Twenty Years at Hull-House - Chapters IV-VI



Page 65

CHAPTER IV
THE SNARE OF PREPARATION

THE winter after I left school was spent in the Woman's Medical College of 
Philadelphia, but the development of the spinal difficulty which had 
shadowed me from childhood forced me into Dr. Weir Mitchell's hospital for 
the late spring, and the next winter I was literally bound to a bed in my 
sister's house for six months. In spite of its tedium, the long winter had 
its mitigations, for after the first few weeks I was able to read with a 
luxurious consciousness of leisure, and I remember opening the first 
volume of Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" with a lively sense of gratitude 
that it was not Gray's "Anatomy," having found, like many another, that 
general culture is a much easier undertaking than professional study. The 
long illness inevitably put aside the immediate prosecution of a medical 
course, and although I had passed my examinations creditably enough in the 
required subjects for the first year, I was very glad to have a 
physician's sanction for giving up clinics and dissecting rooms and to 
follow his prescription of spending the next two years in Europe. 

Before I returned to America I had discovered

Page 66

that there were other genuine reasons for living among the poor than that 
of practicing medicine upon them, and my brief foray into the profession 
was never resumed. 

The long illness left me in a state of nervous exhaustion with which I 
struggled for years, traces of it remaining long after Hull-House was 
opened in 1889. At the best it allowed me but a limited amount of energy, 
so that doubtless there was much nervous depression at the foundation of 
the spiritual struggles which this chapter is forced to record. However, 
it could not have been all due to my health, for as my wise little 
notebook sententiously remarked, "In his own way each man must struggle, 
lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his 
active life." 

It would, of course, be impossible to remember that some of these 
struggles ever took place at all, were it not for these selfsame 
notebooks, in which, however, I no longer wrote in moments of high 
resolve, but judging from the internal evidence afforded by the books 
themselves, only in moments of deep depression when overwhelmed by a sense 
of failure. 

One of the most poignant of these experiences, which occurred during the 
first few months after our landing upon the other side of the Atlantic, 
was on a Saturday night, when I received an ineradicable impression of the 
wretchedness of East London, and also saw for the first time the over-

Page 67

crowded quarters of a great city at midnight. A small party of tourists 
were taken to the East End by a city missionary to witness the Saturday 
night sale of decaying vegetables and fruit, which, owing to the Sunday 
laws in London, could not be sold until Monday, and, as they were beyond 
safe keeping, were disposed of at auction as late as possible on Saturday 
night. On Mile End Road, from the top of an omnibus which paused at the 
end of a dingy street lighted by only occasional flares of gas, we saw two 
huge masses of ill-clad people clamoring around two hucksters' carts. They 
were bidding their farthings and ha'pennies for a vegetable held up by the 
auctioneer, which he at last scornfully flung, with a gibe for its 
cheapness, to the successful bidder. In the momentary pause only one man 
detached himself from the groups. He had bidden in a cabbage, and when it 
struck his hand, he instantly sat down on the curb, tore it with his 
teeth, and hastily devoured it, unwashed and uncooked as it was. He and 
his fellows were types of the "submerged tenth," as our missionary guide 
told us, with some little satisfaction in the then new phrase, and he 
further added that so many of them could scarcely be seen in one spot save 
at this Saturday night auction, the desire for cheap food being apparently 
the one thing which could move them simultaneously. They were huddled into 
ill-fitting, cast-off clothing, the ragged finery which one sees only in 
East

Page 68

London. Their pale faces were dominated by that most unlovely of human 
expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargain-hunter who starves 
if he cannot make a successful trade, and yet the final impression was not 
of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads 
of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless and workworn, showing white in the 
uncertain light of the street, and clutching forward for food which was 
already unfit to eat. 

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this 
oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which 
he is constantly groping forward. I have never since been able to see a 
number of hands held upward, even when they are moving rhythmically in a 
calisthenic exercise, or when they belong to a class of chubby children 
who wave them in eager response to a teacher's query, without a certain 
revival of this memory, a clutching at the heart reminiscent of the 
despair and resentment which seized me then. 

For the following weeks I went about London almost furtively, afraid to 
look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose again this hideous 
human need and suffering. I carried with me for days at a time that 
curious surprise we experience when we first come back into the streets 
after days given over to sorrow and death; we are bewildered that the 
world should be going on as usual and

Page 69

unable to determine which is real, the inner pang or the outward seeming. 
In time all huge London came to seem unreal save the poverty in its East 
End. During the following two years on the continent, while I was 
irresistibly drawn to the poorer quarters of each city, nothing among the 
beggars of South Italy nor among the salt miners of Austria carried with 
it the same conviction of human wretchedness which was conveyed by this 
momentary glimpse of an East London street. It was, of course, a most 
fragmentary and lurid view of the poverty of East London, and quite 
unfair. I should have been shown either less or more, for I went away with 
no notion of the hundreds of men and women who had gallantly identified 
their fortunes with these empty-handed people, and who, in church and 
chapel, "relief works," and charities, were at least making an effort 
towards its mitigation. 

Our visit was made in November, 1883, the very year when the Pall Mall 
Gazette exposure started "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London," and the 
conscience of England was stirred as never before over this joyless city 
in the East End of its capital. Even then, vigorous and drastic plans were 
being discussed, and a splendid program of municipal reforms was already 
dimly outlined. Of all these, however, I had heard nothing but the vaguest 
rumor. 

No comfort came to me then from any source,

Page 70

and the painful impression was increased because at the very moment of 
looking down the East London street from the top of the omnibus, I had 
been sharply and painfully reminded of "The Vision of Sudden Death" which 
had confronted De Quincey one summer's night as he was being driven 
through rural England on a high mail coach. Two absorbed lovers suddenly 
appear between the narrow, blossoming hedgerows in the direct path of the 
huge vehicle which is sure to crush them to their death. De Quincey tries 
to send them a warning shout, but finds himself unable to make a sound 
because his mind is hopelessly entangled in an endeavor to recall the 
exact lines from the Iliad which describe the great cry with which 
Achilles alarmed all Asia militant. Only after his memory responds is his 
will released from its momentary paralysis, and he rides on through the 
fragrant night with the horror of the escaped calamity thick upon him, but 
he also bears with him the consciousness that he had given himself over so 
many years to classic learning­that when suddenly called upon for a quick 
decision in the world of life and death, he had been able to act only 
through a literary suggestion. 

This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that 
only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes. It 
seemed to me too preposterous that in my first view of the horror of East 
London I should have

Page 71

recalled De Quincey's literary description of the literary suggestion 
which had once paralyzed him. In my disgust it all appeared a hateful, 
vicious circle which even the apostles of culture themselves admitted, for 
had not one of the greatest among the moderns plainly said that "conduct, 
and not culture is three fourths of human life." 

For two years in the midst of my distress over the poverty which, thus 
suddenly driven into my consciousness, had become to me the "Weltschmerz," 
there was mingled a sense of futility, of misdirected energy, the belief 
that the pursuit of cultivation would not in the end bring either solace 
or relief. I gradually reached a conviction that the first generation of 
college women had taken their learning too quickly, had departed too 
suddenly from the active, emotional life led by their grandmothers and 
great-grandmothers; that the contemporary education of young women had 
developed too exclusively the power of acquiring knowledge and of merely 
receiving impressions; that somewhere in the process of 'being educated' 
they had lost that simple and almost automatic response to the human 
appeal, that old healthful reaction resulting in activity from the mere 
presence of suffering or of helplessness; that they are so sheltered and 
pampered they have no chance even to make "the great refusal." 

In the German and French pensions, which twenty-five years ago were 
crowded with American

Page 72

mothers and their daughters who had crossed the seas in search of culture, 
one often found the mother making real connection with the life about her, 
using her inadequate German with great fluency, gaily measuring the 
enormous sheets or exchanging recipes with the German Hausfrau, visiting 
impartially the nearest kindergarten and market, making an atmosphere of 
her own, hearty and genuine as far as it went, in the house and on the 
street. On the other hand, her daughter was critical and uncertain of her 
linguistic acquirements, and only at ease when in the familiar receptive 
attitude afforded by the art gallery and opera house. In the latter she 
was swayed and moved, appreciative of the power and charm of the music, 
intelligent as to the legend and poetry of the plot, finding use for her 
trained and developed powers as she sat "being cultivated" in the familiar 
atmosphere of the classroom which had, as it were, become sublimated and 
romanticized. 

I remember a happy busy mother who, complacent with the knowledge that her 
daughter daily devoted four hours to her music, looked up from her 
knitting to say, "If I had had your opportunities when I was young, my 
dear, I should have been a very happy girl. I always had musical talent, 
but such training as I had, foolish little songs and waltzes and not time 
for half an hour's practice a day." 

The mother did not dream of the sting her words

Page 73

left and that the sensitive girl appreciated only too well that her 
opportunities were fine and unusual, but she also knew that in spite of 
some facility and much good teaching she had no genuine talent and never 
would fulfill the expectations of her friends. She looked back upon her 
mother's girlhood with positive envy because it was so full of happy 
industry and extenuating obstacles, with undisturbed opportunity to 
believe that her talents were unusual. The girl looked wistfully at her 
mother, but had not the courage to cry out what was in her heart: "I might 
believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I 
might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the 
rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the 
difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with 
advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the 
morning." 

This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning and the 
assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the 
bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all about her, and 
which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and 
literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her; it peers at her in the 
form of heavy-laden market women and underpaid street laborers, gibing her 
with a sense of her uselessness. 

I recall one snowy morning in Saxe-Coburg, look-

Page 74

ing from the window of our little hotel upon the town square, that we saw 
crossing and recrossing it a single file of women with semicircular, 
heavy, wooden tanks fastened upon their backs. They were carrying in this 
primitive fashion to a remote cooling room these tanks filled with a hot 
brew incident to one stage of beer making. The women were bent forward, 
not only under the weight which they were bearing, but because the tanks 
were so high that it would have been impossible for them to have lifted 
their heads. Their faces and hands, reddened in the cold morning air, 
showed clearly the white scars where they had previously been scalded by 
the hot stuff which splashed if they stumbled ever so little on their way. 
Stung into action by one of those sudden indignations against cruel 
conditions which at times fill the young with unexpected energy, I found 
myself across the square, in company with mine host, interviewing the 
phlegmatic owner of the brewery who received us with exasperating 
indifference, or rather received me, for the innkeeper mysteriously slunk 
away as soon as the great magnate of the town began to speak. I went back 
to a breakfast for which I had lost my appetite, as I had for Gray's "Life 
of Prince Albert" and his wonderful tutor, Baron Stockmar, which I had 
been reading late the night before. The book had lost its fascination; how 
could a good man, feeling so keenly his obligation "to make princely the 
mind of his prince," ignore such

Page 75

conditions of life for the multitude of humble, hard-working folk. We were 
spending two months in Dresden that winter, given over to much reading of 
"The History of Art" and after such an experience I would invariably 
suffer a moral revulsion against this feverish search after culture. It 
was doubtless in such moods that I founded my admiration for Albrecht 
Dürer, taking his wonderful pictures, however, in the most unorthodox 
manner, merely as human documents. I was chiefly appealed to by his 
unwillingness to lend himself to a smooth and cultivated view of life, by 
his determination to record its frustrations and even the hideous forms 
which darken the day for our human imagination and to ignore no human 
complications. I believed that his canvases intimated the coming religious 
and social changes of the Reformation and the peasants' wars, that they 
were surcharged with pity for the downtrodden, that his sad knights, 
gravely standing guard, were longing to avert that shedding of blood which 
is sure to occur when men forget how complicated life is and insist upon 
reducing it to logical dogmas. 

The largest sum of money that I ever ventured to spend in Europe was for 
an engraving of his "St. Hubert," the background of which was said to be 
from an original Dürer plate. There is little doubt, I am afraid, that the 
background as

Page 76

well as the figures "were put in at a later date," but the purchase at 
least registered the high-water mark of my enthusiasm. 

The wonder and beauty of Italy later brought healing and some relief to 
the paralyzing sense of the futility of all artistic and intellectual 
effort when disconnected from the ultimate test of the conduct it 
inspired. The serene and soothing touch of history also aroused old 
enthusiasms, although some of their manifestations were such as one smiles 
over more easily in retrospection than at the moment. I fancy that it was 
no smiling matter to several people in our party, whom I induced to walk 
for three miles in the hot sunshine beating down upon the Roman Campagna, 
that we might enter the Eternal City on foot through the Porta del Popolo, 
as pilgrims had done for centuries. To be sure, we had really entered Rome 
the night before, but the railroad station and the hotel might have been 
anywhere else, and we had been driven beyond the walls after breakfast and 
stranded at the very spot where the pilgrims always said "Ecco Roma," as 
they caught the first glimpse of St.

Page 77

Peter's dome. This melodramatic entrance into Rome, or rather pretended 
entrance, was the prelude to days of enchantment, and I returned to Europe 
two years later in order to spend a winter there and to carry out a great 
desire to systematically study the Catacombs. In spite of my distrust of 
"advantages" I was apparently not yet so cured but that I wanted more of 
them. 

The two years which elapsed before I again found myself in Europe brought 
their inevitable changes. Family arrangements had so come about that I had 
spent three or four months of each of the intervening winters in 
Baltimore, where I seemed to have reached the nadir of my nervous 
depression and sense of maladjustment, in spite of my interest in the 
fascinating lectures given there by Lanciani of Rome, and a definite 
course of reading under the guidance of a Johns Hopkins lecturer upon the 
United Italy movement. In the latter I naturally encountered the influence 
of Mazzini, which was a source of great comfort to me, although perhaps I 
went too suddenly from a contemplation of his wonderful ethical and 
philosophical appeal to the workingmen of Italy, directly to the lecture 
rooms at Johns Hopkins University, for I was certainly much disillusioned 
at this time as to the effect of intellectual pursuits upon moral 
development. 

The summers were spent in the old home in northern Illinois, and one 
Sunday morning I

Page 78

received the rite of baptism and became a member of the Presbyterian 
church in the village. At this time there was certainly no outside 
pressure pushing me towards such a decision, and at twenty-five one does 
not ordinarily take such a step from a mere desire to conform. While I was 
not conscious of any emotional "conversion," I took upon myself the 
outward expressions of the religious life with all humility and sincerity. 
It was doubtless true that I was 

"Weary of myself and sick of asking
 What I am and what I ought to be," 

and that various cherished safeguards and claims to self-dependence had 
been broken into by many piteous failures. But certainly I had been 
brought to the conclusion that "sincerely to give up one's conceit or hope 
of being good in one's own right is the only door to the Universe's deeper 
reaches." Perhaps the young clergyman recognized this as the test of the 
Christian temper, at any rate he required little assent to dogma or 
miracle, and assured me that while both the ministry and the officers of 
his church were obliged to subscribe to doctrines of well-known severity, 
the faith required to the laity was almost early Christian in its 
simplicity. I was conscious of no change from my childish acceptance of 
the teachings of the Gospels, but at this moment something persuasive 
within made me long for an outward symbol of fellowship,

Page 79

some bond of peace, some blessed spot where unity of spirit might claim 
right of way over all differences. There was also growing within me an 
almost passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy, and when in all 
history had these ideals been so thrillingly expressed as when the faith 
of the fisherman and the slave had been boldly opposed to the accepted 
moral belief that the well-being of a privileged few might justly be built 
upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many? Who was I, with my dreams of 
universal fellowship, that I did not identify myself with the 
institutional statement of this belief, as it stood in the little village 
in which I was born, and without which testimony in each remote hamlet of 
Christendom it would be so easy for the world to slip back into the 
doctrines of selection and aristocracy? 

In one of the intervening summers between these European journeys I 
visited a western state where I had formerly invested a sum of money in 
mortgages. I was much horrified by the wretched conditions among the 
farmers, which had resulted from a long period of drought, and one forlorn 
picture was fairly burned into my mind. A number of starved 
hogs­collateral for a promissory note­were huddled into an open pen. Their 
backs were humped in a curious, camel-like fashion, and they were 
devouring one of their own number, the latest victim of absolute 
starvation or possibly merely the one least able to defend himself against

Page 80

their voracious hunger. The farmer's wife looked on indifferently, a 
picture of despair as she stood in the door of the bare, crude house, and 
the two children behind her, whom she vainly tried to keep out of sight, 
continually thrust forward their faces almost covered by masses of coarse, 
sunburned hair, and their little bare feet so black, so hard, the great 
cracks so filled with dust that they looked like flattened hoofs. The 
children could not be compared to anything so joyous as satyrs, although 
they appeared but half-human. It seemed to me quite impossible to receive 
interest from mortgages placed upon farms which might at any season be 
reduced to such conditions, and with great inconvenience to my agent and 
doubtless with hardship to the farmers, as speedily as possible I withdrew 
all my investment. But something had to be done with the money, and in my 
reaction against unseen horrors I bought a farm near my native village and 
also a flock of innocent-looking sheep. My partner in the enterprise had 
not chosen the shepherd's lot as a permanent occupation, but hoped to 
speedily finish his college course upon half the proceeds of our venture. 
This pastoral enterprise still seems to me to have been essentially sound, 
both economically and morally, but perhaps one partner depended too much 
upon the impeccability of her motives and the other found himself too 
preoccupied with study to know that it is not a real kindness to bed a

Page 81

sheepfold with straw, for certainly the venture ended in a spectacle 
scarcely less harrowing than the memory it was designed to obliterate. At 
least the sight of two hundred sheep with four rotting hoofs each, was not 
reassuring to one whose conscience craved economic peace. A fortunate 
series of sales of mutton, wool, and farm enabled the partners to end the 
enterprise without loss, and they passed on, one to college and the other 
to Europe, if not wiser, certainly sadder for the experience. 

It was during this second journey to Europe that I attended a meeting of 
the London match girls who were on strike and who met daily under the 
leadership of well-known labor men of London. The low wages that were 
reported at the meetings, the phossy jaw which was described and 
occasionally exhibited, the appearance of the girls themselves I did not, 
curiously enough, in any wise connect with what was called the labor 
movement, nor did I understand the efforts of the London trades-unionists, 
concerning whom I held the vaguest notions. But of course this impression 
of human misery was added to the others which were already making me so 
wretched. I think that up to this time I was still filled with the sense 
which Wells describes in one of his young characters, that somewhere in 
Church or State are a body of authoritative people who will put things to 
rights as soon as they really know what is wrong. Such

Page 82

a young person persistently believes that behind all suffering, behind sin 
and want, must lie redeeming magnanimity. He may imagine the world to be 
tragic and terrible, but it never for an instant occurs to him that it may 
be contemptible or squalid or self-seeking. Apparently I looked upon the 
efforts of the trades-unionists as I did upon those of Frederic Harrison 
and the Positivists whom I heard the next Sunday in Newton Hall, as a 
manifestation of "loyalty to humanity" and an attempt to aid in its 
progress. I was enormously interested in the Positivists during these 
European years; I imagined that their philosophical conception of man's 
religious development might include all expressions of that for which so 
many ages of men have struggled and aspired. I vaguely hoped for this 
universal comity when I stood in Stonehenge, on the Acropolis in Athens, 
or in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. But never did I so desire it as 
in the cathedrals of Winchester, Notre Dame, Amiens. One winter's day I 
traveled from Munich to Ulm because I imagined from what the art books 
said that the cathedral hoarded a medieval statement of the Positivists' 
final synthesis, prefiguring their conception of a "Supreme Humanity." 

In this I was not altogether disappointed. The religious history carved on 
the choir stalls at Ulm contained Greek philosophers as well as Hebrew 
prophets, and among the disciples and saints stood

Page 83

the discoverer of music and a builder of pagan temples. Even then I was 
startled, forgetting for the moment the religious revolutions of south 
Germany, to catch sight of a window showing Luther as he affixed his 
thesis on the door at Wittenberg, the picture shining clear in the midst 
of the older glass of saint and symbol. 

My smug notebook states that all this was an admission that "the saints 
but embodied fine action," and it proceeds at some length to set forth my 
hope for a "cathedral of humanity," which should be "capacious enough to 
house a fellowship of common purpose," and which should be "beautiful 
enough to persuade men to hold fast to the vision of human solidarity." It 
is quite impossible for me to reproduce this experience at Ulm unless I 
quote pages more from the notebook in which I seem to have written half 
the night, in a fever of composition cast in ill-digested phrases from 
Comte. It doubtless reflected also something of the faith of the Old 
Catholics, a charming group of whom I had recently met in Stuttgart, and 
the same mood is easily traced in my early hopes for the Settlement that 
it should unite in the fellowship of the deed those of widely differing 
religious beliefs. 

The beginning of 1887 found our little party of three in very picturesque 
lodgings in Rome, and settled into a certain student's routine. But my 
study of the Catacombs was brought to an abrupt

Page 84

end in a fortnight by a severe attack of sciatic rheumatism, which kept me 
in Rome with a trained nurse during many weeks, and later sent me to the 
Riviera to lead an invalid's life once more. Although my Catacomb lore 
thus remained hopelessly superficial, it seemed to me a sufficient basis 
for a course of six lectures which I timidly offered to a Deaconess's 
Training School during my first winter in Chicago, upon the simple ground 
that this early interpretation of Christianity is the one which should be 
presented to the poor, urging that the primitive church was composed of 
the poor and that it was they who took the wonderful news to the more 
prosperous Romans. The open-minded head of the school gladly accepted the 
lectures, arranging that the course should be given each spring to her 
graduating class of Home and Foreign Missionaries, and at the end of the 
third year she invited me to become one of the trustees of the school. I 
accepted and attended one meeting of the board, but never another, because 
some of the older members objected to my membership on the ground that "no 
religious instruction was given at Hull-House." I remember my sympathy for 
the embarrassment in which the head of the school was placed, but if I 
needed comfort, a bit of it came to me on my way home from the trustees' 
meeting when an Italian laborer paid my street-car fare, according to the 
custom of our simpler neighbors. Upon

Page 85

my inquiry of the conductor as to whom I was indebted for the little 
courtesy, he replied roughly enough, "I cannot tell one dago from another 
when they are in a gang, but sure, any one of them would do it for you as 
quick as they would for the Sisters." 

It is hard to tell just when the very simple plan which afterward 
developed into the Settlement began to form itself in my mind. It may have 
been even before I went to Europe for the second time, but I gradually 
became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part 
of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which 
young women who had been given over too exclusively to study might restore 
a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life 
itself; where they might try out some of the things they had been taught 
and put truth to "the ultimate test of the conduct it dictates or 
inspires." I do not remember to have mentioned this plan to anyone until 
we reached Madrid in April, 1888. 

We had been to see a bull fight rendered in the most magnificent Spanish 
style, where greatly to my surprise and horror, I found that I had seen, 
with comparative indifference, five bulls and many more horses killed. The 
sense that this was the last survival of all the glories of the 
amphitheater, the illusion that the riders on the caparisoned horses might 
have been knights of a tournament,

Page 86

or the matadore a slightly armed gladiator facing his martyrdom, and all 
the rest of the obscure yet vivid associations of an historic survival, 
had carried me beyond the endurance of any of the rest of the party. I 
finally met them in the foyer, stern and pale with disapproval of my 
brutal endurance, and but partially recovered from the faintness and 
disgust which the spectacle itself had produced upon them. I had no 
defense to offer to their reproaches save that I had not thought much 
about the bloodshed; but in the evening the natural and inevitable 
reaction came, and in deep chagrin I felt myself tried and condemned, not 
only by this disgusting experience but by the entire moral situation which 
it revealed. It was suddenly made quite clear to me that I was lulling my 
conscience by a dreamer's scheme, that a mere paper reform had become a 
defense for continued idleness, and that I was making it a raison d'être 
for going on indefinitely with study and travel. It is easy to become the 
dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and 
I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself 
believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come. Nothing 
less than the moral reaction following the experience at a bullfight had 
been able to reveal to me that so far from following in the wake of a 
chariot of philanthropic fire, I had been tied to the tail of the veriest 
ox-cart of self-seeking.

Page 87

I had made up my mind that next day, whatever happened, I would begin to 
carry out the plan, if only by talking about it. I can well recall the 
stumbling and uncertainty with which I finally set it forth to Miss Starr, 
my old-time school friend, who was one of our party. I even dared to hope 
that she might join in carrying out the plan, but nevertheless I told it 
in the fear of that disheartening experience which is so apt to afflict 
our most cherished plans when they are at last divulged, when we suddenly 
feel that there is nothing there to talk about, and as the golden dream 
slips through our fingers we are left to wonder at our own fatuous belief. 
But gradually the comfort of Miss Starr's companionship, the vigor and 
enthusiasm which she brought to bear upon it, told both in the growth of 
the plan and upon the sense of its validity, so that by the time we had 
reached the enchantment of the Alhambra, the scheme had become convincing 
and tangible although still most hazy in detail. 

A month later we parted in Paris, Miss Starr to go back to Italy, and I to 
journey on to London to secure as many suggestions as possible from those 
wonderful places of which we had heard, Toynbee Hall and the People's 
Palace. So that it finally came about that in June, 1888, five years after 
my first visit in East London, I found myself at Toynbee Hall equipped not 
only with a letter of introduction from Canon Fremantle, but with high 
expectations and a certain belief that what-

Page 88

ever perplexities and discouragement concerning the life of the poor were 
in store for me, I should at least know something at first hand and have 
the solace of daily activity. I had confidence that although life itself 
might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive receptivity 
had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the ever-lasting 
"preparation for life," however ill-prepared I might be. 

It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy's phrase "the 
snare of preparation," which he insists we spread before the feet of young 
people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very 
period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to 
conform it to their own ideals. 

[image caption: A HULL-HOUSE INTERIOR.]



Page 89

CHAPTER V
FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE

THE next January found Miss Starr and myself in Chicago, searching for a 
neighborhood in which we might put our plans into execution. In our 
eagerness to win friends for the new undertaking, we utilized every 
opportunity to set forth the meaning of the Settlement as it had been 
embodied at Toynbee Hall, although in those days we made no appeal for 
money, meaning to start with our own slender resources. From the very 
first the plan received courteous attention, and the discussion, while 
often skeptical, was always friendly. Professor Swing wrote a commendatory 
column in the Evening Journal, and our early speeches were reported quite 
out of proportion to their worth. I recall a spirited evening at the home 
of Mrs. Wilmarth, which was attended by that renowned scholar, Thomas 
Davidson, and by a young Englishman who was a member of the then new 
Fabian society and to whom a peculiar glamour was attached because he had 
scoured knives all summer in a camp of high-minded philosophers in the 
Adirondacks. Our new little plan met with criticism, not to say 
disapproval, from Mr. Davidson,

Page 90

who, as nearly as I can remember, called it "one of those unnatural 
attempts to understand life through cooperative living." 

It was in vain we asserted that the collective living was not an essential 
part of the plan, that we would always scrupulously pay our own expenses, 
and that at any moment we might decide to scatter through the neighborhood 
and to live in separate tenements; he still contended that the fascination 
for most of those volunteering residence would lie in the collective 
living aspect of the Settlement. His contention was, of course, 
essentially sound; there is a constant tendency for the residents to "lose 
themselves in the cave of their own companionship," as the Toynbee Hall 
phrase goes, but on the other hand, it is doubtless true that the very 
companionship, the give and take of colleagues, is what tends to keep the 
Settlement normal and in touch with "the world of things as they are." I 
am happy to say that we never resented this nor any other difference of 
opinion, and that fifteen years later Professor Davidson handsomely 
acknowledged that the advantages of a group far outweighed the weaknesses 
he had early pointed out. He was at that later moment sharing with a group 
of young men, on the East Side of New York, his ripest conclusions in 
philosophy and was much touched by their intelligent interest and absorbed 
devotion. I think that time has also justified our early contention

Page 91

that the mere foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, 
hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large 
foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities, 
would be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago. I am not so sure that 
we succeeded in our endeavors "to make social intercourse express the 
growing sense of the economic unity of society and to add the social 
function to democracy". But Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory 
that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as 
the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gives a form 
of expression that has peculiar value. 

In our search for a vicinity in which to settle we went about with the 
officers of the compulsory education department, with city missionaries, 
and with the newspaper reporters whom I recall as a much older set of men 
than one ordinarily associates with that profession, or perhaps I was only 
sent out with the older ones on what they must all have considered a 
quixotic mission. One Sunday afternoon in the late winter a reporter took 
me to visit a so-called anarchist sunday school, several of which were to 
be found on the northwest side of the city. The young man in charge was of 
the German student type, and his face flushed with enthusiasm as he led 
the children singing one of Koerner's poems. The newspaperman, who did not 
understand German, asked me what abomi-

Page 92

nable stuff they were singing, but he seemed dissatisfied with my 
translation of the simple words and darkly intimated that they were "deep 
ones," and had probably "fooled" me. When I replied that Koerner was an 
ardent German poet whose songs inspired his countrymen to resist the 
aggressions of Napoleon, and that his bound poems were found in the most 
respectable libraries, he looked at me rather askance and I then and there 
had my first intimation that to treat a Chicago man, who is called an 
anarchist, as you would treat any other citizen, is to lay yourself open 
to deep suspicion. 

Another Sunday afternoon in the early spring, on the way to a Bohemian 
mission in the carriage of one of its founders, we passed a fine old house 
standing well back from the street, surrounded on three sides by a broad 
piazza, which was supported by wooden pillars of exceptionally pure 
Corinthian design and proportion. I was so attracted by the house that I 
set forth to visit it the very next day, but though I searched for it then 
and for several days after, I could not find it, and at length I most 
reluctantly gave up the search. 

Three weeks later, with the advice of several of the oldest residents of 
Chicago, including the ex-mayor of the city, Colonel Mason, who had from 
the first been a warm friend to our plans, we decided upon a location 
somewhere near the junction of Blue Island Avenue, Halsted Street, and 
Harrison

Page 93

Street. I was surprised and overjoyed on the very first day of our search 
for quarters to come upon the hospitable old house, the quest for which I 
had so recently abandoned. The house was of course rented, the lower part 
of it used for offices and storerooms in connection with a factory that 
stood back of it. However, after some difficulties were overcome, it 
proved to be possible to sublet the second floor and what had been a large 
drawing-room on the first floor. 

The house had passed through many changes since it had been built in 1856 
for the homestead of one of Chicago's pioneer citizens, Mr. Charles J. 
Hull, and although battered by its vicissitudes, was essentially sound. 
Before it had been occupied by the factory, it had sheltered a second-hand 
furniture store, and at one time the Little Sisters of the Poor had used 
it for a home for the aged. It had a half-skeptical reputation for a 
haunted attic, so far respected by the tenants living on the second floor 
that they always kept a large pitcher full of water on the attic stairs. 
Their explanation of this custom was so incoherent that I was sure it was 
a survival of the belief that a ghost could not cross running water, but 
perhaps that interpretation was only my eagerness for finding folklore. 

The fine old house responded kindly to repairs, its wide hall and open 
fireplace always insuring it a gracious aspect. Its generous owner, Miss 
Helen Culver, in the following spring gave us a free

Page 94

leasehold of the entire house. Her kindness has continued through the 
years until the group of thirteen buildings, which at present comprises 
our equipment, is built largely upon land which Miss Culver has put at the 
service of the Settlement which bears Mr. Hull's name. In those days the 
house stood between an undertaking establishment and a saloon. "Knight, 
Death and the Devil," the three were called by a Chicago wit, and yet any 
mock heroics which might be implied by comparing the Settlement to a 
knight quickly dropped away under the genuine kindness and hearty welcome 
extended to us by the families living up and down the street. 

We furnished the house as we would have furnished it were it in another 
part of the city, with the photographs and other impedimenta we had 
collected in Europe, and with a few bits of family mahogany. While all the 
new furniture which was bought was enduring in quality, we were careful to 
keep it in character with the fine old residence. Probably no young matron 
ever placed her own things in her own house with more pleasure than that 
with which we first furnished Hull-House. We believed that the Settlement 
may logically bring to its aid all those adjuncts which the cultivated man 
regards as good and suggestive of the best of the life of the past. 

On the 18th of September, 1889, Miss Starr and I moved into it, with Miss 
Mary Keyser, who be-

Page 95

gan performing the housework, but who quickly developed into a very 
important factor in the life of the vicinity as well as that of the 
household, and whose death five years later was most sincerely mourned by 
hundreds of our neighbors. 

In our enthusiasm over "settling," the first night we forgot not only to 
lock but to close a side door opening

Page 96

on Polk Street, and we were much pleased in the morning to find that we 
possessed a fine illustration of the honesty and kindliness of our new 
neighbors. 

Our first guest was an interesting young woman who lived in a neighboring 
tenement, whose widowed mother aided her in the support of the family by 
scrubbing a downtown theater every night. The mother, of English birth, 
was well bred and carefully educated, but was in the midst of that bitter 
struggle which awaits so many strangers in American cities who find that 
their social position tends to be measured solely by the standards of 
living they are able to maintain. Our guest has long since married the 
struggling young lawyer to whom she was then engaged, and he is now 
leading his profession in an eastern city. She recalls that month's 
experience always with a sense of amusement over the fact that the 
succession of visitors who came to see the new Settlement invariably 
questioned her most minutely concerning "these people" without once 
suspecting that they were talking to one who had been identified with the 
neighborhood from childhood. I at least was able to draw a lesson from the 
incident, and I never addressed a Chicago audience on the subject of the 
Settlement and its vicinity without inviting a neighbor to go with me, 
that I might curb any hasty generalization by the consciousness that I had 
an auditor who knew the

Page 97

conditions more intimately than I could hope to do. 

Halsted Street has grown so familiar during twenty years of residence that 
it is difficult to recall its gradual changes,­the withdrawal of the more 
prosperous Irish and Germans, and the slow substitution of Russian Jews, 
Italians, and Greeks. A description of the street such as I gave in those 
early addresses still stands in my mind as sympathetic and correct. 

Halsted Street is thirty-two miles long, and one of the great 
thoroughfares of Chicago; Polk Street crosses it midway between the 
stockyards to the south and the shipbuilding yards on the north branch of 
the Chicago River. For the six miles between these two industries the 
street is lined with shops of butchers and grocers, with dingy and 
gorgeous saloons, and pretentious establishments for the sale of ready-
made clothing. Polk Street, running west from Halsted Street, grows 
rapidly more prosperous; running a mile east to State Street, it grows 
steadily worse, and crosses a network of vice

Page 98

on the corners of Clark Street and Fifth Avenue. Hull-House once stood in 
the suburbs, but the city has steadily grown up around it and its site now 
has corners on three or four foreign colonies. Between Halsted Street and 
the river live about ten thousand Italians­Neapolitans, Sicilians, and 
Calabrians, with an occasional Lombard or Venetian. To the south on 
Twelfth Street are many Germans, and side streets are given over almost 
entirely to Polish and Russian Jews. Still farther south, these Jewish 
colonies merge into a huge Bohemian colony, so vast that Chicago ranks as 
the third Bohemian city in the world. To the northwest are many Canadian-
French, clannish in spite of their long residence in America, and to the 
north are Irish and first-generation Americans. On the streets directly 
west and farther north are well-to-do English speaking families, many of 
whom own their own houses and have lived in the neighborhood for years; 
one man is still living in his old farmhouse. 

The policy of the public authorities of never taking an initiative, and 
always waiting to be urged to do their duty, is obviously fatal in a 
neighborhood where there is little initiative among the citizens. The idea 
underlying our self- government breaks down in such a ward. The streets 
are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools inadequate, sanitary 
legislation unenforced, the street lighting bad, the paving miserable and 
altogether lacking in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul 
beyond description. Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street 
sewer. The older and richer inhabitants seem anxious to move away as 
rapidly as they can afford it. They make room for newly arrived immigrants 
who are densely ignorant of

Page 99

civic duties. This substitution of the older inhabitants is accomplished 
industrially also, in the south and east quarters of the ward. The Jews 
and Italians do the finishing for the great clothing manufacturers, 
formerly done by Americans, Irish, and Germans, who refused to submit to 
the extremely low prices to which the sweating system has reduced their 
successors. As the design of the sweating system is the elimination of 
rent from the manufacture of clothing, the "outside work" is begun after 
the clothing leaves the cutter. An unscrupulous contractor regards no 
basement as too dark, no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too 
provisional, no tenement room too small for his workroom, as these 
conditions imply low rental. Hence these shops abound in the worst of the 
foreign districts where the sweater easily finds his cheap basement and 
his home finishers. 

The houses of the ward, for the most part wooden, were originally built 
for one family and are now occupied by several. They are after the type of 
the inconvenient frame cottages found in the poorer suburbs twenty years 
ago. Many of them were built where they now stand; others were brought 
thither on rollers, because their previous sites had been taken by 
factories. The fewer brick tenement buildings which are three or four 
stories high are comparatively new, and there are few large tenements. The 
little wooden houses have a temporary aspect, and for this reason, 
perhaps, the tenement-house legislation in Chicago is totally inadequate. 
Rear tenements flourish; many houses have no water supply save the faucet 
in the back yard, there are no fire escapes, the garbage and ashes are 
placed in wooden boxes which are fastened to the street pave-

Page 100

ments. One of the most discouraging features about the present system of 
tenement houses is that many are owned by sordid and ignorant immigrants. 
The theory that wealth brings responsibility, that possession entails at 
length education and refinement, in these cases fails utterly. The 
children of an Italian immigrant owner may "shine" shoes in the street, 
and his wife may pick rags from the street gutter, laboriously sorting 
them in a dingy court. Wealth may do something for her self-complacency 
and feeling of consequence; it certainly does nothing for her comfort or 
her children's improvement nor for the cleanliness of anyone concerned. 
Another thing that prevents better houses in Chicago is the tentative 
attitude of the real estate men. Many unsavory conditions are allowed to 
continue which would be regarded with horror if they were considered 
permanent. Meanwhile, the wretched conditions persist until at least two 
generations of children have been born and reared in them. 

In every neighborhood where poorer people live, because rents are supposed 
to be cheaper there, is an element which, although uncertain in the 
individual, in the aggregate can be counted upon. It is composed of people 
of former education and opportunity who have cherished ambitions and 
prospects, but who are caricatures of what they meant to be­"hollow ghosts 
which blame the living men." There are times in many lives when there is a 
cessation of energy and loss of power. Men and women of education and 
refinement come to live in a cheaper neighborhood because they lack the 
ability to make money, because of ill health, because of an unfortunate 
marriage, or for other reasons which do not imply criminality or 
stupidity. Among

Page 101

them are those who, in spite of untoward circumstances, keep up some sort 
of an intellectual life; those who are "great for books," as their 
neighbors say. To such the Settlement may be a genuine refuge. 

In the very first weeks of our residence Miss Starr started a reading 
party in George Eliot's "Romola," which was attended by a group of young 
women who followed the wonderful tale with unflagging interest. The weekly 
reading was held in our little upstairs dining room, and two members of 
the club came to dinner each week, not only that they might be received as 
guests, but that they might help us wash the dishes afterwards and so make 
the table ready for the stacks of Florentine photographs. 

Our "first resident," as she gaily designated herself, was a charming old 
lady who gave five consecutive readings from Hawthorne to a most 
appreciative audience, interspersing the magic tales most delightfully 
with recollections of the elusive and fascinating author. Years before she 
had lived at Brook Farm as a pupil of the Ripleys, and she came to us for 
ten days because she wished to live once more in an atmosphere where 
"idealism ran high." We thus early found the type of class which through 
all the years has remained most popular­a combination of a social 
atmosphere with serious study. 

Volunteers to the new undertaking came quickly; a charming young girl 
conducted a kindergarten

Page 102

in the drawing room, coming regularly every morning from her home in a 
distant part of the North Side of the city. Although a tablet to her 
memory has stood upon a mantel shelf in Hull-House for five years, we 
still associate her most vividly with the play of little children, first 
in her kindergarten and then in her own nursery, which furnished a 
veritable illustration of Victor Hugo's definition of heaven­"a place 
where parents are always young and children always little." Her daily 
presence for the first two years made it quite impossible for us to become 
too solemn and self-conscious in our strenuous routine, for her mirth and 
buoyancy were irresistible and her eager desire to share the life of the 
neighborhood never failed, although it was often put to a severe test. One 
day at luncheon she gaily recited her futile attempt to impress temperance 
principles upon the mind of an Italian mother, to whom she had returned a 
small daughter of five sent to the kindergarten "in quite a horrid state 
of intoxication" from the wine-soaked bread upon which she had 
breakfasted. The mother, with the gentle courtesy of a South Italian, 
listened politely to her graphic portrayal of the untimely end awaiting so 
immature a wine bibber; but long before the lecture was finished, quite 
unconscious of the incongruity, she hospitably set forth her best wines, 
and when her baffled guest refused one after the other, she disappeared, 
only to quickly return with a small dark glass of whisky, saying

Page 103

reassuringly, "See, I have brought you the true American drink." The 
recital ended in seriocomic despair, with the rueful statement that "the 
impression I probably made on her darkened mind was, that it was the 
American custom to breakfast children on bread soaked in whisky instead of 
light Italian wine." 

That first kindergarten was a constant source of education to us. We were 
much surprised to find social distinctions even among its lambs, although 
greatly amused with the neat formulation made by the superior little 
Italian boy who refused to sit beside uncouth little Angelina because "we 
eat our macaroni this way"­imitating the movement of a fork from a plate 
to his mouth­"and she eat her macaroni this way," holding his hand high in 
the air and throwing back his head, that his wide-open mouth might receive 
an imaginary cascade. Angelina gravely nodded her little head in approval 
of this distinction between gentry and peasant. "But isn't it astonishing 
that merely table manners are made such a test all the way along?" was the 
comment of their democratic teacher. Another memory which refuses to be 
associated with death, which came to her all too soon, is that of the 
young girl who organized our first really successful club of boys, holding 
their fascinated interest by the old chivalric tales, set forth so 
dramatically and vividly that checkers and jackstraws were abandoned by 
all the other clubs

Page 104

on Boys' Day, that their members might form a listening fringe to "The 
Young Heros." 

I met a member of the latter club one day as he flung himself out of the 
House in the rage by which an emotional boy hopes to keep from shedding 
tears. "There is no use coming here any more, Prince Roland is dead," he 
gruffly explained as we passed. We encouraged the younger boys in 
tournaments and dramatics of all sorts, and we somewhat fatuously believed 
that boys who were early interested in adventurers or explorers might 
later want to know the lives of living statesmen and inventors. It is 
needless to add that the boys quickly responded to such a program, and 
that the only difficulty lay in finding leaders who were able to carry it 
out. This difficulty has been with us through all the years of growth and 
development in the Boys' Club

Page 105

until now, with its five-story building, its splendid equipment of shops, 
of recreation and study rooms, that group alone is successful which 
commands the services of a resourceful and devoted leader. 

The dozens of younger children who from the first came to Hull- House were 
organized into groups which were not quite classes and not quite clubs. 
The value of these groups consisted almost entirely in arousing a higher 
imagination and in giving the children the opportunity which they could 
not have in the crowded schools, for initiative and for independent social 
relationships. The public schools then contained little hand work of any 
sort, so that naturally any instruction which we provided for the children 
took the direction of this supplementary work. But it required a constant 
effort that the pressure of poverty itself should not defeat the 
educational aim. The Italian girls in the sewing classes would count the 
day lost when they could not carry home a garment, and the insistence that 
it should be neatly made seemed a super-refinement to those in dire need 
of clothing.

Page 106

As these clubs have been continued during the twenty years they have 
developed classes in the many forms of handicraft which the newer 
education is so rapidly adapting for the delight of children; but they 
still keep their essentially social character and still minister to that 
large number of children who leave school the very week they are fourteen 
years old, only too eager to close the schoolroom door forever on a 
tiresome task that is at last well over. It seems to us important that 
these children shall find themselves permanently attached to a House that 
offers them evening clubs and classes with their old companions, that 
merges as easily as possible the school life into the working life and 
does what it can to find places for the bewildered young things looking 
for work. A large proportion of the delinquent boys brought into the 
juvenile court in Chicago are the oldest sons in large families whose 
wages are needed at home. The grades from which many of them leave school, 
as the records show, are piteously far from the seventh and eighth where 
the very first introduction in manual training is given, nor have they 
been caught by any other abiding interest. 

In spite of these flourishing clubs for children early established at Hull-
House, and the fact that our first organized undertaking was a 
kindergarten, we were very insistent that the Settlement should not be 
primarily for the children, and that it was absurd to suppose that grown 
people

Page 107

would not respond to opportunities for education and social life. Our 
enthusiastic kindergartner herself demonstrated this with an old woman of 
ninety who, because she was left alone all day while her daughter cooked 
in a restaurant, had formed such a persistent habit of picking the plaster 
off the walls that one landlord after another refused to have her for a 
tenant. It required but a few week's time to teach her to make large paper 
chains, and gradually she was content to do it all day long, and in the 
end took quite as much pleasure in adorning the walls as she had formally 
taken in demolishing them. Fortunately the landlord had never heard the 
aesthetic principle that exposure of basic construction is more desirable 
than gaudy decoration. In course of time it was discovered that the old 
woman could speak Gaelic, and when one or two grave professors came to see 
her, the neighborhood was filled with pride that such a wonder lived in 
their midst. To mitigate life for a woman of ninety was an unfailing 
refutation of the statement that the Settlement was designed for the 
young. 

On our first New Year's Day at Hull-House we invited the older people in 
the vicinity, sending a carriage for the most feeble and announcing to all 
of them that we were going to organize an Old Settlers' Party. 

Every New Year's Day since, older people in varying numbers have come 
together at Hull-

Page 108

House to relate early hardships, and to take for the moment the place in 
the community to which their pioneer life entitles them. Many people who 
were formerly residents of the vicinity, but whom prosperity has carried 
into more desirable neighborhoods, come back to these meetings and often 
confess to each other that they have never since found such kindness as in 
early Chicago when all its citizens came together in mutual enterprises. 
Many of these pioneers, so like the men and women of my earliest childhood 
that I always felt comforted by their presence in the house, were very 
much opposed to "foreigners," whom they held responsible for a 
depreciation of property and a general lowering of the tone of the 
neighborhood. Sometimes we had a chance for championship; I recall one old 
man, fiercely American, who had reproached me because we had so many 
"foreign views" on our walls, to whom I endeavored to set forth our hope 
that the pictures might afford a familiar island to the immigrants in a 
sea of new and strange impressions. The old settler guest, taken off his 
guard, replied, "I see; they feel as we did when we saw a Yankee notion 
from Down East,"­thereby formulating the dim kinship between the pioneer 
and the immigrant, both "buffeting the waves of a new development." The 
older settlers as well as their children throughout the years have given 
genuine help to our various enterprises for neighborhood improvement, and 
from their own memories of earlier hardships have

Page 109

made many shrewd suggestions for alleviating the difficulties of that 
first sharp struggle with untoward conditions. 

In those early days we were often asked why we had come to live on Halsted 
Street when we could afford to live somewhere else. I remember one man who 
used to shake his head and say it was "the strangest thing he had met in 
his experience," but who was finally convinced that it was "not strange 
but natural." In time it came to seem natural to all of us that the 
Settlement should be there. If it is natural to feed the hungry and care 
for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, 
comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving for social 
intercourse that all men feel. Whoever does it is rewarded by something 
which, if not gratitude, is at least spontaneous and vital and lacks that 
irksome sense of obligation with which a substantial benefit is too often 
acknowledged. 

In addition to the neighbors who responded to the receptions and classes, 
we found those who were too battered and oppressed to care for them. To 
these, however, was left that susceptibility to the bare offices of 
humanity which raises such offices into a bond of fellowship. 

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

Page 110

Occasionally these neighborly offices unexpectedly uncovered ugly human 
traits. For six weeks after an operation we kept in one of our three 
bedrooms a forlorn little baby who, because he was born with a cleft 
palate, was most unwelcome even to his mother, and we were horrified when 
he died of neglect a week after he was returned to his home; a little 
Italian bride of fifteen sought shelter with us one November evening to 
escape her husband who had beaten her every night for a week when he 
returned home from work, because she had lost her wedding ring; two of us 
officiated quite alone at the birth of an illegitimate child because the 
doctor was late in arriving, and none of the honest Irish matrons would 
"touch the likes of her"; we ministered at the deathbed of a young man, 
who during a long illness of tuberculosis had received so many bottles of 
whisky through the mistaken kindness of his friends, that the cumulative 
effect produced wild periods of exultation, in one of which he died. 

We were also early impressed with the curious isolation of many of the 
immigrants; an Italian woman once expressed her pleasure in the red roses 
that she saw at one of our receptions in surprise that they had been 
"brought so fresh all the way from Italy." She would not believe for an 
instant that they had been grown in America. She said that she had lived 
in Chicago for six years and had never seen any roses, whereas in Italy 
she had seen

Page 111

them every summer in great profusion. During all that time, of course, the 
woman had lived within ten blocks of a florist's window; she had not been 
more than a five-cent car ride away from the public parks; but she had 
never dreamed of faring forth for herself, and no one had taken her. Her 
conception of America had been the untidy street in which she lived and 
had made her long struggle to adapt herself to American ways. 

But in spite of some untoward experiences, we were constantly impressed 
with the uniform kindness and courtesy we received. Perhaps these first 
days laid the simple human foundations which are certainly essential for 
continuous living among the poor; first, genuine preference for residence 
in an industrial quarter to any other part of the city, because it is 
interesting and makes the human appeal; and second, the conviction, in the 
words of Canon Barnett, that the things that make men alike are finer and 
better than the things that keep

Page 112

them apart, and that these basic likenesses, if they are properly 
accentuated, easily transcend the less essential differences of race, 
language, creed, and tradition. 

Perhaps even in those first days we made a beginning toward that object 
which was afterwards stated in our charter: "To provide a center for 
higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and 
philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions 
in the industrial districts of Chicago." 

[image caption: A VIEW FROM A HULL-HOUSE WINDOW.]



Page 113

CHAPTER VI
SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS

THE Ethical Culture Societies held a summer school at Plymouth, 
Massachusetts, in 1892, to which they invited several people representing 
the then new Settlement movement, that they might discuss with others the 
general theme of Philanthropy and Social Progress. 

I venture to produce here parts of a lecture I delivered in Plymouth, both 
because I have found it impossible to formulate with the same freshness 
those early motives and strivings, and because, when published with other 
papers given that summer, it was received by the Settlement people 
themselves as a satisfactory statement. 

I remember on golden summer afternoon during the sessions of the summer 
school that several of us met on the shores of a pond in a pine wood a few 
miles from Plymouth, to discuss our new movement. The natural leader of 
the group was Robert A. Woods. He had recently returned from a residence 
in Toynbee Hall, London, to open Andover House in Boston, and had just 
issued a book, "English Social Movements," in which he had gathered 
together and focused the many

Page 114

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

Page 115

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 coördination between thought and action. I 
think it is hard for us to realize how seriously many of

Page 116

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

Page 117

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

Page 118

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

Page 119

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 law­that the final 
return of the deed is upon the head of the doer. The deed is that of exclu-

Page 120

siveness 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

Page 121

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

Page 122

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 revelation­a 
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

Page 123

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 preëminently 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 world­the 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

Page 124

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

Page 125

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

Page 126

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

Page 127

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. 

Page 128 [blank]