Twenty Years at Hull

House

By

Jane Addams
 TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

CHAPTER I

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS

On the theory that our genuine impulses may be connected with our childish
experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that "No-Man'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 mazes.

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 father—
representing the entire adult world which I had basely deceived—should
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 door—which my father, because of his
Quaker tendencies, did not lock—and 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 end-of-the-world 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,
red-shirted 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 good-natured
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 at
the same time too heavy a burden to be borne alone.

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 left-hand 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, pigeon-toed 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 to-day?" "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 knowledge until this hour.
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 Hull-House, in my earliest childhood had
opposite to it—only across the road and then across a little stretch of
greensward—two 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 mill-race.

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 eighth year.

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 mill-
stones in the hope that the little hard flints flying form the miller's chisel would
light upon their backs and make the longed-for 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 hated his teasing, I
never had the courage to confess my real purpose.

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
self-made 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 cloak—in 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 self-sacrifice 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 fore-ordination 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
contains.

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 categorically asked him:-

"What are you? What do you say when people ask you?"

His eyes twinkled a little as he soberly replied:

"I am a Quaker."

"But that isn't enough to say," I urged.

"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 "Lime-Burner." My stepbrother and I carried on games and
crusades which lasted week after week, and even summer after summer, as
only free-ranging 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 Hull-House, is the constant interruption to their play which is
inevitable on the streets, so that it can never have any continuity—the 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
wind-flowers—the anemone patens—"looked as if the winds had made them,"
we thought much more of the fact that they were wind-born 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 toil—some
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 kinship with the remotest past.

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 pronunciation because it
seemed to us more religious than "plain English."

When, however, I really prayed, what I saw before my eyes was a most
outrageous picture which adorned a song-book 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 powers.

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 lamp-lit, 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, old-fashioned 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 discussed it together.

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:—
 CHAPTER II

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN

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 grown-up 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 living-room. 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 one-armed 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 reconciled that Tommy was safe in the peaceful home graveyard.

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 half-cleared 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 dimly to trace to
man's own wrongdoing.
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 we
are all forced to bear and with which I have become only too familiar.

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 sixty-five 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
much more incredible thing happened, for we were at last taken to see him.

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 heavy-headed
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 thirty-six 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
them.

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 world-old effort to imprison a space in so divine a line that it
shall hold only yearning devotion and high-hearted 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 self-government 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 ensign of
courage to the soldiers of the Wisconsin regiment.

Thirty-five 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 of the state's
aspiration even in its high mission of universal education.

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 red-letter 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
in his comings and goings at the state capital.

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 question until the Union men could rally their forces.

My father always spoke of the martyred President as Mr. Lincoln, and I never
heard the great name without a thrill. I remember the day—it must have been
one of comparative leisure, perhaps a Sunday—when 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 Double-D'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
Lincoln-Douglas debates. There were at least two pictures of Lincoln that
always hung in my father's room, and one in our old-fashioned upstairs parlor,
of Lincoln with little Tad. For one or all of these reasons I always tend to
associate Lincoln with the tenderest thoughts of my father.

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 Hull-House to Lincoln Park—for no cars were running
regularly at that moment of sympathetic strikes—in 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 had won charity
for those on both sides of "an irrepressible conflict."

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 men were instinctively afraid of him.

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 Hull-House 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
Hull-House "the largest institution on the West Side," but that we were much
concerned that our neighbors should be protected from untoward conditions of
work, and—so much heroics, youth must permit itself—if to accomplish this
the destruction of Hull-House 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 obligation of social intercourse.

Of the many old friends of my father who kindly came to look up his daughter
in the first days of Hull-House, 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 Hull-House 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 self-government failed here, it would be the
disappointment of the centuries and that upon their ability to organize self-
government 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 new-fangled business," and had no use for any railroad, much less for
one in which they were asked to risk their hard-earned 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 high-spirited 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 to-day, 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 public-
spirited 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 twenty-five 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 Hull-House, in spite of exigent demands upon my
slender purse for candy and shoes, I gave to a club of boys twenty-five copies of
the then new Carl Schurz's "Appreciation of Abraham Lincoln."
In our early effort at Hull-House 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 for any successful career in our conglomerate America.

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 road-building 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 class-conscious 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, while at the same time the
rustic American looked on in detached comment.

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 self-respecting 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 this

Faith to each other; this fidelity

Of fellow wanderers in a desert place.

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 two years
before.

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 the barren places
of life.

Gradually a healing sense of well-being 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 American Academy of Political and Social
Science. It begins as follows:—

The word "settlement," which we have borrowed from London, is apt to

grate a little upon American ears. It is not, after all, so long ago that
Americans who settled were those who had adventured into a new country,
where they were pioneers in the midst of difficult surroundings. The word
still implies migrating from one condition of life to another totally unlike it,
and against this implication the resident of an American settlement takes
alarm.

We do not like to acknowledge that Americans are divided into two

nations, as her prime minister once admitted of England. We are not
willing, openly and professedly, to assume that American citizens are
broken up into classes, even if we make that assumption the preface to a
plea that the superior class has duties to the inferior. Our democracy is
still our most precious possession, and we do well to resent any inroads
upon it, even though they may be made in the name of philanthropy.

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.
This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at
the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text entry and proof-reading of this
chapter were the work of volunteer Diana Camden.
 CHAPTER III

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS

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 students.

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 West."

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 self-sacrifice 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 campus and the buildings, without knowing that
it could have been otherwise.

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 son of Adam dimly longs."

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 made various and
restless attempts to break through this dull obtuseness.

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 supper
"whether we were able to or not."

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 Pegasus, had slain the earthy dragon.
There were practically no Economics taught in women's colleges—at least in
the fresh-water ones—thirty 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 to him and twenty-five cents for every volume of Irving's "Life of
Washington."

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 rough-and-tumble 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 librarian in that early effort to bring "books to
the people."
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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House had been the happiest and most familiar they had
had in America.

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 upon which was
obligatory.

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 fellow-students who cared for him
merely on the basis of his grandfatherly relation to "Little Women." I recall
cleaning the clay of the unpaved streets off his heavy cloth overshoes in a state
of ecstatic energy.
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 Port Royalists than by any others.

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 college—one of the black days which followed the death of my father—this
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 argument for the permanence of the excellent.

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 old-fashioned 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 drawn waters of healing and
inspiration.

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 old-fashioned 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 the first place.

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 feminine orator.

I so heartily concurred with the decision of the judges of the contest that it was
with a care-free 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 oratorical contest seemed of little moment.

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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 of such master
reasonings.

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 build up a conception lofty enough to be of use in the world."

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 trade-unionists and a non-union employee of their establishment. The
non-union 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 trade-unionists 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 place.

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, trade-unionists, 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 proceeds—I
am forced to admit, with overmuch conviction—with 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 self-deceit 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
upon the magnetic chain of humanity."

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
brother-in-law 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 one of flagging
zeal.

As our boarding-school 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 self-tradition."

We believed, in our sublime self-conceit, 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 self-
blame wherein, if we held our minds open, we might learn something of the
mystery and complexity of life's purposes.

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 rose-colored mist with which
the dream of youth so readily envelops the future.

Whatever may have been the perils of self-tradition, I certainly did not escape
them, for it required eight years—from the time I left Rockford in the summer
of 1881 until Hull-House was opened in the the autumn of 1889—to 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 intellectual or
aesthetic reflection of it.
 CHAPTER IV

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION

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 Hull-House 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 far-off
abstraction utterly separated from his active life."

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 overwhelmed by a sense of failure.

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 ill-clad 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 ill-fitting, cast-off 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 bargain-hunter 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 of the street, and clutching
forward for food which was already unfit to eat.

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 seized
me then.

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 empty-handed 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 vaguest rumor.

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 learning—that when suddenly called upon for a quick decision
in the world of life and death, he had been able to act only through a literary
suggestion.
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 culture is
three fourths of human life."

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 great-grandmothers; 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 have no chance even to make "the
great refusal."

In the German and French pensions, which twenty-five 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 little songs and waltzes and not time for half an hour's practice a day."

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 heavy-laden
market women and underpaid street laborers, gibing her with a sense of her
uselessness.

I recall one snowy morning in Saxe-Coburg, 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, hard-working 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 high-water mark of my enthusiasm.

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
not yet so cured but that I wanted more of them.

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 twenty-five 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 was

"Weary of myself and sick of asking

What I am and what I ought to be,"

and that various cherished safeguards and claims to self-dependence 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 well-known 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 well-being 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 slip back into the
doctrines of selection and aristocracy?

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 hogs—collateral for a promissory
note—were huddled into an open pen. Their backs were humped in a curious,
camel-like 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 half-human. 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
innocent-looking 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 sadder for the experience.

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 well-known 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 trades-unionists, 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 self-seeking. Apparently I looked upon the efforts of
the trades-unionists 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 Humanity."

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 ill-digested 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 differing religious beliefs.

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 open-minded 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 Hull-House." 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 street-car 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 them would
do it for you as quick as they would for the Sisters."

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 self-deception 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 ox-cart of self-seeking.

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 old-time
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 most hazy in detail.

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 ever-lasting "preparation for life,"
however ill-prepared I might be.

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.
This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at
the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text entry and proof-reading of this
chapter were the work of volunteer Judi Oswalt.
 CHAPTER V

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 high-minded
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 unnatural attempts to understand life through cooperative
living."

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 Hull-House 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 expression that has peculiar value.

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 so-called
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
you would treat any other citizen, is to lay yourself open to deep suspicion.

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 ex-mayor 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 drawing-room on the first floor.

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 second-hand furniture store, and at
one time the Little Sisters of the Poor had used it for a home for the aged. It
had a half-skeptical 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 eagerness for
finding folklore.

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 Hull-House. 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 past.

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 our neighbors.

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 honesty and
kindliness of our new neighbors.

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 could hope to do.

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 mind as sympathetic and correct.

Halsted Street is thirty-two miles long, and one of the great thoroughfares
of Chicago; Polk Street crosses it midway between the stockyards to the
south and the shipbuilding yards on the north branch of the Chicago
River. For the six miles between these two industries the street is lined
with shops of butchers and grocers, with dingy and gorgeous saloons, and
pretentious establishments for the sale of ready-made clothing. Polk
Street, running west from Halsted Street, grows rapidly more prosperous;
running a mile east to State Street, it grows steadily worse, and crosses a
network of vice on the corners of Clark Street and Fifth Avenue. Hull-
House once stood in the suburbs, but the city has steadily grown up
around it and its site now has corners on three or four foreign colonies.
Between Halsted Street and the river live about ten thousand Italians—
Neapolitans, Sicilians, and Calabrians, with an occasional Lombard or
Venetian. To the south on Twelfth Street are many Germans, and side
streets are given over almost entirely to Polish and Russian Jews. Still
farther south, these Jewish colonies merge into a huge Bohemian colony,
so vast that Chicago ranks as the third Bohemian city in the world. To the
northwest are many Canadian-French, clannish in spite of their long
residence in America, and to the north are Irish and first-generation
Americans. On the streets directly west and farther north are well-to-do
English speaking families, many of whom own their own houses and have
lived in the neighborhood for years; one man is still living in his old
farmhouse.

The policy of the public authorities of never taking an initiative, and

always waiting to be urged to do their duty, is obviously fatal in a
neighborhood where there is little initiative among the citizens. The idea
underlying our self- government breaks down in such a ward. The streets
are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools inadequate, sanitary
legislation unenforced, the street lighting bad, the paving miserable and
altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul
beyond description. Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street
sewer. The older and richer inhabitants seem anxious to move away as
rapidly as they can afford it. They make room for newly arrived immigrants
who are densely ignorant of civic duties. This substitution of the older
inhabitants is accomplished industrially also, in the south and east
quarters of the ward. The Jews and Italians do the finishing for the great
clothing manufacturers, formerly done by Americans, Irish, and Germans,
who refused to submit to the extremely low prices to which the sweating
system has reduced their successors. As the design of the sweating system
is the elimination of rent from the manufacture of clothing, the "outside
work" is begun after the clothing leaves the cutter. An unscrupulous
contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear
shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom, as
these conditions imply low rental. Hence these shops abound in the worst
of the foreign districts where the sweater easily finds his cheap basement
and his home finishers.

The houses of the ward, for the most part wooden, were originally built for
one family and are now occupied by several. They are after the type of the
inconvenient frame cottages found in the poorer suburbs twenty years ago.
Many of them were built where they now stand; others were brought
thither on rollers, because their previous sites had been taken by factories.
The fewer brick tenement buildings which are three or four stories high are
comparatively new, and there are few large tenements. The little wooden
houses have a temporary aspect, and for this reason, perhaps, the
tenement-house legislation in Chicago is totally inadequate. Rear
tenements flourish; many houses have no water supply save the faucet in
the back yard, there are no fire escapes, the garbage and ashes are placed
in wooden boxes which are fastened to the street pavements. One of the
most discouraging features about the present system of tenement houses
is that many are owned by sordid and ignorant immigrants. The theory
that wealth brings responsibility, that possession entails at length
education and refinement, in these cases fails utterly. The children of an
Italian immigrant owner may "shine" shoes in the street, and his wife may
pick rags from the street gutter, laboriously sorting them in a dingy court.
Wealth may do something for her self-complacency and feeling of
consequence; it certainly does nothing for her comfort or her children's
improvement nor for the cleanliness of anyone concerned. Another thing
that prevents better houses in Chicago is the tentative attitude of the real
estate men. Many unsavory conditions are allowed to continue which
would be regarded with horror if they were considered permanent.
Meanwhile, the wretched conditions persist until at least two generations
of children have been born and reared in them.

In every neighborhood where poorer people live, because rents are

supposed to be cheaper there, is an element which, although uncertain in
the individual, in the aggregate can be counted upon. It is composed of
people of former education and opportunity who have cherished ambitions
and prospects, but who are caricatures of what they meant to be—"hollow
ghosts which blame the living men." There are times in many lives when
there is a cessation of energy and loss of power. Men and women of
 education and refinement come to live in a cheaper neighborhood because
they lack the ability to make money, because of ill health, because of an
unfortunate marriage, or for other reasons which do not imply criminality
or stupidity. Among them are those who, in spite of untoward
circumstances, keep up some sort of an intellectual life; those who are
"great for books," as their neighbors say. To such the Settlement may be a
genuine refuge.

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 and so make the table ready for the
stacks of Florentine photographs.

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
popular—a combination of a social atmosphere with serious study.

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 Hull-House 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 self-conscious
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 wine-soaked 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 wide-open 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 listening fringe to "The Young Heros."

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 five-story
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
super-refinement to those in dire need of clothing.

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 Hull-House,

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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 conditions.
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 deep-seated 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 a substantial
benefit is too often acknowledged.

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 humanity which
raises such offices into a bond of fellowship.

From the first it seemed understood that we were ready to perform the
humblest neighborhood services. We were asked to wash the new-born babies,
and to prepare the dead for burial, to nurse the sick, and to "mind the
children."

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 periods of exultation, in one of
which he died.

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 five-
cent 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 American ways.

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 essential differences of race, language, creed, and
tradition.

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."

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at
the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text entry and proof-reading of this
chapter were the work of volunteer Diana Camden.

"Chapter VI: The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements." by

Jane Addams (1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with
Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan
Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 113-127.
 CHAPTER VI

SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS

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 the
general theme of Philanthropy and Social Progress.

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 statement.

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 Hull-House. 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 developed.

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 the day to express
regret for its stilted title.

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 mid-air, 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 of a poet, and it is hazardous for any but a poet to
attempt it.

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 plate-glass 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 powers.

"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 strong-growing 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 self-forgetting and self-sacrificing,
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, ill-advised 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 law—that 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, are unconscious of the situation and we
have all the elements of a tragedy.

We have in America a fast-growing 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 self-destructive. 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 so-called 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 revelation—a 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 world—the 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 pre-eminently in England, is endeavoring to
embody itself, not in a sect, but in society itself.

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 Hull-House 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 self-
sacrifice; 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
self-assertion, 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 over-differentiation.

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
social and individual salvation.

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at
the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text entry and proof-reading of this
chapter were the work of volunteer Diana Camden.
 CHAPTER VII

SOME EARLY UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE

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 Hull-House held to this
standard in the opening of our new coffee-house 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
children with which they might secure a lunch from a neighboring candy shop.

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
Hull-House 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 had never
seen anything but potatoes going in and beer coming out.

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 Hull-House 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 factories—a sale which has steadily increased throughout
the years—and 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 coffee-house
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 innocent and legitimate occasions as weddings and
christenings.

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
coffee-house 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 Hull-House 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 coffee-house 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 Hull-House Men's Club who had been appointed
superintendent of Douglas Park had secured there the first public swimming
pool, and his fellow club members were proud of the achievement.

There was in the earliest undertakings at Hull-House 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 cooperation which should be effective against them.

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
organization and possibly complement them by small efforts of our own?

Some such vague hope was in our minds when we started the Hull-House
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 world-old
effort—the "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 quarter-of-
a-ton 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 Hull-House 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 by the cooperators taking up their stock in the remaining coal.

Our next cooperative experiment was much more successful, perhaps because
it was much more spontaneous.

At a meeting of working girls held at Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 original building contained, and
numbered fifty members.

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 kind-hearted 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 use.

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 touch "the life of the people," they
would understand.

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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 money-making,
but that from the very nature of the case our refusal of this money could not be
made public because a representative of Hull-House 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 Hull-House
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 slave-trading merchant
in Bristol, who had been much disapproved of by his fellow townsmen and had
hoped by this transmutation of ill-gotten 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 world-old 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 Bristol in regard to the entire moral issue.

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 University of
Chicago, the righteousness of whose foundation they challenged.

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 they give no religious instruction;
he has always been a very devout man."

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 so intense, although it doubtless registered genuine moral
concern.

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 Hull-House 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 old-time cooperators denounced the modern method as "too much
like cut-throat 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 Hull-House 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 cooperation in Ireland.

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 trades-unions 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 Hull-House because
they heard that we "had once tried a cooperative coal association," might well
have convinced me of the persistency of the cooperative ideal.

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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 department of a large
shop, had begun to suspect her past life.

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 Hull-House, 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 was a show window for
candy kids."

In spite of poignant experiences or, perhaps, because of them, the memory of

the first years at Hull-House 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 a book by the fire was of necessity definitely
abandoned.

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 Hull-House should have
been designed for an art gallery, for although it contained a reading-room 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
wage-earning 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 Hull-House
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 perplexities Hull-House was
often called irreligious.

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 Hull-House
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 a building for them, as that the boys should clamor for more room.

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 saved money for the consummation of some ardently desired
undertaking.

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 Hull-House
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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-House residential force numbered fifteen, a majority of
whom still remain identified with the Settlement.

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 labor and Christian teaching.

In those early years at Hull-House 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 "Hull-House 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 Hull-House to shake his head and meditatively remark, "There
is not such a street—no, not one—in all the territory of Belgium."

At the end of five years the residents of Hull-House published some first found
facts and our reflections thereon in a book called "Hull-House 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 worthy of a second.

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at
the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text entry and proof-reading of this
chapter were the work of volunteer Jill Thoren.
"Chapter VIII: Problems of Poverty." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)
From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by
Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.
154-176.
 CHAPTER VII

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY

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 Hull-House. 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 living almost beyond the limit of human endurance.

The poor creature who clung so desperately to her chest of drawers was really
clinging to the last remnant of normal living—a 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 Hull-House coffee-house 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
adventures, with which they regaled the other paupers during the long winter.

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 pie at Mike's wedding"
and she was disappointed after all.

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 hot-water bottles." Suddenly
the harsh gasping voice was stilled in death and I awaited the doctor's coming
shaken and horrified.

The lack of municipal regulation already referred to was, in the early days of
Hull-House, 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 administered, were inadequate in
extent and antiquated in method.

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 Hull-House. 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 matter and roundly "cursed poverty."

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, reminding one of
the London gatherings in Trafalgar Square.

It was the winter in which Mr. Stead wrote his indictment of Chicago. I can
vividly recall his visits to Hull-House, 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 out-of-
door 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, Hull-House 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 seventy-five 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 street-cleaning 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 ever done.

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 Hull-House. 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 Hull-House 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 episode is almost sure to invite
blundering.

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 render the solution of both impossible.

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 worn-out 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 relief-station 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 become more social and free
from economic disturbance.

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, whose existence I had
quite forgotten.

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 Hull-House 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
and alarm.
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 Hull-House.
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 thirty-five 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 designed for the protection of such girls as her daughters.

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 playground protects the little one from
bullies.

We early learned to know the children of hard-driven 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 third-story 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 Hull-House. 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 so-called
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.

Hull-House 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 again—the "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 which gives one a new sense of the security of
affection.

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 their mother.

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 her children."

As I walked on, I could but wonder in which particular we are most stupid—to
judge a man's worth so solely by his wage-earning capacity that a good wife
feels justified in leaving him, or in holding fast to that wretched delusion that a
woman can both support and nurture her children.

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. Five-
year-old 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,
sorrow-stricken woman looked up and replied, "If you could give me my wages
for to-morrow, 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 poverty-stricken. The long hours of factory labor necessary for
earning the support of a child leave no time for the tender care and caressing
which may enrich the life of the most piteous baby.

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 in a Settlement are constantly brought in
contact.

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 Hull-House, we knew a well-bred 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 hammock-wise 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 disappointment, died
upon my lips.

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.

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at
the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text entry and proof-reading of this
chapter were the work of volunteer Flo Carrierre.

"I am a full-time staff at University, continuing my studies on a part-time basis.

I volunteer in the community, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to
make a difference in the Celebration of Women Writers by contributing time to
enter book chapters."—Flo Carrierre.
 CHAPTER IX

A DECADE OF ECONOMIC DISCUSSION

The Hull-House 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 1890-
1900 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 Hull-House 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 1889-
1890, 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
to-day, 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 and all its sensational results might have been avoided.

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 Hull-House 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 met with the strong disapprobation of the members.

In these weekly discussions in the Hull-House 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 ill-regulated 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 man
may be able to work out the problems of his own existence.
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 Hull-House 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 a department of sociology.

In the meantime the Hull-House 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 remarkable—that 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 he saw a drunkard reeling along the same street.

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 out
of joint.

It was doubtless owing largely to this club that Hull-House 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 common-sense
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, Hull-House 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 rough-looking 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 class
conflict was the test of faith.

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 religion embodying the hope of the world and the
protection of all who suffer.

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 Hull-
House 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 been a college professor who "wasn't accustomed to being talked back to."

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 research.
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.

Trades-unionists, 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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-House, afforded but
a striking portrayal of that "between-age 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 during the bread riots of the earlier part of the century.

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 eight-hour 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 Hull-House, 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 him—an 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 rose-colored 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 demonstrate the reality of abstract
notions?

I remember when Frederick Harrison visited Hull-House 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 Hull-House when Benjamin
Kidd, author of the much-read "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 Hull-House 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 much-needed
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 half-starved 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 killed by dangerous and hurtful tasks."

As the American city is awakening to self-consciousness, 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 totally unregulated by well-considered legislation.

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 Hull-House
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 difference between mere social unrest
and spiritual impulse.

The group of Hull-House residents, which by the end of the decade comprised
twenty-five, 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 to-day. 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 varied anticipation.

]
 CHAPTER X

PIONEER LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS

Our very first Christmas at Hull-House, 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 Hull-House 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
child-labor 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 thirty-three 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, English-speaking
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 Russian-Jewish 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 wages—but what could the family live upon that week in case she did!
Her child mind, of course, had no sense of proportion, and carbolic acid
appeared inevitable.

While we found many pathetic cases of child labor and hard-driven 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 conditions if we would make it of any genuine value.

There was at that time no statistical information on Chicago industrial

conditions, and Mrs. Florence Kelley, an early resident of Hull-House,
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
Hull-House, 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 trades-unions 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 trades-unions. 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 Hull-House, and continued
with the unions in their well-conducted campaign until the passage of Illinois's
first Factory Legislation was secured, a statute which has gradually been built
upon by many public-spirited citizens until Illinois stands well among the
States, at least in the matter of protecting her children. The Hull-House
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 well-known Chicago women should accompany this first
little group of Settlement folk who with trades-unionists 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 law.

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 forty-eight a week, should be inserted in the
first factory legislation of the State. Although we had lived at Hull-House 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 house—too frightened and disgraced
to return to her mother.

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 eight-hour 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
Eight-Hour Club of working women met at Hull-House, 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 the "referendum" in a
limited use of the term.

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 hard-working widows, in whose behalf many prosperous people
were so eloquent. These widowed mothers would say, "Why, of course, that is
what I am working for—to 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 live—that 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 self-made 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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-House; 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 brought against the violators of the
law.

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 trades-unions, as the securing of the law had
already come from them, and through the years which have elapsed since, the
experience of the Hull-House 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 unionism."

This special value of the trades-unions first became clear to the residents of
Hull-House 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 English-
speaking 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 fellow-workers.

During the fourth year of our residence at Hull-House 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 which have been sent from infected city sweatshops.

Through our efforts to modify the sweating system, the Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House
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 fellow workers may not be "nice girls."

In the first years of Hull-House we came across no trades-unions among the

women workers, and I think, perhaps, that only one union, composed solely of
women, was to be found in Chicago then—that of the bookbinders. I easily
recall the evening when the president of this pioneer organization accepted an
invitation to take dinner at Hull-House. 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 Hull-House, and her hearty
cooperation was assured until she moved to Boston and became a general
organizer for the American Federation of Labor.

The women shirt makers and the women cloak makers were both organized at
Hull-House 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 drawing-room door, or, in
trades-union 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 big-minded
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 a class struggle.

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 so-called "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 far-reaching 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 self-
righteousness which makes the spirit of forgiveness well-nigh impossible.

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 Hull-House
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 street-car 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 black-listed 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 many trying weeks and at last suffer a complete moral
collapse.

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 broken-down 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 Hull-House 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, and employment of children.

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. Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 trades-unions 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 twenty-two 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 Hull-House, 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 fair-minded
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 hitherto new to a monopoly-ridden public.

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 trades-
unions 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
trades-unionists 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 trades-unionism
to the unskilled, unbefriended worker. I remember in a meeting held at Hull-
House 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 inaugurated for their own purposes.

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 trades-unions is most obvious. This identity of aim
apparently commits the Settlement in the public mind to all the faiths and
works of actual trades-unions. Fellowship has so long implied similarity of
creed that the fact that the Settlement often differs widely from the policy
pursued by trades-unionists 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 trades-unionists themselves are suspicious of all but their
"own kind." It is during the much longer periods between strikes that the
Settlement's fellowship with trades-unions 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 of the Illinois Ten-Hour Law for Women and in its many other fine
undertakings.

Nevertheless the reaction of strikes upon Chicago Settlements affords an

interesting study in social psychology. For whether Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 arbitrator.
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
Settlement, unsatisfactory and difficult as the role often becomes.

There has gradually developed between the various Settlements of Chicago a

warm fellowship founded upon a like-mindedness 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 wise—that 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 ten-hour case.

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 world-
wide significance and manifold manifestation.
 CHAPTER XI

IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN

From our very first months at Hull-House 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 Hull-House. 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 American clothes, and
with their needs for an interpreter.

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 Hull-House heartily cooperated.

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
enlarging the functions of the Federal Department of Immigration.

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 English-speaking 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 hand-clapping as she made an old-fashioned 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, and not quite so much
assurance that the new was the best.

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 money-making 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 Hull-House, 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
Pan-Slavic Movement. A Bohemian widow who supported herself and her two
children by scrubbing, hastily sent her youngest child to purchase, with the
twenty-five 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Goethe declares to
be the basis of all sound progress.

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 Hull-House.
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 weavers had been.

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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-House, 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 Museum—
where 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 Hull-House has scarcely begun to develop, of
demonstrating that culture is an understanding of the long-established
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 white-clad 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 family life.

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 stick-spindle 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 life—how hard it must be to exchange it all for a
two-room 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 something of the old
ways.

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 sanctities—to the shrine before which she
had always prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted church—and
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
walked timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore.

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 which had been so much
admired.

A club of necktie workers formerly meeting at Hull-House 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
self-supporting industry through the sale of its homespun products.

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 Hull-
House, 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 Hull-House 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 long-
established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that
the art with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his
uncertain temperament.

There are many examples of touching fidelity to immigrant parents 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 with paramount claims.

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.

There are many convincing illustrations that this parental harshness often
results in juvenile delinquency. A Polish boy of seventeen came to Hull-House
one day to ask a contribution of fifty cents "towards a flower piece for the
funeral of an old Hull-House club boy." A few questions made it clear that the
object was fictitious, whereupon the boy broke down and half-defiantly stated
that he wanted to buy two twenty-five 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 father; "just look at the clothes he buys me" was his concluding remark.

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 sixty-two 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 old-country 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
Madchen" and no one had the heart to tell her of her own blindness.

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
recently had thus carried away and sold to one man two tons of iron.

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 were still a frightened little boy in the
steerage.

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 Hull-House "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 Hull-House, 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 Italy—only mixed
it in her own house and then taken it out to the village oven—makes 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 children—that skillful care which every
tenement-house 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 the way said that it was all right.

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
fast-changing curriculum in the direction of the vacation-school experiments
will react more directly upon such households.

It is difficult to write of the relation of the older and most foreign-looking

immigrants to the children of other people—the Italians whose fruit-carts 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 Hull-House 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 Anglo-Saxon 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 Hull-House 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
cosmopolitan neighbors.

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
Hull-House 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 Hull-House, in which the achievements of the

classic period were set forth both in Greek and English by scholars of well-
known 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
Athens itself, so deeply cherished in the hearts of this group of citizens.

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 Hull-
House 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.

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at
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 CHAPTER XII

TOLSTOYISM

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 Hull-House 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 Tolstoy—that the
Settlement, or Hull-House 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 the needy can claim to have served them.

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 righteousness, but to discover
where the path lies.

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 self-distrust; 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 whom it is ordinarily performed, had brought him peace!

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 Smith, to effect if possible a more complete recovery.

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 seer—his
message is much too confused and contradictory for that—but as to a man who
has had the ability to lift his life to the level of his conscience, to translate his
theories into action.

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 self-
examination 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 far-reaching 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 lesson—these 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 secular.

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 in the booming
hymn

When wilt Thou save the people,

O God of Mercy, when!

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 old-fashioned
orthodox Socialist who had not yet begun to yield to the biting ridicule of
Bernard Shaw although he flamed in their midst that evening.
Octavia Hill kindly demonstrated to us the principles upon which her well-
founded 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 mural frescoes portraying the heroism in the life
of the modern workingman.

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 of modern capitalism.

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 halls—vaudeville shows we later called them in Chicago—which 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, heard a program the better for this effort.

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
cared-for donkeys, and the warden, Herbert Stead, exhibited almost the
enthusiasm of his well-known 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 neglected.

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, another
is dying of hunger."

The fair of Nijni-Novgorod 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 self-conscious
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 in
industrial affairs.

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 Hull-House appear much more noble and unique than I should have
ventured to do.

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 thirty-six 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 five-o'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 martyrdom.

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 worked with his
hands, had come to be a prototype to many of his generation.

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 grown-up 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 hay-making 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 food prepared by someone else's labor. Tolstoy ate his simple 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 matter with their own
consciences.

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 Hull-
House 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 expenditure of energy?

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 well—that 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-
House 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 wants—were 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 one-legged 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 not—the fanatic's joy in seeing
his own formula translated into action. At any rate, as we reached the
common-place 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 non-resistance 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 long-kept
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 Hull-House. It seemed possible to spend this fund only for the relief of
the most primitive wants of food and shelter on the part of the most needy
families.
This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at
the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text entry and proof-reading of this
chapter were the work of volunteer Terri Perkins.
 CHAPTER XIII

PUBLIC ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS

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 homes of the rag pickers for further sorting and
washing.

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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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
tenement-house 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 the city clean.
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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 death rate in the
various wards of the city.

The Hull-House 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 Hull-House to the health
department were one thousand and thirty-seven. 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 ill-kept 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 well-known 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 who tried to
make the garbage wagons carry away the contents of his stable.

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 use—much 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 phaeton" and who took my side of the
controversy.

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 citizens, the Illinois legislature made that possible.
Many of the foreign-born 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 so-called "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 alleys than to stay here any longer!"

And yet the spectacle of eight hours' work for eight hours' pay, the even-
handed 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 all-
powerful 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 ward inspector out of office.

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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House, accompanying the offer, however, with
the warning remark, that if we should choose to use the income from the rents
in sanitary improvements we should be throwing our money away.

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 Hull-House 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. Hull-
House 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 general
order and who became a valued adjunct of the House.

During fifteen years this public-spirited owner of the property paid all the
taxes, and when the block was finally sold he made possible the playground
equipment of a near-by 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 so
much like Italy."
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 Hull-House 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 Burns—the 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 Hull-House resident, the association had obtained the enactment of a model
tenement-house 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 Hull-House, 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 tenants was
in any wise as important as his undisturbed rents.

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 Hull-House 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 as that of the "lung block" in New York.
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 thirty-sixth of the population of
the city, registered one sixth of the total number of deaths, two of the Hull-
House 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 tenement-house 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 self-sacrificing 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 rest of the community and its interests.

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 landlords.

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 twenty-four. 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. Hull-House 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 trial to a successful issue.

Inevitable misunderstanding also developed in connection with the attempt on

the part of Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 super-refinement 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 the instrument was not fitted to find
it out.

For many years we have administered a branch station of the federal post office
at Hull-House, 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 twenty-four 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 compared with those of other
states.

The investigations of Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 a sanitary inspector on the city staff.
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 Hull-House,
whose long residence in an industrial neighborhood as well as her scientific
attainment, give her peculiar qualifications for the undertaking.

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 Hull-House
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 Hull-House
residents testified before the Federal Industrial Commission in 1900, and much
later with genuine enthusiasm joined with trades-unionists and other public-
spirited 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 James.

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 there should affect their convictions.

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 wanted—to be swallowed and digested, to disappear into the
bulk of the people.

Twenty years later I am willing to testify that something of the sort does take
place after years of identification with an industrial community.
 CHAPTER XIV

CIVIC COOPERATION

One of the first lessons we learned at Hull-House 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 patients.

I have heard a broken-hearted 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 more comprehending than that of any individual
group.

It was as early as our second winter on Halsted Street that one of the Hull-
House 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 Hull-House 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 came to depend upon her suggestion
and advice.

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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House has always held its activities lightly, ready to
hand them over to whosoever would carry them on properly.

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 Hull-House 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 Hull-
House 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 tenement-house 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 Board had established a
branch reading room at Hull-House.

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 of a
veteran police sergeant.

Several of these earlier attempts at civic cooperation were undertaken in

connection with the Hull-House 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 Hull-House
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 among his constituents.

Hull-House 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 Hull-
House Men's Club who thus became his colleague in the city council. When
Hull-House, however, made an effort in the following spring against the re-
election 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 living.

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
franchise-seeking corporations; it took us some time to understand why so
large a proportion of our neighbors were street-car 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House lasting through weeks and months by a Chicago daily
newspaper which has since ceased publication.

During the third campaign I received many anonymous letters—those 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 lodging-house 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
threatened.

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 deep-sea
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 second-class 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 themselves.

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 second-class 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 Hull-House has never since
failed; another was a sense of identification with public-spirited 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 Hull-House,
traveling the long distance every day throughout the autumn and winter that
he might qualify as a nineteenth-ward 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House Cooperative Coal Association brought
together the poorer ones.

I remember that during the second campaign against our alderman, Governor
Pingree of Michigan came to visit at Hull-House. 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 well-meaning 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 nineteenth-ward experience had
convinced him of the unity of city politics, and that he constantly used our
campaign as a challenge to the unaroused citizens living in wards less
conspicuously corrupt.

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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House, 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 and girl under arrest for a trivial
offense.

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 Hull-House 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 public-spirited citizens who first
supplied only Mrs. Stevens' salary later maintained a corps of twenty-two such
officers; several of these were Hull-House 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 the examination may
be, it is still our hope of political salvation.

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 twenty-two officers meet weekly at Hull-
House 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 safeguarding and
protection.

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
Five-Cent Theaters arrange for "stunts" which shall deal with the subject of
public health and morals, when the lecturers provided are entertaining as well
as instructive.

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 even-handed 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 sources—official 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
public-spirited 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 court-records 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 lives under
the most adverse city conditions.

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 ill-adapted 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
Cooperation not to attempt an outline.

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 self-direction 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 well-deserved 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 principles were but appointed to office, public welfare must be
established.

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 self-seeking 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 so-called 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 platform.

This much talked of affiliation between the teachers and the trades-unionists
had been, at least in the first instance, but one more tactic in the long struggle
against the tax-dodging 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 grade-
school 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 rake-off in the contract for
every new building or coal supply or adoption of school-books. 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 smooth-running
schools. All this, however, dangerously approximated the commercialistic ideal
of high salaries only for the management with the final test of a small expense
account and a large output.

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 well-intentioned expression of
the bureaucracy necessary in a large system but which under pressure had
become unnecessarily self-assertive, and on the other side a fairly militant
demand for self-government made in the name of freedom. Both sides
inevitably exaggerated the difficulties of the situation, and both felt that they
were standing by important principles.

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
stepping-stones. 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 half-hearted
fashion. Before my School Board experience, I thought that life had taught me
at least one hard-earned 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 indefinitely postponed.
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 verbal discussions
of public affairs.
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 property-
owning 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 forced to enlarge the boundary of its
activity.
 CHAPTER XV

THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS

From the early days at Hull-House, 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
memory.

On the whole we were much impressed by the great desire for self-
improvement, 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House severing
their connection with us because their ambitious and right-minded efforts had
been unappreciated, basing this on the ground that we had not urged the
expulsion of the so-called "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 Hull-House. 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 self-seeking and personal improvement leading straight into
the pit of self-righteousness 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 Hull-House 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 custom-made clothing from samples of cloth he
displayed, although the orders were filled by ready-made 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 social clubs.

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 Hull-House club." I once asked one of these young people,
a man who held a good position on a Chicago daily, what special thing Hull-
House 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 I began to
have confidence in what I could do."

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 Hull-House 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 twenty-five 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 still held.

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 Hull-House
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
companionship of the young people is safe and unsullied.

As an illustration of this difference in standard, I may instance an early Hull-

House 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
one.

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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-
House 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 Hull-House, 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 twenty-five thousand young people under the age of twenty-five
passed through the Juvenile and Municipal Courts of Chicago—approximately
one out of every eighty of the entire population, or one out of every fifty-two of
those under twenty-five 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 Hull-House 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 edge of the pit.

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 who quickly discover an unprotected girl.

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 good-by and ran
up the steps shutting herself in the vestibule from which she did not emerge
until the dazzled and bewildered young man had vanished down the street.
Then there is the ever-recurring 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:

The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze

On some gray rock.

I was grimly reminded of that moment a year later when I heard the tale of this
seventeen-year-old 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 learned that possibility which the city
ever holds open to the restless girl.

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 grown-up 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House Woman's Club have obtained the power of seeing
the concrete through the general and have entered into various undertakings.

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 Irish-American women and the South-Italian
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 committee were equal to it, as
because the Italian men rose to the occasion.

Untiring pairs of them danced the tarantella; they sang Neapolitan songs; one
of them performed some of those wonderful sleight-of-hand 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 discovered for herself.

This social extension committee under the leadership of an ex-president of the

Club, a Hull-House 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 tenement-house 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 resources of
Hull-House for them, and at last even for herself.

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 Hull-House 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 either from the eighth grade or
from a high school.

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 self-
improvement, 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
memorial tablet erected in their club library:-

"As more exposed to suffering and distress

Thence also more alive to tenderness."

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 Hull-House discuss, not only topics of
public interest, sometimes with experts whom they have long known through
their mutual undertakings, but also their own club affairs in the light of this
larger knowledge.

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, opens new and interesting vistas of life to those who are ambitious.

The entire organization of the social life at Hull-House, 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 useful.

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 non-residents 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 tenement-house
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 Hull-House is so unlike what I predicted

twenty years ago, that I venture to quote from that ancient writing as an end to
this chapter.

The social organism has broken down through large districts of our great
cities. Many of the people living there are very poor, the majority of them
without leisure or energy for anything but the gain of subsistence.

They live for the moment side by side, many of them without knowledge of
each other, without fellowship, without local tradition or public spirit,
without social organization of any kind. Practically nothing is done to
remedy this. The people who might do it, who have the social tact and
training, the large houses, and the traditions and customs of hospitality,
live in other parts of the city. The club houses, libraries, galleries, and
semi-public conveniences for social life are also blocks away. We find
workingmen organized into armies of producers because men of executive
ability and business sagacity have found it to their interests thus to
organize them. But these workingmen are not organized socially; although
lodging in crowded tenement houses, they are living without a
corresponding social contact. The chaos is as great as it would be were
they working in huge factories without foremen or superintendent. Their
ideas and resources are cramped, and the desire for higher social pleasure
becomes extinct. They have no share in the traditions and social energy
which make for progress. Too often their only place of meeting is a saloon,
their only host a bartender; a local demagogue forms their public opinion.
Men of ability and refinement, of social power and university cultivation,
stay away from them. Personally, I believe the men who lose most are
those who thus stay away. But the paradox is here; when cultivated people
do stay away from a certain portion of the population, when all social
advantages are persistently withheld, it may be for years, the result itself
is pointed to as a reason and is used as an argument, for the continued
withholding.

It is constantly said that because the masses have never had social
advantages, they do want them, that they are heavy and dull, and that it
will take political or philanthropic machinery to change them. This divides
a city into rich and poor; into the favored, who express their sense of the
social obligation by gifts of money, and into the unfavored, who express it
by clamoring for a "share"—both of them actuated by a vague sense of
justice. This division of the city would be more justifiable, however, if the
people who thus isolate themselves on certain streets and use their social
ability for each other, gained enough thereby and added sufficient to the
sum total of social progress to justify the withholding of the pleasures and
results of that progress from so many people who ought to have them. But
they cannot accomplish this for the social spirit discharges itself in many
forms, and no one form is adequate to its total expression.
 CHAPTER XVI

ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE

The first building erected for Hull-House 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 Hull-
House and urged that one must always remember "the hungry individual soul
which without art will have passed unsolaced and unfed, followed by other
souls who lack the impulse his should have given."

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 dollars—that
looking at pictures was something people only did in Italy.

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 Hull-

House 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 people of Chicago knew
nothing of ancient times."

The loan exhibits were continued until the Chicago Art Institute was opened
free to the public on Sunday afternoons and parties were arranged at Hull-
House 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 management did much to make pictures popular.

From the first a studio was maintained at Hull-House 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
Hull-House 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 self-expression which she
habitually suppressed.

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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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
Hull-House. 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 his own feet,
expressing himself through a familiar and delicate technique.

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. Cobden-Sanderson and established her
bindery at Hull-House 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 Hull-House drawing-room 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 public-spirited 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 Hull-House for a large meeting in sympathy with the
anthracite coal strike in which the swinging lines

"Who was it made the coal?

Our God as well as theirs."

seemed to relieve the tension of the moment. Miss Eleanor Smith, the head of
the Hull-House 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 be applied to almost any other machinery industry as the first
verse indicates: —

"The roaring of the wheels has filled my ears,

The clashing and the clamor shut me in,
Myself, my soul, in chaos disappears,
I cannot think or feel amid the din."

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 Hull-House 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 officiated in the synagogue.

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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-
House 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 music-loving 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 Hull-House 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 in a crowded city quarter.
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 self-supporting 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

"To find the inheritance of this poor child

His little kingdom of a forced grave."

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 runs out upon the
ground and is irretrievably lost.

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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-House, 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 disappointed girls were arrested.

All this effort to see the play took place in the years before the five-cent
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 twenty-four 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 Hull-House 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 five-cent theaters we established at Hull-House 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 five-cent 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 Hull-
House, not only as an agent of recreation and education, but as a vehicle of
self-expression for the teeming young life all about us.

Long before the Hull-House theater was built we had many plays, first in the
drawing-room 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 end of the journey?

The immigrants in the neighborhood of Hull-House 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 one country
into the land of the universal.

A large colony of Greeks near Hull-House, 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 children were the worst of all?

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 Settlement group is
constantly searching for new material.

A labor story appearing in the Atlantic Monthly was kindly dramatized for us
by the author who also superintended its presentation upon the Hull-House
stage. The little drama presented the untutored effort of a trades-union man to
secure for his side the beauty of self-sacrifice, 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 trades-unionists 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 war—the saints is the only ones that has got the world
under their feet—we'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 upon
the truth of this statement.

The dramatic arts have gradually been developed at Hull-House 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 become a pioneer teacher of social righteousness.

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 far-away neighbors, I
was reproached with the sense of an ungarnered harvest.

Of course such a generally uplifted state comes only at rare moments, while
the development of the little theater at Hull-House 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 "Snow-White" and "Puss-in-Boots" 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 its rightful place in the community.

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 with us as a reminder of an
attempt not wholly unsuccessful, in this direction.

This group of Hull-House 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 gymnasium.

Some such synthesis takes place every year at the Hull-House 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 enthusiasm expresses that
which the older people take more soberly.
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 Hull-House 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
twenty-five 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 that the connection is
not convincing.

In spite of its stormy career this attempt at mural decoration connects itself
quite naturally with the spirit of our earlier efforts to make Hull-House 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 slow-growing
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
and the spiritual.

Perhaps the early devotion of the Hull-House residents to the pre-Raphaelites

recognized that they above all English speaking poets and painters reveal "the
sense of the expressiveness of outward things" which is at once the glory and
the limitation of the arts.
 CHAPTER XVII

ECHOES OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

The residents of Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House by a daily newspaper, which ignored the fact that while
Prince Kropotkin had addressed the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull-
House, 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. Hull-
House 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 law-abiding 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 old-fashioned, 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 Hull-
House, 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 half-witted 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 solitary man with no
political or social affiliations.

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 Hull-House, 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 what they termed
a sane attempt to uphold the law in time of panic.

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 hundred-fold 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
include the veriest outcast.

It seemed to me then that in the millions of words uttered and written at that
time, no one adequately urged that public-spirited 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 half-crazed creature bent upon destruction
in the name of justice, came to me through an experience recited to me at this
time by an old anarchist.

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 ill-balanced 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
fellowship with normal men.

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 hot-headed 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 bear—one of those
terrible sins of omission; one of the things he "ought to have done," the memory
of which is so hard to endure.

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 anarchy
itself.

The public mind at such a moment falls into the old medieval confusion—he
who feeds or shelters a heretic is upon prima facie evidence a heretic himself—
he 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 socialist-anarchists, 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 Hull-House 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 so-called "foreign anarchist" that Hull-House 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
self-defense, young Averbuch was shot to death. The members of the Russian-
Jewish 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 Hull-House 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 law-abiding 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 Russian-Jewish 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 forty-eight hours, when they mercilessly "sweated" the sister, Olga, that
she might be startled into a confession—all 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 hot-headed 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 through
political institutions is nonsense.

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 self-governing
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 Russian-Jewish 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 high-
spirited young Russian was, in a sense, a revolutionist.

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 spirited young
refugees to the punishments of the Russian autocracy.

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 sympathy and understanding.

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 Anglo-Saxon 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 inspired by noble motives.
Still more perplexing than the use of force by the revolutionists is the
employment of the agent-provocateur 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 Hull-House 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 affairs.

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
immigrants.

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 encouraging "harlots and sinners" and of defending their doctrines.

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 pig-headed 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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-
House, 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 Hull-House, 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 associated with
Hull-House either in its motive or direction.

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 Hull-House 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 mail.

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 Hull-House
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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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."

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at
the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text entry and proof-reading of this
chapter were the work of volunteer Jill Thoren.
"Chapter XVIII: Socialized Education." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)
From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by
Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.
427-453.
 CHAPTER XVIII

SOCIALIZED EDUCATION

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 upon the earlier
educational undertakings at Hull-House:-

Teaching in a Settlement requires distinct methods, for it is true of people

who have been allowed to remain undeveloped and whose facilities are
inert and sterile, that they cannot take their learning heavily. It has to be
diffused in a social atmosphere, information must be held in solution, in a
medium of fellowship and good will.

Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the influences
and assimilation of the interests and affections of others. Mazzini, that
greatest of all democrats, who broke his heart over the condition of the
South European peasantry, said: "Education is not merely a necessity of
true life by which the individual renews his vital force in the vital force of
humanity; it is a Holy Communion with generations dead and living, by
which he fecundates all his faculties. When he is withheld from this
Communion for generations, as the Italian peasant has been, we say, 'He
is like a beast of the field; he must be controlled by force.'" Even to this it
is sometimes added that it is absurd to educate him, immoral to disturb
his content. We stupidly use the effect as an argument for a continuance
of the cause. It is needless to say that a Settlement is a protest against a
restricted view of education.

In line with this declaration, Hull-House in the very beginning opened what we
called College Extension Classes with a faculty finally numbering thirty-five
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 very good work was done.
In connection with these classes a Hull-House 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 parti-colored
caps and gowns, lent themselves toward a reproduction of the comradeship
which college life fosters.

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 satisfying than
piazza gossip.

Every Thursday evening during the first years, a public lecture came to be an
expected event in the neighborhood, and Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 applauded a Polish hero endeared through his
tragic failure.

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 professor—merely a university
instructor—and 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 utilize the most direct forms of expression.

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 Hull-House 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
twenty-fifth 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
Hull-House 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 well for three days when he had
kept it up for years."

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 did and face my accusers
as she did in innocence and beauty."

If one makes calls on a Sunday afternoon in the homes of the immigrant

colonies near Hull-House, 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 self-absorbed 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 much-
praised 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 burden, and not once does he
obtain a glimpse of the delights of knowledge.

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 Hull-House, 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 Hull-House courses in cooking, and at the end of six months
reported a united and happy home.

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 of errand
running which is supposed to teach them their trade.

The beginning of trade instruction has been already evolved in connection with
the Hull-House Boys' club. The ample Boys' club building presented to Hull-
House three years ago by one of our trustees has afforded well-equipped 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 life that his future usefulness is
seriously impaired.

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 Hull-House, in which the bricklayers' apprentices were
taught eight hours a day in special classes during the non-bricklaying 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 path of knowledge by all sorts of appeals.

It sometimes happens that boys are held in the Hull-House 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 wood-carving 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 evening classes.

Out of the fifteen hundred members of the Hull-House 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
Hull-House gymnasium and with all those enthusiasms which are so
mysteriously aroused by athletics.
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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House

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 long-time
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 forms but a small part of the activities of
the Greek Educational Association.

Having thus confessed to military drill countenanced if not encouraged at Hull-

House, 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 Hull-House 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 disease-breeding
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 self-conscious,
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 Hull-House 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 the implements of civic salvation.

Before closing this chapter on Socialized Education, it is only fair to speak of

the education accruing to the Hull-House residents themselves during their
years of living in what at least purports to be a center for social and
educational activity.

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 interpretation won the gratitude of many
Sicilians.

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 and gracious ways" so much more
congruous with worthy aims.

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 Settlement
"conform to every shape and mode of excellence."

It may not be true

"That the good are always the merry

Save by an evil chance,"

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 Hull-
House 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 connected with dubious aims.

Throughout the history of Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-House 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 Hull-
House, 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 Hull-
House 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 drawing-rooms 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 cannot limit its friends to
any one political party or economic school.

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 society if we would have our democracy
endure.

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 itself.