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.