sighed as if the whole incident were more than he could

bearone of those terrible sins of omission; one of the things he "ought to have done," the memory of which

The attempt a Settlement makes to interpret American institutions to those who are bewildered concerning

them either because of their personal experiences, or because of preconceived theories, would seem to lie in

the direct path of its public obligation, and yet it is apparently impossible for the overwrought community to

distinguish between the excitement the Settlements are endeavoring to understand and to allay and the

attitude of the Settlement itself. At times of public panic, fervid denunciation is held to be the duty of every

good citizen, and if a Settlement is convinced that the incident should be used to vindicate the law and does

not at the moment give its strength to denunciation, its attitude is at once taken to imply a championship of

The public mind at such a moment falls into the old medieval confusionhe who feeds or shelters a heretic

is upon prima facie evidence a heretic himselfhe who knows intimately people among whom anarchists

arise is therefore an anarchist. I personally am convinced that anarchy as a philosophy is dying down, not

only in Chicago, but everywhere; that their leading organs have discontinued publication, and that their most

eminent men in America have deserted them. Even those groups which have continued to meet are dividing,

and the major half in almost every instance calls itself socialistanarchists, an apparent contradiction of

terms, whose members insist that the socialistic organization of society must be the next stage of social

development and must be gone through with, so to speak, before the ideal state of society can be reached, so

nearly begging the question that some orthodox socialists are willing to recognize them. It is certainly true

that just because anarchy questions the very foundations of society, the most elemental sense of protection

demands that the method of meeting the challenge should be intelligently considered.

Whether or not HullHouse has accomplished anything by its method of meeting such a situation, or at least

attempting to treat it in a way which will not destroy confidence in the American institutions so adored by

refugees from foreign governmental oppression, it is of course impossible for me to say.

And yet it was in connection with an effort to pursue an intelligent policy in regard to a socalled "foreign

anarchist" that HullHouse again became associated with that creed six years later. This again was an echo of

the Russian revolution, but in connection with one of its humblest representatives. A young Russian Jew

named Averbuch appeared in the early morning at the house of the Chicago chief of police upon an obscure

errand. It was a moment of panic everwhere in regard to anarchists because of a recent murder in Denver

which had been charged to an Italian anarchist, and the chief of police, assuming that the dark young man

standing in his hallway was an anarchist bent upon his assassination, hastily called for help. In a panic born of

fear and selfdefense, young Averbuch was shot to death. The members of the RussianJewish colony on the

west side of Chicago were thrown into a state of intense excitement as soon as the nationality of the young

man became known. They were filled with dark forebodings from a swift prescience of what it would mean

to them were the oduim of anarchy rightly or wrongly attached to one of their members. It seemed to the

residents of HullHouse most important that every effort should be made to ascertain just what did happen,

that every means of securing information should be exhausted before a final opinion should be formed, and

this odium fastened upon a colony of lawabiding citizens. The police might be right or wrong in their

assertion that the man was an anarchist. It was, to our minds, also most unfortunate that the Chicago police in

the determination to uncover an anarchistic plot should have utilized the most drastic methods of search

within the RussianJewish colony composed of families only too familiar with the methods of Russian

police. Therefore, when the Chicago police ransacked all the printing offices they could locate in the colony,

when they raided a restaurant which they regarded as suspicious because it had been supplying food at cost to

the unemployed, when they searched through private houses for papers and photographs of revolutionaries,

when they seized the library of the Edelstadt group and carried the books, including Shakespeare and Herbert

Spencer, to the city hall, when they arrested two friends of young Averbuch and kept them in the police

station fortyeight hours, when they mercilessly "sweated" the sister, Olga, that she might be startled into a

confessionall these things so poignantly reminded them of Russian methods that indignation fed both by

old memory and bitter disappointment in America, swept over the entire colony. The older men asked

whether constitutional rights gave no guarantee against such violent aggression of police power, and the

hotheaded younger ones cried out at once that the only way to deal with the police was to defy them, which

was true of police the world over. It was said many times that those who are without influence and protection

in a strange country fare exactly as hard as do the poor in Europe; that all the talk of guaranteed protection

Every Settlement has classes in citizenship in which the principles of American institutions are expounded,

and of these the community, as a whole, approves. But the Settlements know better than anyone else that

while these classes and lectures are useful, nothing can possibly give lessons in citizenship so effectively and

make so clear the constitutional basis of a selfgoverning community as the current event itself. The

treatment at a given moment of that foreign colony which feels itself outraged and misunderstood, either

makes its constitutional rights clear to it, or forever confuses it on the subject.

The only method by which a reasonable and loyal conception of government may be substituted for the one

formed upon Russian experiences is that the actual experience of refugees with government in America shall

gradually demonstrate what a very different thing government means here. Such an event as the Averbuch

affair affords an unprecedented opportunity to make clear this difference and to demonstrate beyond the

possibility of misunderstanding that the guarantee of constitutional rights implies that officialism shall be

restrained and guarded at every point, that the official represents, not the will of a small administrative body,

but the will of the entire people, and that methods therefore have been constituted by which official

aggression may be restrained. The Averbuch incident gave an opportunity to demonstrate this to that very

body of people who need it most; to those who have lived in Russia where autocratic officers represent

autocratic power and where government is officialism. It seemed to the residents in the Settlements nearest

the RussianJewish colony that it was an obvious piece of public spirit to try out all the legal value involved,

to insist that American institutions were stout enough to break down in times of stress and public panic.

The belief of many Russians that the Averbuch incident would be made a prelude to the constant use of the

extradition treaty for the sake of terrorizing revolutionists both at home and abroad received a certain

corroboration when an attempt was made in 1908 to extradite a Russian revolutionist named Rudovitz who

was living in Chicago. The first hearing before a United States Commissioner gave a verdict favorable to the

Russian Government although this was afterward reversed by the Department of State in Washington. Partly

to educate American sentiment, partly to express sympathy with the Russian refugees in their dire need, a

series of public meetings was arranged in which the operations of the extradition treaty were discussed by

many of us who had spoken at a meeting held in protest against its ratification fifteen years before. It is

impossible for anyone unacquainted with the Russian colony to realize the consternation produced by this

attempted extradition. I acted as treasurer of the fund collected to defray the expenses of halls and printing in

the campaign against the policy of extradition and had many opportunities to talk with members of the

colony. One old man, tearing his hair and beard as he spoke, declared that all his sons and grandsons might

thus be sent back to Russia; in fact, all of the younger men in the colony might be extradited, for every

Would it not provoke to ironic laughter that very nemesis which presides over the destinies of nations, if the

most autocratic government yet remaining in civilization should succeed in utilizing for its own autocratic

methods the youngest and most daring experiment in democratic government which the world has ever seen?

Stranger results have followed a course of stupidity and injustice resulting from blindness and panic!

It is certainly true that if the decision of the federal office in Chicago had not been reversed by the department

of state in Washington, the United States government would have been committed to return thousands of

It was perhaps significant of our need of what Napoleon called a "revival of civic morals" that the public

appeal against such a reversal of our traditions had to be based largely upon the contributions to American

progress made from other revolutions; the Puritans from the English, Lafayette from the French, Carl Schurz

and many another able man from the German upheavals in the middle of the century.

A distinguished German scholar writing at the end of his long life a description of his friends of 1848 who

made a gallant although premature effort to unite the German states and to secure a constitutional

government, thus concludes: "But not a few saw the whole of their lives wrecked, either in prison or poverty,

though they had done no wrong, and in many cases were the finest characters it has been my good fortune to

know. They were before their time; the fruit was not ripe, as it was in 1871, and Germany but lost her best

sons in those miserable years." When the time is ripe in Russia, when she finally yields to those great forces

which are molding and renovating contemporary life, when her Cavour and her Bismark finally throw into

the first governmental forms all that yearning for juster human relations which the idealistic Russian

revolutionists embody, we may look back upon these "miserable years" with a sense of chagrin at our lack of

Again it is far from easy to comprehend the great Russian struggle. I recall a visit from the famous

revolutionist Gershuni, who had escaped from Siberia in a barrel of cabbage rolled under the very fortress of

the commandant himself, had made his way through Manchuria and China to San Francisco, and on his way

back to Russia had stopped in Chicago for a few days. Three months later we heard of his death, and

whenever I recall the conversation held with him, I find it invested with that dignity which last words imply.

Upon the request of a comrade, Gershuni had repeated the substance of the famous speech he had made to the

court which sentenced him to Siberia. As representing the government against which he had rebelled, he told

the court that he might in time be able to forgive all of their outrages and injustices save one; the unforgivable

outrage would remain that hundreds of men like himself, who were vegetarians because they were not willing

to participate in the destruction of living creatures, who had never struck a child even in punishment, who

were so consumed with tenderness for the outcast and oppressed that they had lived for weeks among

starving peasants only that they might cheer and solace them,that these men should have been driven into

terrorism, until impelled to "execute," as they call it,"assassinate" the AngloSaxon would term

it,public officials, was something for which he would never forgive the Russian government. It was,

perhaps, the heat of the argument, as much as conviction, which led me to reply that it would be equally

difficult for society to forgive these very revolutionists for one thing they had done, their institution of the use

of force in such wise that it would inevitably be imitated by men of less scruple and restraint; that to have

revived such a method in civilization, to have justified it by their disinterestedness of purpose and nobility of

character, was perhaps the gravest responsibility that any group of men could assume. With a smile of

indulgent pity such as one might grant to a mistaken child, he replied that such Tolstoyan principles were as

fitted to Russia as "these toilettes," pointing to the thin summer gowns of his listeners, "were fitted to a

Siberian winter." And yet I held the belief then, as I certainly do now, that when the sense of justice seeks to

express itself quite outside the regular channels of established government, it has set forth on a dangerous

journey inevitably ending in disaster, and that this is true in spite of the fact that the adventure may have been

Still more perplexing than the use of force by the revolutionists is the employment of the agentprovocateur

on the part of the Russian government. The visit of Vladimir Bourtzeff to Chicago just after his exposure of

the famous secret agent, Azeff, filled one with perplexity in regard to a government which would connive at

the violent death of a faithful official and that of a member of the royal household for the sake of bringing

opprobrium and punishment to the revolutionists and credit to the secret police.

The Settlement has also suffered through its effort to secure open discussion of the methods of the Russian

government. During the excitement connected with the visit of Gorki to this country, three different

committees of Russians came to HullHouse begging that I would secure a statement in at least one of the

Chicago dailies of their own view, that the agents of the Czar had cleverly centered public attention upon

Gorki's private life and had fomented a scandal so successfully that the object of Gorki's visit to America had

been foiled; he who had known intimately the most wretched of the Czar's subjects, who was best able to

sympathetically portray their wretchedness, not only failed to get a hearing before an American audience, but

could scarcely find the shelter of a roof. I told two of the Russian committees that it was hopeless to

undertake any explanation of the bitter attack until public excitement had somewhat subsided; but one

Sunday afternoon when a third committee arrived, I said that I would endeavor to have reprinted in a Chicago

daily the few scattered articles written for the magazines which tried to explain the situation, one by the head

professor in political economy of a leading university, and others by publicists well informed as to Russian

I hoped that a cosmopolitan newspaper might feel an obligation to recognize the desire for fair play on the

part of thousands of its readers among the Russians, Poles, and Finns, at least to the extent of reproducing

these magazine articles under a noncommittal caption. That same Sunday evening, in company with one of

the residents, I visited a newspaper office only to hear its representative say that my plan was quite out of the

question, as the whole subject was what newspaper men called "a sacred cow." He said, however, that he

would willingly print an article which I myself should write and sign. I declined this offer with the statement

that one who had my opportunities to see the struggles of poor women in securing support for their children,

found it impossible to write anything which would however remotely justify the loosening of marriage bonds,

even if the defense of Gorki made by the Russian committees was sound. We left the newspaper office

somewhat discouraged with what we thought one more unsuccessful effort to procure a hearing for the

I had considered the incident closed, when to my horror and surprise several months afterward it was made

the basis of a story with every possible vicious interpretation. One of the Chicago newspapers had been

indicted by Mayor Dunne for what he considered an actionable attack upon his appointees to the Chicago

School Board of whom I was one, and the incident enlarged and coarsened was submitted as evidence to the

Grand Jury in regard to my views and influence. Although the evidence was thrown out, an attempt was again

made to revive this story by the managers of Mayor Dunne's second campaign, this time to show how "the

protector of the oppressed" was traduced. The incident is related here as an example of the clever use of that

old device which throws upon the radical in religion, in education, and in social reform, the oduim of

If the under dog were always right, one might quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he

is but obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong; but perhaps he is never so

altogether wrong and pigheaded and utterly reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the

possession of prejudices to the other almost insuperable difficulties of understanding him. It was, perhaps, not

surprising that with these excellent opportunities for misjudging HullHouse, we should have suffered attack

from time to time whenever any untoward event gave an opening as when an Italian immigrant murdered a

priest in Denver, Colorado. Although the wretched man had never been in Chicago, much less at

HullHouse, a Chicago ecclesiastic asserted that he had learned hatred of the Church as a member of the

Giordano Bruno Club, an Italian Club, one of whose members lived at HullHouse, and which had

occasionally met there, although it had long maintained clubrooms of its own. This club had its origin in the

old struggles of united Italy against the temporal power of the Pope, one of the European echoes with which

Chicago resounds. The Italian resident, as the editor of a paper representing new Italy, had come in sharp

conflict with the Chicago ecclesiastic, first in regard to naming a public school of the vicinity after Garibaldi,

which was of course not tolerated by the Church, and then in regard to many another issue arising in

anticlericalism, which, although a political party, is constantly involved, from the very nature of the case, in

theological difficulties. The contest had been carried on with a bitterness impossible for an American to

understand, but its origin and implications were so obvious that it did not occur to any of us that it could be

The ecclesiastic himself had lived for years in Rome, and as I had often discussed the problems of Italian

politics with him, I was quite sure he understood the raison d'etre for the Giordano Bruno Club. Fortunately

in the midst of the rhetorical attack, our friendly relations remained unbroken with the neighboring priests

from whom we continued to receive uniform courtesy as we cooperated in cases of sorrow and need.

Hundreds of devout communicants identified with the various HullHouse clubs and classes were deeply

distressed by the incident, but assured us it was all a misunderstanding. Easter came soon afterwards, and it

was not difficult to make a connection between the attack and the myriad of Easter cards which filled my

Thus a Settlement becomes involved in the many difficulties of its neighbors as its experiences make vivid

the consciousness of modern internationalism. And yet the very fact that the sense of reality is so keen and

the obligation of the Settlement so obvious may perhaps in itself explain the opposition HullHouse has

encountered when it expressed its sympathy with the Russian revolution. We were much entertained,

although somewhat ruefully, when a Chicago woman withdrew from us a large annual subscription because

HullHouse had defended a Russian refugee while she, who had seen much of the Russian aristocracy in

Europe, knew from them that all the revolutionary agitation was both unreasonable and unnecessary!

It is, of course impossible to say whether these oppositions were inevitable or whether they were indications

that HullHouse had somehow bungled at its task. Many times I have been driven to the confession of the

blundering Amiel: "It requires ability to make what we seem agree with what we are."

In a paper written years ago I deplored at some length the fact that educational matters are more democratic

in their political than in their social aspect, and I quote the following extract from it as throwing some light

In line with this declaration, HullHouse in the very beginning opened what we called College Extension

Classes with a faculty finally numbering thirtyfive college men and women, many of whom held their

pupils for consecutive years. As these classes antedated in Chicago the University Extension and Normal

Extension classes and supplied a demand for stimulating instruction, the attendance strained to their utmost

capacity the spacious rooms in the old house. The relation of students and faculty to each other and to the

residents was that of guest and hostess, and at the close of each term the residents gave a reception to students

and faculty which was one of the chief social events of the season. Upon this comfortable social basis some

In connection with these classes a HullHouse summer school was instituted at Rockford College, which was

most generously placed at our disposal by the trustees. For ten years one hundred women gathered there for

six weeks, in addition there were always men on the faculty, and a small group of young men among the

students who were lodged in the gymnasium building. The outdoor classes in bird study and botany, the

serious reading of literary masterpieces, the boat excursions on the Rock River, the cooperative spirit of

doing the housework together, the satirical commencements in particolored caps and gowns, lent themselves

As each member of the faculty, as well as the students, paid three dollars a week, and as we had little outlay

beyond the actual cost of food, we easily defrayed our expenses. The undertaking was so simple and

gratifying in results that it might well be reproduced in many college buildings which are set in the midst of

beautiful surroundings, unused during the two months of the year when hundreds of people, able to pay only

a moderate price for lodgings in the country, can find nothing comfortable and no mental food more

Every Thursday evening during the first years, a public lecture came to be an expected event in the

neighborhood, and HullHouse became one of the early University Extension centers, first in connection

with an independent society and later with the University of Chicago. One of the HullHouse trustees was so

impressed with the value of this orderly and continuous presentation of economic subjects that he endowed

three courses in a downtown center, in which the lectures were free to anyone who chose to come. He was

much pleased that these lectures were largely attended by workingmen who ordinarily prefer that an

economic subject shall be presented by a partisan, and who are supremely indifferent to examinations and

credits. They also dislike the balancing of pro and con which scholarly instruction implies, and prefer to be

"inebriated on raw truth" rather than to sip a carefully prepared draught of knowledge.

Nevertheless Bowen Hall, which seats seven hundred and fifty people, is often none too large to hold the

audiences of men who come to HullHouse every Sunday evening during the winter to attend the illustrated

lectures provided by the faculty of the University of Chicago and others who kindly give their services. These

courses differ enormously in their popularity: one on European capitals and their social significance was

followed with the most vivid attention and sense of participation indicated by groans and hisses when the

audience was reminded of an unforgettable feud between Austria and her Slavic subjects, or when they wildly

In spite of the success of these Sunday evening courses, it has never been an easy undertaking to find

acceptable lectures. A course of lectures on astronomy illustrated by stereopticon slides will attract a large

audience the first week, who hope to hear of the wonders of the heavens and the relation of our earth thereto,

but instead are treated to spectrum analyses of star dust, or the latest theory concerning the milky way. The

habit of research and the desire to say the latest word upon any subject often overcomes the sympathetic

understanding of his audience which the lecturer might otherwise develop, and he insensibly drops into the

dull terminology of the classroom. There are, of course, notable exceptions; we had twelve gloriously popular

talks on organic evolution, but the lecturer was not yet a professormerely a university instructorand his

mind was still eager over the marvel of it all. Fortunately there is an increasing number of lecturers whose

matter is so real, so definite, and so valuable, that in an attempt to give it an exact equivalence in words, they

It sometimes seems as if the men of substantial scholarship were content to leave to the charletan the teaching

of those things which deeply concern the welfare of mankind, and that the mass of men get their intellectual

food from the outcasts of scholarship, who provide millions of books, pictures, and shows, not to instruct and

guide, but for the sake of their own financial profit. A Settlement soon discovers that simple people are

interested in large and vital subjects, and the HullHouse residents themselves at one time, with only partial

success, undertook to give a series of lectures on the history of the world, beginning with the nebular

hypothesis and reaching Chicago itself in the twentyfifth lecture! Absurd as the hasty review appears, there

is no doubt that the beginner in knowledge is always eager for the general statement, as those wise old

teachers of the people well knew, when they put the history of creation on the stage and the monks

themselves became the actors. I recall that in planning my first European journey I had soberly hoped in two

years to trace the entire pattern of human excellence as we passed from one country to another, in the shrines

popular affection had consecrated to the saints, in the frequented statues erected to heroes, and in the "worn

blasonry of funeral brasses"an illustration that when we are young we all long for those mountaintops

upon which we may soberly stand and dream of our own ephemeral and uncertain attempts at righteousness. I

have had many other illustrations of this; a statement was recently made to me by a member of the

HullHouse Boys' club, who had been unjustly arrested as an accomplice to a young thief and held in the

police station for three days, that during his detention he "had remembered the way Jean Valjean behaved

when he was everlastingly pursued by that policeman who was only trying to do right"; "I kept seeing the

pictures in that illustrated lecture you gave about him, and I thought it would be queer if I couldn't behave

The power of dramatic action may unfortunately be illustrated in other ways. During the weeks when all the

daily papers were full of the details of a notorious murder trial in New York and all the hideous events which

preceded the crime, one evening I saw in the street a knot of working girls leaning over a newspaper,

admiring the clothes, the beauty, and "sorrowful expression" of the unhappy heroine. In the midst of the trial

a woman whom I had known for years came to talk to me about her daughter, shamefacedly confessing that

the girl was trying to dress and look like the notorious girl in New York, and that she had even said to her

mother in a moment of defiance, "Some day I shall be taken into court and then I shall dress just as Evelyn

If one makes calls on a Sunday afternoon in the homes of the immigrant colonies near HullHouse, one finds

the family absorbed in the Sunday edition of a sensational daily newspaper, even those who cannot read,

quite easily following the comic adventures portrayed in the colored pictures of the supplement or tracing the

clew of a murderer carefully depicted by a black line drawn through a plan of the houses and streets.

Sometimes lessons in the great loyalties and group affections come through life itself and yet in such a

manner that one cannot but deplore it. During the teamsters' strike in Chicago several years ago when class

bitterness rose to a dramatic climax, I remember going to visit a neighborhood boy who had been severely

injured when he had taken the place of a union driver upon a coal wagon. As I approached the house in which

he lived, a large group of boys and girls, some of them very little children, surrounded me to convey the

exciting information that "Jack T. was a 'scab'," and that I couldn't go in there. I explained to the excited

children that his mother, who was a friend of mine, was in trouble, quite irrespective of the way her boy had

been hurt. The crowd around me outside of the house of the "scab" constantly grew larger and I, finally

abandoning my attempt at explanation, walked in only to have the mother say: "Please don't come here. You

will only get hurt, too." Of course I did not get hurt, but the episode left upon my mind one of the most

painful impressions I have ever received in connection with the children of the neighborhood. In addition to

all else are the lessons of loyalty and comradeship to come to them as the mere reversals of class antagonism?

And yet it was but a trifling incident out of the general spirit of bitterness and strife which filled the city.

Therefore the residents of HullHouse place increasing emphasis upon the great inspirations and solaces of

literature and are unwilling that it should ever languish as a subject for class instruction or for reading parties.

The Shakespeare club has lived a continuous existence at HullHouse for sixteen years during which time its

members have heard the leading interpreters of Shakespeare, both among scholars and players. I recall that

one of its earliest members said that her mind was peopled with Shakespeare characters during her long hours

of sewing in a shop, that she couldn't remember what she thought about before she joined the club, and

concluded that she hadn't thought about anything at all. To feed the mind of the worker, to lift it above the

monotony of his task, and to connect it with the larger world, outside of his immediate surroundings, has

always been the object of art, perhaps never more nobly fulfilled than by the great English bard. Miss Starr

has held classes in Dante and Browning for many years, and the great lines are conned with never failing

enthusiasm. I recall Miss Lathrop's Plato club and an audience who listened to a series of lectures by Dr. John

Dewey on "Social Psychology" as geniune intellectual groups consisting largely of people from the

immediate neighborhood, who were willing to make "that effort from which we all shrink, the effort of

thought." But while we prize these classes as we do the help we are able to give to the exceptional young man

or woman who reaches the college and university and leaves the neighborhood of his childhood behind him,

the residents of HullHouse feel increasingly that the educational efforts of a Settlement should not be

directed primarily to reproduce the college type of culture, but to work out a method and an ideal adapted to

the immediate situation. They feel that they should promote a culture which will not set its possessor aside in

a class with others like himself, but which will, on the contrary, connect him with all sorts of people by his

ability to understand them as well as by his power to supplement their present surroundings with the historic

background. Among the hundreds of immigrants who have for years attended classes at HullHouse designed

primarily to teach the English language, dozens of them have struggled to express in the newly acquired

tongue some of these hopes and longings which had so much to do with their emigration.

A series of plays was thus written by a young Bohemian; essays by a Russian youth, outpouring sorrows

rivaling Werther himself and yet containing the precious stuff of youth's perennial revolt against accepted

wrong; stories of Russian oppression and petty injustices throughout which the desire for free America

became a crystallized hope; an attempt to portray the Jewish day of Atonement, in such wise that even

individualistic Americans may catch a glimpse of that deeper national life which has survived all

transplanting and expresses itself in forms so ancient that they appear grotesque to the ignorant spectator. I

remember a pathetic effort on the part of a young Russian Jewess to describe the vivid inner life of an old

Talmud scholar, probably her uncle or father, as of one persistently occupied with the grave and important

things of the spirit, although when brought into sharp contact with busy and overworked people, he inevitably

appeared selfabsorbed and slothful. Certainly no one who had read her paper could again see such an old

man in his praying shawl bent over his crabbed book, without a sense of understanding.

On the other hand, one of the most pitiful periods in the drama of the muchpraised young American who

attempts to rise in life, is the time when his educational requirements seem to have locked him up and made

him rigid. He fancies himself shut off from his uneducated family and misunderstood by his friends. He is

bowed down by his mental accumulations and often gets no farther than to carry them through life as a great

The teacher in a Settlement is constantly put upon his mettle to discover methods of instruction which shall

make knowledge quickly available to his pupils, and I should like here to pay my tribute of admiration to the

dean of our educational department, Miss Landsberg, and to the many men and women who every winter

come regularly to HullHouse, putting untiring energy into the endless task of teaching the newly arrived

immigrant the first use of a language of which he has such desperate need. Even a meager knowledge of

English may mean an opportunity to work in a factory versus nonemployment, or it may mean a question of

life or death when a sharp command must be understood in order to avoid the danger of a descending crane.

In response to a demand for an education which should be immediately available, classes have been

established and grown apace in cooking, dressmaking, and millinery. A girl who attends them will often say

that she "expects to marry a workingman next spring," and because she has worked in a factory so long she

knows "little about a house." Sometimes classes are composed of young matrons of like factory experiences.

I recall one of them whose husband had become so desperate after two years of her unskilled cooking that he

had threatened to desert her and go where he could get "decent food," as she confided to me in a tearful

interview, when she followed my advice to take the HullHouse courses in cooking, and at the end of six

Two distinct trends are found in response to these classes; the first is for domestic training, and the other is

for trade teaching which shall enable the poor little milliner and dressmaker apprentices to shorten the years

The beginning of trade instruction has been already evolved in connection with the HullHouse Boys' club.

The ample Boys' club building presented to HullHouse three years ago by one of our trustees has afforded

wellequipped shops for work in wood, iron, and brass; for smithing in copper and tin; for commercial

photography, for printing, for telegraphy, and electrical construction. These shops have been filled with boys

who are eager for that which seems to give them a clew to the industrial life all about them. These classes

meet twice a week and are taught by intelligent workingmen who apparently give the boys what they want

better than do the strictly professional teachers. While these classes in no sense provide a trade training, they

often enable a boy to discover his aptitude and help him in the selection of what he "wants to be" by reducing

the trades to embryonic forms. The factories are so complicated that the boy brought in contact with them,

unless he has some preliminary preparation, is apt to become confused. In pedagogical terms, he loses his

"power of orderly reaction" and is often so discouraged or so overstimulated in his very first years of factory

One of Chicago's most significant experiments in the direction of correlating the schools with actual industry

was for several years carried on in a public school building situated near HullHouse, in which the

bricklayers' apprentices were taught eight hours a day in special classes during the nonbricklaying season.

This early public school venture anticipated the very successful arrangement later carried on in Cincinnati, in

Pittsburgh and in Chicago itself, whereby a group of boys at work in a factory alternate month by month with

another group who are in school and are thus intelligently conducted into the complicated processes of

modern industry. But for a certain type of boy who has been demoralized by the constant change and

excitement of street life, even these apprenticeship classes are too strenuous, and he has to be lured into the

It sometimes happens that boys are held in the HullHouse classes for weeks by their desire for the

excitement of placing burglar alarms under the door mats. But to enable the possessor of even a little

knowledge to thus play with it, is to decoy his feet at least through the first steps of the long, hard road of

learning, although even in this, the teacher must proceed warily. A typical street boy who was utterly

absorbed in a woodcarving class, abruptly left never to return when he was told to use some simple

calculations in the laying out of the points. He evidently scented the approach of his old enemy, arithmetic,

and fled the field. On the other hand, we have come across many cases in which boys have vainly tried to

secure such opportunities for themselves. During the trial of a boy of ten recently arrested for truancy, it

developed that he had spent many hours watching the electrical construction in a downtown building, and

many others in the public library "reading about electricity." Another boy who was taken from school early,

when his father lost both of his legs in a factory accident, tried in vain to find a place for himself "with

machinery." He was declared too small for any such position, and for four years worked as an errand boy,

during which time he steadily turned in his unopened pay envelope for the use of the household. At the end of

the fourth year the boy disappeared, to the great distress of his invalid father and his poor mother whose day

washings became the sole support of the family. He had beaten his way to Kansas City, hoping "they

wouldn't be so particular there about a fellow's size." He came back at the end of six weeks because he felt

sorry for his mother who, aroused at last to a realization of his unbending purpose, applied for help to the

Juvenile Protective Association. They found a position for the boy in a machine shop and an opportunity for

Out of the fifteen hundred members of the HullHouse Boy's club, hundreds seem to respond only to the

opportunities for recreation, and many of the older ones apparently care only for the bowling and the

billiards. And yet tournaments and match games under supervision and regulated hours are a great advance

over the sensual and exhausting pleasures to be found so easily outside the club. These organized sports

readily connect themselves with the HullHouse gymnasium and with all those enthusiasms which are so

Our gymnasium has been filled with large and enthusiastic classes for eighteen years in spite of the popularity

of dancing and other possible substitutes, while the Saturday evening athletic contests have become a feature

of the neighborhood. The Settlement strives for that type of gymnastics which is at least partly a matter of

character, for that training which presupposes abstinence and the curbing of impulse, as well as for those

athletic contests in which the mind of the contestant must be vigilant to keep the body closely to the rules of

the game. As one sees in rhythmic motion the slim bodies of a class of lads, "that scrupulous and

uncontaminate purity of form which recommended itself even to the Greeks as befitting messengers from the

gods, if such messengers should come," one offers up in awkward prosaic form the very essence of that old

prayer, "Grant them with feet so light to pass through life." But while the glory stored up for Olympian

winners was at the most a handful of parsley, an ode, fame for family and city, on the other hand, when the

men and boys from the HullHouse gymnasium bring back their cups and medals, one's mind is filled with

something like foreboding in the reflection that too much success may lead the winners into the

professionalism which is so associated with betting and so close to pugilism. Candor, however, compels me

to state that a long acquaintance with the acrobatic folk who have to do with the circus, a large number of

whom practice in our gymnasium every winter, has raised our estimate of that profession.

Young people who work long hours at sedentary occupations, factories and offices, need perhaps more than

anything else the freedom and ease to be acquired from a symmetrical muscular development and are quick to

respond to that fellowship which athletics apparently affords more easily than anything else. The Greek

immigrants form large classes and are eager to reproduce the remnants of old methods of wrestling, and other

bits of classic lore which they still possess, and when one of the Greeks won a medal in a wrestling match

which represented the championship of the entire city, it was quite impossible that he should present it to the

HullHouse trophy chest without a classic phrase which he recited most gravely and charmingly.

It was in connection with a large association of Greek lads that HullHouse finally lifted its long restriction

against military drill. If athletic contests are the residuum of warfare first waged against the conqueror

without and then against the tyrants within the State, the modern Greek youth is still in the first stage so far as

his inherited attitude against the Turk is concerned. Each lad believes that at any moment he may be called

home to fight this longtime enemy of Greece. With such a genuine motive at hand, it seemed mere

affectation to deny the use of our boys' club building and gymnasium for organized drill, although happily it

Having thus confessed to military drill countenanced if not encouraged at HullHouse, it is perhaps only fair

to relate an early experience of mine with the "Columbian Guards," and organization of the World's Fair

summer. Although the HullHouse squad was organized as the others were with the motto of a clean city, it

was very anxious for military drill. This request not only shocked my nonresistant principles, but seemed to

afford an opportunity to find a substitute for the military tactics which were used in the boys' brigades

everywhere, even in those connected with churches. As the cleaning of the filthy streets and alleys was the

ostensible purpose of the Columbian guards, I suggested to the boys that we work out a drill with sewer

spades, which with their long narrow blades and shortened handles were not so unlike bayoneted guns in size,

weight, and general appearance, but that much of the usual military drill could be readapted. While I myself

was present at the gymnasium to explain that it was nobler to drill in imitation of removing diseasebreeding

filth than to drill in simulation of warfare; while I distractedly readapted tales of chivalry to this modern

rescuing of the endangered and distressed, the new drill went forward in some sort of fashion, but so surely as

I withdrew, the drillmaster would complain that our troops would first grow selfconscious, then

demoralized, and finally flatly refuse to go on. Throughout the years since the failure of this Quixotic

experiment, I occasionally find one of these sewer spades in a HullHouse storeroom, too truncated to be

used for its original purpose and too prosaic to serve the purpose for which it was bought. I can only look at it

in the forlorn hope that it may foreshadow that piping time when the weapons of warfare shall be turned into

Before closing this chapter on Socialized Education, it is only fair to speak of the education accruing to the

HullHouse residents themselves during their years of living in what at least purports to be a center for social

While a certain number of the residents are primarily interested in charitable administration and the

amelioration which can be suggested only by those who know actual conditions, there are other residents

identified with the House from its earlier years to whom the groups of immigrants make the historic appeal,

and who use, not only their linguistic ability, but all the resource they can command of travel and reading to

qualify themselves for intelligent living in the immigrant quarter of the city. I remember one resident lately

returned from a visit in Sicily, who was able to interpret to a bewildered judge the ancient privilege of a jilted

lover to scratch the cheek of his faithless sweetheart with the edge of a coin. Although the custom in America

had degenerated into a knife slashing after the manner of foreign customs here, and although the Sicilian

deserved punishment, the incident was yet lifted out of the slough of mere brutal assault, and the

There is no doubt that residents in a Settlement too often move toward their ends "with hurried and ignoble

gait," putting forth thorns in their eagerness to bear grapes. It is always easy for those in pursuit of ends

which they consider of overwhelming importance to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and

temper, to gradually develop a dark mistaken eagerness alternating with fatigue, which supersedes "the great

Partly because of this universal tendency, partly because a Settlement shares the perplexities of its times and

is never too dogmatic concerning the final truth, the residents would be glad to make the daily life at the

but a Settlement would make clear that one need not be heartless and flippant in order to be merry, nor

solemn in order to be wise. Therefore quite as HullHouse tries to redeem billiard tables from the association

of gambling, and dancing from the temptations of the public dance halls, so it would associate with a life of

upright purpose those more engaging qualities which in the experience of the neighborhood are too often

Throughout the history of HullHouse many inquiries have been made concerning the religion of the

residents, and the reply that they are as diversified in belief and in the ardor of the inner life as any like

number of people in a college or similar group, apparently does not carry conviction. I recall that after a

house for men residents had been opened on Polk Street and the residential force at HullHouse numbered

twenty, we made an effort to come together on Sunday evenings in a household service, hoping thus to

express our moral unity in spite of the fact that we represented many creeds. But although all of us reverently

knelt when the High Church resident read the evening service and bowed our heads when the evangelical

resident led in prayer after his chapter, and although we sat respectfully through the twilight when a resident

read her favorite passages from Plato and another from Abt Vogler, we concluded at the end of the winter

that this was not religious fellowship and that we did not care for another reading club. So it was reluctantly

given up, and we found that it was quite as necessary to come together on the basis of the deed and our

common aim inside the household as it was in the neighborhood itself. I once had a conversation on the

subject with the warden of Oxford House, who kindly invited me to the evening service held for the residents

in a little chapel on the top floor of the Settlement. All the residents were High Churchmen to whom the

service was an important and reverent part of the day. Upon my reply to a query of the warden that the

residents of HullHouse could not come together for religious worship because there were among us Jews,

Roman Catholics, English Churchmen, Dissenters, and a few agnostics, and that we had found unsatisfactory

the diluted form of worship which we could carry on together, he replied that it must be most difficult to

work with a group so diversified, for he depended upon the evening service to clear away any difficulties

which the day had involved and to bring the residents to a religious consciousness of their common aim. I

replied that this diversity of creed was part of the situation in American Settlements, as it was our task to live

in a neighborhood of many nationalities and faiths, and that it might be possible that among such diversified

people it was better that the Settlement corps should also represent varying religious beliefs.

A wise man has told us that "men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and

to live in," but that it is no easy matter to find a world rational as to its intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and

practical aspects. Certainly it is no easy matter if the place selected is of the very sort where the four aspects

are apparently furthest from perfection, but an undertaking resembling this is what the Settlement gradually

becomes committed to, as its function is revealed through the reaction on its consciousness of its own

experiences. Because of this fourfold undertaking, the Settlement has gathered into residence people of

widely diversified tastes and interests, and in HullHouse, at least, the group has been surprisingly

permanent. The majority of the present corp of forty residents support themselves by their business and

professional occupations in the city, giving only their leisure time to Settlement undertakings. This in itself

tends to continuity of residence and has certain advantages. Among the present staff, of whom the larger

number have been in residence for more than twelve years, there are the secretary of the City club, two

practicing physicians, several attorneys, newspapermen, businessmen, teachers, scientists, artists, musicians,

lecturers in the School of Civics and Philanthropy, officers in The Juvenile Protective Association and in The

League for the Protection of Immigrants, a visiting nurse, a sanitary inspector, and others.

We have also worked out during our years of residence a plan of living which may be called cooperative, for

the families and individuals who rent the HullHouse apartments have the use of the central kitchen and

dining room so far as they care for them; many of them work for hours every week in the studios and shops;

the theater and drawingrooms are available for such social organization as they care to form; the entire

group of thirteen buildings is heated and lighted from a central plant. During the years, the common human

experiences have gathered about the House; funeral services have been held there, marriages and

christenings, and many memories hold us to each other as well as to our neighbors. Each resident, of course,

carefully defrays his own expenses, and his relations to his fellow residents are not unlike those of a college

professor to his colleagues. The depth and strength of his relation to the neighborhood must depend very

largely upon himself and upon the genuine friendships he has been able to make. His relation to the city as a

whole comes largely through his identification with those groups who are carrying forward the reforms which

a Settlement neighborhood so sadly needs and with which residence has made him familiar.

Life in the Settlement discovers above all what has been called "the extraordinary pliability of human nature,"

and it seems impossible to set any bounds to the moral capabilities which might unfold under ideal civic and

educational conditions. But in order to obtain these conditions, the Settlement recognizes the need of

cooperation, both with the radical and the conservative, and from the very nature of the case the Settlement

The Settlement casts side none of those things which cultivated men have come to consider reasonable and

goodly, but it insists that those belong as well to that great body of people who, because of toilsome and

underpaid labor, are unable to procure them for themselves. Added to this is a profound conviction that the

common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of

him who would approach it, that those "best results of civilization" upon which depend the finer and freer

aspects of living must be incorporated into our common life and have free mobility through all elements of

The educational activities of a Settlement, as well its philanthropic, civic, and social undertakings, are but

differing manifestations of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the very existence of the Settlement