Twenty Years at Hull-House - Chapters I-III



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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

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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 father­representing the entire adult world which I 
had basely deceived­should himself die before I had time to tell him. My 
only method of obtaining relief was to go downstairs to my father's room 
and make full confession. The high resolve to do this would push me out of 
bed and carry me down the stairs without a touch of fear. But at the foot 
of the stairs I would be faced by the awful necessity of passing the front 
door­which my father, because of his Quaker tendencies, did not lock­and 
of crossing the wide and black expanse of the living room in order to 
reach his door. I would invariably cling to the newel post while I 
contemplated the perils of the situation, complicated by the fact that the 
literal first step meant putting my bare foot upon a piece of oilcloth in 
front of the door, only a few inches wide, but lying straight in my path. 
I would finally reach my father's bedside perfectly breathless and having 
panted out the history of my sin, invariable re-

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ceived 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, 

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[image caption: HOMESTEAD AT CEDARVILLE.]

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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

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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 lefthand corner of the church next to the pulpit, and 
to my eyes at least, was a most imposing figure in

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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

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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

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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 it­only across the road and then across a little 
stretch of greensward­two mills belonging to my father; one flour mill, to 
which the various grains were brought by the neighboring farmers, and one 
sawmill, in which the logs of the native timber were sawed into lumber. 
The latter offered the great excitement of sitting on a log while it 
slowly approached the buzzing saw which was cutting it into slabs, and of 
getting off just in time to escape a sudden and gory death. But the 
flouring mill was much more beloved. It was full of dusky, floury places 
which we adored, of empty bins in which we might play house; it had a 
basement, 

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[image caption: MILL AT CEDARVILLE.]

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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

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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

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with the lives of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Copies 
of the same books, mostly bound in calfskin, were to be found in the 
library below, and I courageously resolved that I too would read them all 
and try to understand life as he did. I did in fact later begin a course 
of reading in the early morning hours, but I was caught by some fantastic 
notion of chronological order and early legendary form. Pope's translation 
of the "Iliad," even followed by Dryden's "Virgil," did not leave behind 
the residuum of wisdom for which I longed, and I finally gave them up for 
a thick book entitled "The History of the World" as affording a shorter 
and an easier path. 

Although I constantly confided my sins and perplexities to my father, 
there are only a few occasions on which I remember having received direct 
advice or admonition; it may easily be true, however, that I have 
forgotten the latter, in the manner of many seekers after advice who 
enjoyably set forth their situation but do not really listen to the advice 
itself. I can remember an admonition on one occasion, however, when, as a 
little girl of eight years, arrayed in a new cloak, gorgeous beyond 
anything I had ever worn before, I stood before my father for his 
approval. I was much chagrined by his remark that it was a very pretty 
cloak­in fact so much prettier than any cloak the other little girls in 
the Sunday School had, that he would advise me to wear my old cloak,

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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-

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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:­

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"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

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of Hull-House, is the constant interruption to their play which is 
inevitable on the streets, so that it can never have any continuity­the 
most elaborate "plan or chart" or "fragment from their dream of human 
life" is sure to be rudely destroyed by the passing traffic. Although they 
start over and over again, even the most vivacious become worn out at last 
and take to that passive "standing 'round" varied by rude horseplay, which 
in time becomes so characteristic of city children. 

We had of course our favorite places and trees and birds and flowers. It 
is hard to reproduce the companionship which children establish with 
nature, but certainly it is much too unconscious and intimate to come 
under the head of æsthetic appreciation or anything of the sort. When we 
said that the purple wind-flowers­the 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-

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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:­ 

"He wrapt me in his large
 Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no." 
 
[image caption: JOHN H. ADDAMS.]



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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

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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

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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

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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 over-

Page 27

whelmingly 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

Page 28

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

Page 29

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,

Page 30

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 Illi-

Page 31

nois 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 day­it must 
have been one of comparative leisure, perhaps a Sunday­when at my request 
my father took out of his desk a thin packet marked "Mr. Lincoln's
Letters," the shortest one of which bore unmistakable traces of that 
remarkable personality. These letters began, "My dear 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

Page 32

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 Park­for no cars 
were running regularly at that moment of sympathetic strikes­in order to 
look at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I might, from the marvelous St. 
Gaudens statue which had been but recently been placed at the entrance of 
the park. Some of Lincoln's immortal words were cut into the stone at his 
feet, and never did a distracted town more sorely need the healing of 
"with charity towards all" than did Chicago at that moment, and the 
tolerance of the man who 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

Page 33

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, and­so much heroics, youth must permit itself­if to 
accomplish this the destruction of Hull-House was necessary, that we would 
cheerfully sing a Te Deum on

Page 34

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

Page 35

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

Page 36

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

Page 37

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

Page 38

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,

Page 39

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 rôles 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

Page 40

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

Page 41

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

Page 42

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. 



Page 43

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 alumnæ, 
college women who were most eager that this

Page 44

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

Page 45

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

Page 46

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

Page 47

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 colleges­at least in 
the fresh-water ones­thirty years ago, although we painstakingly studied 
"Mental" and "Moral" Philosophy, which, though far from dry in the 
classroom, became the subject of more spirited discussion outside, and 
gave us a clew for animated rummaging in the little college library. Of 
course we read a great deal of Ruskin and Browning, and liked the most 
abstruse parts the best; but like the famous gentleman who talked prose 
without knowing it, we never dreamed of connecting them with our 
philosophy. My genuine interest was history, partly because of a superior 
teacher, and partly because my father had always insisted upon a certain 
amount of historic reading ever since he had paid me, as a little girl, 
five cents a "Life" for each Plutarch hero I could intelligently report 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

Page 48

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

Page 49

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 even-

Page 50

ing, 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 read-

Page 51

ing 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 régime 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

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of having made immaculate my own immediate surroundings, the consciousness 
of clean linen, said to be close to the consciousness of a clean 
conscience, always mingles in my mind with these early readings. I 
certainly bore away with me a lifelong enthusiasm for reading the Gospels 
in bulk, a whole one at a time, and an insurmountable distaste for having 
them cut up into chapter and verse, or for hearing the incidents in that 
wonderful Life thus referred to as if it were merely a record. 

My copy of the Greek testament had been presented to me by the brother of 
our Greek teacher, Professor Blaisdell of Beloit College, a true scholar 
in "Christian Ethics," as his department was called. I recall that one day 
in the summer after I left college­one of the black days which followed 
the death of my father­this kindly scholar came to see me in order to 
bring such comfort as he might and to inquire how far I had found solace 
in the little book he had given me so long before. When I suddenly recall 
the village in which I was born, its steeples and roofs look as they did 
that day from the hilltop where we talked together, the familiar details 
smoothed out and merging, as it were, into that wide conception of the 
universe, which for the moment swallowed up my personal grief or at least 
assuaged it with a realization that it was but a drop in that "torrent of 
sorrow and aguish and terror which flows under all the footsteps of man." 
This realization of

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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 pos-

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sibly 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."

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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

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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

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settled in my mind that I should study medicine and "live with the poor." 
This conclusion of course was the result of many things, perhaps 
epitomized in my graduating essay on "Cassandra" and her tragic fate 
"always to be in the right, and always to be disbelieved and rejected." 

This state of affairs, it may readily be guessed, the essay held to be an 
example of the feminine trait of mind called intuition, "an accurate 
perception of Truth and Justice, which rests contented in itself and will 
make no effort to confirm itself or to organize through existing 
knowledge." The essay then proceeds­I am forced to admit, with overmuch 
conviction­with the statement that women can only "grow accurate and 
intelligible by the thorough study of at least one branch of physical 
science, for only with eyes thus accustomed to the search for truth can 
she detect all 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

Page 62

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

Page 63

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.

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Whatever may have been the perils of self-tradition, I certainly did not 
escape them, for it required eight years­from the time I left Rockford in 
the summer of 1881 until Hull-House was opened in the the autumn of 
1889­to formulate my convictions even in the least satisfactory manner, 
much less to reduce them to a plan for action. During most of that time I 
was absolutely at sea so far as any moral purpose was concerned, clinging 
only to the desire to live in a really living world and refusing to be 
content with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reflection of it. 

[image caption: ELLEN GATES STARR.]