Hull House, which was Chicago's first Settlement, was established in
September, 1889. It represented no association, but was opened by two
women, backed by many friends, in the belief 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. Hull House endeavors to make social
intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society.
It is an effort to add the social function to democracy. It was 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 gave a form of expression that has peculiar value."
This paper is an attempt to treat of the subjective necessity for
Social Settlements, to analyze the motives which underlie a movement
based not only upon conviction, but genuine emotion. Hull House of
Chicago is used as an illustration, but so far as the analysis is
faithful, it obtains wherever educated young people are seeking an
outlet for that sentiment of universal brotherhood which the best spirit
of our times is forcing from an emotion into a motive.
I have divided the motives which constitute the subjective
pressure toward Social Settlements into three great lines: the first
contains the desire to make the entire social organism democratic, to
extend democracy beyond its political expression; the second is the
impulse to share the race life, and to bring as much as possible of
social energy and the accumulation of civilization to those portions of
the race which have little; the third springs from a certain renaissance
of Christianity, a movement toward its early humanitarian aspects.
It is not difficult to see that although America is pledged to the
democratic ideal, the view of democracy has been partial, and that its
best achievement thus far has been pushed along the line of the
franchise. Democracy has made little attempt to assert itself in social
affairs. We have refused to move beyond the position of its
eighteenth-century leaders, who believed that political equality alone
would secure all good to all men. We conscientiously followed the gift
of the ballot hard upon the gift of freedom to the negro, but we are
quite unmoved by the fact that he lives among us in a practical social
ostracism. We hasten to give the franchise to the immigrant from a sense
of justice, from a tradition that he ought to have it, while we dub him
with epithets deriding his past life or present occupation, and feel no
duty to invite him to our houses. We are forced to acknowledge that it
is only in our local and national politics that we try very hard for the
ideal so dear to those who were enthusiasts when the century was young.
We have almost given it up as our ideal in social intercourse. There are
city wards in which many of the votes are sold for drinks and dollars;
still there is a remote pretence, at least a fiction current, that a
man's vote is his own. The judgment of the voter is consulted and an
opportunity for remedy given. There is not even a theory in the social
order, not a shadow answering to the polls in politics. The time may
come when the politician who sells one by one to the highest bidder all
the offices in his grasp, will not be considered more base in his code
of morals, more hardened in his practice, than the woman who constantly
invites to her receptions those alone who bring her an equal social
return, who shares her beautiful surroundings only with those who
minister to a liking she has for successful social events. In doing this
is she not just as unmindful of the common weal, as unscrupulous in her
use of power, as is any city "boss" who consults only the interests of
the "ring"?
In politics "bossism" arouses a scandal. It goes on in society
constantly and is only beginning to be challenged. Our consciences are
becoming tender in regard to the lack of democracy in social affairs. We
are perhaps entering upon the second phase of democracy, as the French
philosophers entered upon the first, somewhat bewildered by its logical
conclusions. 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 move often from one wretched lodging to another. 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 custom of
hospitality, live in other parts of the city. The clubhouses, libraries,
galleries, and semi-public conveniences for social life are also blocks
away. We find working-men 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 working-men are not organized
socially; although living 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 foreman or
superintendent. Their ideas and resources are cramped. The desire for
higher social pleasure is 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 at as a
reason, is used as an argument, for the continued withholding.
It is constantly said that because the masses have never had
social advantages they do not 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. "The social spirit discharges itself in many forms, and no one
form is adequate to its total expression." We are all uncomfortable in
regard to the sincerity of our best phrases, because we hesitate to
translate our philosophy into the deed.
It is inevitable that those who feel most keenly this insincerity
and partial living should be our young people, our so-called educated
young people who accomplish little toward the solution of this social
problem, and who bear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished,
oversensitive lives. They have been shut off from the common labor by
which they live and 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 co-ordination between thought and action. I think it is
bard 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.
These hopes may be loosely formulated thus: that if in a
democratic country nothing can he 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.
These hopes are responsible for results in various directions,
pre-eminently in the extension of educational advantages. We find that
all educational matters are more democratic in their political than in
their social aspects. The public schools in the poorest and most crowded
wards of the city are inadequate to the number of children, and many of
the teachers are ill-prepared and overworked; but in each ward there is
an effort to secure public education. The schoolhouse itself stands as a
pledge that the city recognizes and endeavors to fulfil the duty of
educating its children. But what becomes of these children when they are
no longer in public schools? Many of them never come under the influence
of a professional teacher nor a cultivated friend after they are twelve.
Society at large does little for their intellectual development. The
dream of transcendentalists that each New England village would be a
university, that every child taken from the common school would be put
into definite lines of study and mental development, had its unfulfilled
beginning in the village lyceum and lecture courses, and has its feeble
representative now in the multitude of clubs for study which are so
sadly restricted to educators, to the leisure class, or only to the
advanced and progressive wage-workers.
The University Extension movement - certainly when it is closely
identified with Settlements - would not confine learning to those who
already want it, or to those who, by making an effort, can gain it, or
to those among whom professional educators are already at work, but
would take it to the tailors of East London and the dock-laborers of the
Thames. It requires tact and training, love of learning, and the
conviction of the justice of its diffusion to give it to people whose
intellectual faculties are untrained and disused. But men in England are
found who do it successfully, and it is believed there are men and women
in America who can do it. I also believe that the best work in
University Extension can be done in Settlements, where the teaching will
be further socialized, where the teacher will grapple his students, not
only by formal lectures, but by every hook possible to the fuller
intellectual life which he represents. This teaching requires distinct
methods, for it is true of people who have been allowed to remain
undeveloped and whose faculties are inert and sterile, that they cannot
take their learning heavily. It has to be diffused in a social
atmosphere. Information held in solution, a medium of fellowship and
goodwill can be assimilated by the dullest.
If education is, as Froebel defined it, "deliverance," deliverance
of the forces of the body and mind, then the untrained must first be
delivered from all constraint and rigidity before their faculties can be
used. Possibly 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. Not once has he had a glimpse of the delights of
knowledge. Intellectual life requires for its expansion and
manifestation the influence 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 be
fecundates all his faculties. When he is withheld from this Communion
for generations, as the Italian peasant has been, we point our finger at
him and 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 again 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, and
makes it possible for every educated man or woman with a teaching
faculty to find out those who are ready to be taught. The social and
educational activities of a Settlement are but differing manifestations
of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the existence of the
settlement itself.
I find it somewhat difficult to formulate the second 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 over-bold 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 which we have been born heir to 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; yon hear the driving and jostling of huge carts. 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 at 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. You feel that it would be almost grotesque to claim from him
the sympathy you crave. Civilization has placed you far 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 tales are the stirring of inherited impressions, just
so surely is the other the striving of inherited powers.
"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 with 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
awhile 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 mean time 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 be Whole before the good of the Ego. But when all this information
and culture show results, when the daughter comes ack from college and
begins to recognize her social claim to the "submerged tenth," and to
evince a disposition to fulfil 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 bead of the Doer. The deed is that of exclusiveness and
caution, but the return instead of falling upon the bead 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 which
she is entitled to. 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
bear constantly of the great social mal-adjustment, but no way is
provided for them to change it, and their uselessness bangs 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 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 bow 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 mere 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. It is 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.
The third division of motives which I believe make toward the
Settlement is 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 labelled "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 revelations 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 held and made manifest must be put into
terms of action; that action is the only medium man has for receiving
and appropriating truth. "If any man will do His will, be shall know of
the doctrine."
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 be regards his fellows. By this simple process was
created a deep enthusiasm for humanity, which regarded man as at once
the organ and object of revelation; and by this process came about that
wonderful fellowship, that true democracy of the early Church, that so
captivates the imagination. The early Christians were pre-eminently
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 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 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, that it is a thing to be
proclaimed and instituted apart from the social life of the community.
They insist that it shall 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. Tolstoi has reminded us
all very forcibly of Christ's principle of non-resistance. His
formulation has been startling and his expression has deviated from the
general movement, but there is little doubt that be has many adherents,
men and women who are philosophically convinced of the futility of
opposition, wh believe that evil can be overcome only with good and
cannot be opposed. If love is the creative force of the universe, the
principle which binds men together, and by their interdependence on each
other makes them human, just so surely is anger and the spirit of
opposition the destructive principle of the universe, that which tears
down, thrusts men apart, and makes them isolated and brutal.
I cannot, of course, speak for other Settlements, but it would, I
think, be unfair to Hull House not to emphasize the conviction with
which the first residents went there, that it would be a foolish and an
unwarrantable expenditure of force to oppose or to antagonize any
individual or set of people in the neighborhood; that whatever of good
the House had to offer should be put into positive terms; that its
residents should live with opposition to no man, with recognition of the
good in every man, even the meanest, 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, 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 Frederic Harrison insists, 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. How far the Positivists' formula of the high ardor for humanity
can carry the Settlement movement, Mrs. Humphry Ward's house in London
may in course of time illustrate. 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.
If you have heard a thousand voices singing in the Hallelujah
Chorus in Handel's "Messiah," you have found that the leading voices
could still be distinguished, but that the differences of training and
cultivation between them and the voices of the chorus were lost in the
unity of purpose and the fact that they were 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 lead 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 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 is it not content with the treble clapping of
delicate hands, but wishes also to bear the bass notes from toughened
palms, may mingle with these.
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