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.