Twenty Years at Hull-House - Chapters XVII-XVIII



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CHAPTER XVII
ECHOES OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

THE residents of Hull-House have always seen many evidences of the Russian 
Revolution; a forlorn family of little children whose parents have been 
massacred at Kishinev are received and supported by their relatives in our 
Chicago neighborhood; or a Russian woman, her face streaming with tears of 
indignation and pity, asks you to look at the scarred back of her sister, 
a young girl, who has escaped with her life from the whips of the Cossack 
soldiers; or a studious young woman suddenly disappears from the Hull-
House classes because she has returned to Kiev to be near her brother 
while he is in prison, that she may earn money for the nourishing food 
which alone will keep him from contracting tuberculosis; or we attend a 
protest meeting against the newest outrages of the Russian government in 
which the speeches are interrupted by the groans of those whose sons have 
been sacrificed and by the hisses of others who cannot repress their 
indignation. At such moments an American is acutely conscious of our 
ignorance of this greatest tragedy of modern times, and at our 
indifference to the 

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waste of perhaps the noblest human material among our contemporaries. 
Certain it is, as the distinguished Russian revolutionists have come to 
Chicago, they have impressed me, as no one else ever has done, as 
belonging to that noble company of martyrs who have ever and again poured 
forth blood that human progress might be advanced. Sometimes these men and 
women have addressed audiences gathered quite outside the Russian colony 
and have filled to overflowing Chicago's largest halls with American 
citizens deeply touched by this message of martyrdom. One significant 
meeting was addressed by a member of the Russian Duma and by one of 
Russia's oldest and sanest revolutionists; another by Madame Breshkovsky, 
who later languished a prisoner in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. 

In this wonderful procession of revolutionists, Prince Kropotkin, or, as 
he prefers to be called, Peter Kropotkin, was doubtless the most 
distinguished. When he came to America to lecture, he was heard throughout 
the country with great interest and respect; that he was a guest of Hull-
House during his stay in Chicago attracted little attention at the time, 
but two years later, when the assassination of President McKinley 
occurred, the visit of this kindly scholar, who had always called himself 
an "anarchist" and had certainly written fiery tracts in his younger 
manhood, was made the basis of an attack upon Hull-House by a daily

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newspaper, which ignored the fact that while Prince Kropotkin had 
addressed the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull-House, giving a 
digest of his remarkable book on "Fields, Factories, and Workshops," he 
had also spoken at the State Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin and 
before the leading literary and scientific societies of Chicago. These 
institutions and societies were not, therefore, called anarchistic. Hull-
House had doubtless laid itself open to this attack through an incident 
connected with the imprisonment of the editor on an anarchistic paper, who 
was arrested in Chicago immediately after the assassination of President 
McKinley. In the excitement following the national calamity and the avowal 
by the assassin of the influence of the anarchistic lecture to which he 
had listened, arrests were made in Chicago of every one suspected of 
anarchy, in the belief that a widespread plot would be uncovered. The 
editor's house was searched for incriminating literature, his wife and 
daughter taken to a police station, and his son and himself, with several 
other suspected anarchists, were placed in the disused cells in the 
basement of the city hall. 

It is impossible to overstate the public excitement of the moment and the 
unfathomable sense of horror with which the community regarded an attack 
upon the chief executive of the nation, as a crime against government 
itself which compels an instinctive recoil from all law-abiding citizens.

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Doubtless both the horror and recoil have their roots deep down in human 
experience; the earliest forms of government implied a group which offered 
competent resistance to outsiders, but assuming no protection was 
necessary between any two of its own members, promptly punished with death 
the traitor who had assaulted anyone within. An anarchistic attack against 
an official thus furnishes an accredited basis both for unreasoning hatred 
and for prompt punishment. Both the hatred and the determination to punish 
reached the highest pitch in Chicago after the assassination of President 
McKinley, and the group of wretched men detained in the old-fashioned, 
scarcely habitable cells, had not the least idea of their ultimate fate. 
They were not allowed to see an attorney and were kept "in communicado" as 
their excited friends called it. I had seen the editor and his family only 
during Prince Kropotkin's stay at Hull-House, when they had come to visit 
him several times. The editor had impressed me as a quiet, scholarly man, 
challenging the social order by the philosophic touchstone of Bakunin and 
of Herbert Spencer, somewhat startled by the radicalism of his fiery young 
son and much comforted by the German domesticity of his wife and daughter. 
Perhaps it was but my hysterical symptom of the universal excitement, but 
it certainly seemed to me more than I could bear when a group of his 
individualistic friends, who had come to ask for help, said: "You see what 
becomes

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of your boasted law; the authorities won't even allow an attorney, nor 
will they accept bail for these men, against whom nothing can be proved, 
although the veriest criminals are not denied such a right." Challenged by 
an anarchist, one is always sensitive for the honor of legally constituted 
society, and I replied that of course the men could have an attorney, that 
the assassin himself would eventually be furnished with one, that the fact 
that a man was an anarchist had nothing to do with his rights before the 
law! I was met with the retort that that might do for a theory, but that 
the fact still remained that these men had been absolutely isolated, 
seeing no one but policemen, who constantly frightened them with tales of 
public clamor and threatened lynching. 

The conversation took place on Saturday night and, as the final police 
authority rests in the mayor, with a friend who was equally disturbed over 
the situation, I repaired to his house on Sunday morning to appeal to him 
in the interest of a law and order that should not yield to panic. We 
contended that to the anarchist above all men it must be demonstrated that 
law is impartial and stands the test of every strain. The mayor heard us 
through with the ready sympathy of the successful politician. He insisted, 
however, that the men thus far had merely been properly protected against 
lynching, but that it might now be safe to allow them to see some one; he 
would not yet, however,

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take the responsibility of permitting an attorney, but if I myself chose 
to see them on the humanitarian errand of an assurance of fair play, he 
would write me a permit at once. I promptly fell into the trap, if trap it 
was, and within half an hour was in a corridor in the city hall basement, 
talking to the distracted editor and surrounded by a cordon of police, who 
assured me that it was not safe to permit him out of his cell. The editor, 
who had grown thin and haggard under his suspense, asked immediately as to 
the whereabouts of his wife and daughter, concerning whom he had heard not 
a word since he had seen them arrested. Gradually he became composed as he 
learned, not that his testimony had been believed to the effect that he 
had never seen the assassin but once and had then considered him a foolish 
half-witted creature, but that the most thoroughgoing "dragnet" 
investigations on the part of the united police of the country had failed 
to discover a plot and that the public was gradually becoming convinced 
that the dastardly act was that of a solitary man with no political or 
social affiliations. 

The entire conversation was simple and did not seem to me unlike, in 
motive or character, interviews I had had with many another forlorn man 
who had fallen into prison. I had scarce returned to Hull-House, however, 
before it was filled with reporters, and I at once discovered that whether 
or not I had helped a brother out of a pit, I had fallen into a

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deep one myself. A period of sharp public opprobrium followed, traces of 
which, I suppose, will always remain. And yet in the midst of the letters 
of protest and accusation which made my mail a horror every morning came a 
few letters of another sort, one from a federal judge whom I had never 
seen and another from a distinguished professor in the constitutional law, 
who congratulated me on what they termed a sane attempt to uphold the law 
in time of panic. 

Although one or two ardent young people rushed into print to defend me 
from the charge of "abetting anarchy," it seemed to me at the time that 
mere words would not avail. I had felt that the protection of the law 
itself extended to the most unpopular citizen was the only reply to the 
anarchistic argument, to the effect that this moment of panic revealed the 
truth of their theory of government; that the custodians of law and order 
have become the government itself quite as the armed men hired by the 
medieval guilds to protect them in the peaceful pursuit of their 
avocations, through sheer possession of arms finally made themselves 
rulers of the city. At that moment I was firmly convinced that the public 
could only be convicted of the blindness of its course, when a body of 
people with a hundred-fold of the moral energy possessed by a Settlement 
group, should make clear that there is no method by which any community 
can be guarded against sporadic efforts on the part of half-

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crazed, discouraged men, save by a sense of mutual rights and securities 
which will include the veriest outcast. 

It seemed to me then that in the millions of words uttered and written at 
that time, no one adequately urged that public-spirited citizens set 
themselves the task of patiently discovering how these sporadic acts of 
violence against government may be understood and averted. We do not know 
whether they occur among the discouraged and unassimilated immigrants who 
might be cared for in such a way as enormously to lessen the probability 
of these acts, or whether they are the result of anarchistic teaching. By 
hastily concluding that the latter is the sole explanation for them, we 
make no attempt to heal and cure the situation. Failure to make a proper 
diagnosis may mean treatment of a disease which does not exist, or it may 
furthermore mean that the dire malady from which the patient is suffering 
be permitted to develop unchecked. And yet as the details of the meager 
life of the President's assassin were disclosed, they were a challenge to 
the forces for social betterment in American cities. Was it not an 
indictment to all those whose business it is to interpret and solace the 
wretched, that a boy should have grown up in an American city so uncared 
for, so untouched by higher issues, his wounds of life so unhealed by 
religion that the first talk he ever heard dealing with life's wrongs,

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although anarchistic and violent, should yet appear to point a way of 
relief? 

The conviction that a sense of fellowship is the only implement which will 
break into the locked purpose of a half-crazed creature bent upon 
destruction in the name of justice, came to me through an experience 
recited to me at this time by an old anarchist. 

He was a German cobbler who, through all the changes in the manufacturing 
of shoes, had steadily clung to his little shop on a Chicago thoroughfare, 
partly as an expression of his individualism and partly because he 
preferred bitter poverty in a place of his own to good wages under a 
disciplinary foreman. The assassin of President McKinley on his way 
through Chicago only a few days before he committed his dastardly deed had 
visited all the anarchists whom he could find in the city, asking them for 
"the password" as he called it. They, of course, possessed no such thing, 
and had turned him away, some with disgust and all with a certain degree 
of impatience, as a type of the ill-balanced man who, as they put it, was 
always "hanging around the movement, without the slightest conception of 
its meaning." Among other people, he visited the German cobbler, who 
treated him much as the others had done, but who, after the event had made 
clear the identity of his visitor, was filled with the most bitter remorse 
that he had failed

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to utilize his chance meeting with the assassin to deter him from his 
purpose. He knew as well as any psychologist who has read the history of 
such solitary men that the only possible way to break down such a 
persistent and secretive purpose, was by the kindliness which might have 
induced confession, which might have restored the future assassin into 
fellowship with normal men. 

In the midst of his remorse, the cobbler told me a tale of his own youth; 
that years before, when an ardent young fellow in Germany, newly converted 
to the philosophy of anarchism, as he called it, he had made up his mind 
that the Church, as much as the State, was responsible for human 
oppression, and that this fact could best be set forth "in the deed" by 
the public destruction of a clergyman or priest; that he had carried 
firearms for a year with this purpose in mind, but that one pleasant 
summer evening, in a moment of weakness, he had confided his intention to 
a friend, and that from that moment he not only lost all desire to carry 
it out, but it seemed to him the most preposterous thing imaginable. In 
concluding the story he said; "That poor fellow sat just beside me on my 
bench; if I had only put my hand on his shoulder and said, 'Now, look 
here, brother, what is on your mind? What makes you talk such nonsense? 
Tell me. I have seen much of life, and understand all kinds of men. I have 
been young and hot-headed and

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foolish myself,' if he had told me of his purpose then and there, he would 
never have carried it out. The whole nation would have been spared this 
horror." As he concluded he shook his gray head and sighed as if the whole 
incident were more than he could bear­one of those terrible sins of 
omission; one of the things he "ought to have done," the memory of which 
is so hard to endure. 

The attempt a Settlement makes to interpret American institutions to those 
who are bewildered concerning them either because of their personal 
experiences, or because of preconceived theories, would seem to lie in the 
direct path of its public obligation, and yet it is apparently impossible 
for the overwrought community to distinguish between the excitement the 
Settlements are endeavoring to understand and to allay and the attitude of 
the Settlement itself. At times of public panic, fervid denunciation is 
held to be the duty of every good citizen, and if a Settlement is 
convinced that the incident should be used to vindicate the law and does 
not at the moment give its strength to denunciation, its attitude is at 
once taken to imply a championship of anarchy itself. 

The public mind at such a moment falls into the old medieval confusion­he 
who feeds or shelters a heretic is upon prima facie evidence a heretic 
himself­he who knows intimately people among whom anarchists arise is 
therefore an

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anarchist. I personally am convinced that anarchy as a philosophy is dying 
down, not only in Chicago, but everywhere; that their leading organs have 
discontinued publication, and that their most eminent men in America have 
deserted them. Even those groups which have continued to meet are 
dividing, and the major half in almost every instance calls itself 
socialist-anarchists, an apparent contradiction of terms, whose members 
insist that the socialistic organization of society must be the next stage 
of social development and must be gone through with, so to speak, before 
the ideal state of society can be reached, so nearly begging the question 
that some orthodox socialists are willing to recognize them. It is 
certainly true that just because anarchy questions the very foundations of 
society, the most elemental sense of protection demands that the method of 
meeting the challenge should be intelligently considered. 

Whether or not Hull-House has accomplished anything by its method of 
meeting such a situation, or at least attempting to treat it in a way 
which will not destroy confidence in the American institutions so adored 
by refugees from foreign governmental oppression, it is of course 
impossible for me to say. 

And yet it was in connection with an effort to pursue an intelligent 
policy in regard to a so-called "foreign anarchist" that Hull-House again 
became associated with that creed six years later.

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This again was an echo of the Russian revolution, but in connection with 
one of its humblest representatives. A young Russian Jew named Averbuch 
appeared in the early morning at the house of the Chicago chief of police 
upon an obscure errand. It was a moment of panic everwhere in regard to 
anarchists because of a recent murder in Denver which had been charged to 
an Italian anarchist, and the chief of police, assuming that the dark 
young man standing in his hallway was an anarchist bent upon his 
assassination, hastily called for help. In a panic born of fear and self-
defense, young Averbuch was shot to death. The members of the Russian-
Jewish colony on the west side of Chicago were thrown into a state of 
intense excitement as soon as the nationality of the young man became 
known. They were filled with dark forebodings from a swift prescience of 
what it would mean to them were the oduim of anarchy rightly or wrongly 
attached to one of their members. It seemed to the residents of Hull-House 
most important that every effort should be made to ascertain just what did 
happen, that every means of securing information should be exhausted 
before a final opinion should be formed, and this odium fastened upon a 
colony of law-abiding citizens. The police might be right or wrong in 
their assertion that the man was an anarchist. It was, to our minds, also 
most unfortunate that the Chicago police in the deter-

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mination to uncover an anarchistic plot should have utilized the most 
drastic methods of search within the Russian-Jewish colony composed of 
families only too familiar with the methods of Russian police. Therefore, 
when the Chicago police ransacked all the printing offices they could 
locate in the colony, when they raided a restaurant which they regarded as 
suspicious because it had been supplying food at cost to the unemployed, 
when they searched through private houses for papers and photographs of 
revolutionaries, when they seized the library of the Edelstadt group and 
carried the books, including Shakespeare and Herbert Spencer, to the city 
hall, when they arrested two friends of young Averbuch and kept them in 
the police station forty-eight hours, when they mercilessly "sweated" the 
sister, Olga, that she might be startled into a confession­all these 
things so poignantly reminded them of Russian methods that indignation fed 
both by old memory and bitter disappointment in America, swept over the 
entire colony. The older men asked whether constitutional rights gave no 
guarantee against such violent aggression of police power, and the hot-
headed younger ones cried out at once that the only way to deal with the 
police was to defy them, which was true of police the world over. It was 
said many times that those who are without influence and protection in a 
strange country fare exactly as hard as do the poor in Europe;

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that all the talk of guaranteed protection through political institutions 
is nonsense. 

Every Settlement has classes in citizenship in which the principles of 
American institutions are expounded, and of these the community, as a 
whole, approves. But the Settlements know better than anyone else that 
while these classes and lectures are useful, nothing can possibly give 
lessons in citizenship so effectively and make so clear the constitutional 
basis of a self-governing community as the current event itself. The 
treatment at a given moment of that foreign colony which feels itself 
outraged and misunderstood, either makes its constitutional rights clear 
to it, or forever confuses it on the subject. 

The only method by which a reasonable and loyal conception of government 
may be substituted for the one formed upon Russian experiences is that the 
actual experience of refugees with government in America shall gradually 
demonstrate what a very different thing government means here. Such an 
event as the Averbuch affair affords an unprecedented opportunity to make 
clear this difference and to demonstrate beyond the possibility of 
misunderstanding that the guarantee of constitutional rights implies that 
officialism shall be restrained and guarded at every point, that the 
official represents, not the will of a small administrative body, but the 
will of the entire people, and that methods therefore have been 
constituted by which official

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aggression may be restrained. The Averbuch incident gave an opportunity to 
demonstrate this to that very body of people who need it most; to those 
who have lived in Russia where autocratic officers represent autocratic 
power and where government is officialism.  It seemed to the residents in 
the Settlements nearest the Russian-Jewish colony that it was an obvious 
piece of public spirit to try out all the legal value involved, to insist 
that American institutions were stout enough to break down in times of 
stress and public panic. 

The belief of many Russians that the Averbuch incident would be made a 
prelude to the constant use of the extradition treaty for the sake of 
terrorizing revolutionists both at home and abroad received a certain 
corroboration when an attempt was made in 1908 to extradite a Russian 
revolutionist named Rudovitz who was living in Chicago. The first hearing 
before a United States

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Commissioner gave a verdict favorable to the Russian Government although 
this was afterward reversed by the Department of State in Washington. 
Partly to educate American sentiment, partly to express sympathy with the 
Russian refugees in their dire need, a series of public meetings was 
arranged in which the operations of the extradition treaty were discussed 
by many of us who had spoken at a meeting held in protest against its 
ratification fifteen years before. It is impossible for anyone 
unacquainted with the Russian colony to realize the consternation produced 
by this attempted extradition. I acted as treasurer of the fund collected 
to defray the expenses of halls and printing in the campaign against the 
policy of extradition and had many opportunities to talk with members of 
the colony. One old man, tearing his hair and beard as he spoke, declared 
that all his sons and grandsons might thus be sent back to Russia; in 
fact, all of the younger men in the colony might be extradited, for every 
high-spirited young Russian was, in a sense, a revolutionist. 

Would it not provoke to ironic laughter that very nemesis which presides 
over the destinies of nations, if the most autocratic government yet 
remaining in civilization should succeed in utilizing for its own 
autocratic methods the youngest and most daring experiment in democratic 
government which the world has ever seen? Stranger results

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have followed a course of stupidity and injustice resulting from blindness 
and panic! 

It is certainly true that if the decision of the federal office in Chicago 
had not been reversed by the department of state in Washington, the United 
States government would have been committed to return thousands of 
spirited young refugees to the punishments of the Russian autocracy. 

It was perhaps significant of our need of what Napoleon called a "revival 
of civic morals" that the public appeal against such a reversal of our 
traditions had to be based largely upon the contributions to American 
progress made from other revolutions; the Puritans from the English, 
Lafayette from the French, Carl Schurz and many another able man from the 
German upheavals in the middle of the century. 

A distinguished German scholar writing at the end of his long life a 
description of his friends of 1848 who made a gallant although premature 
effort to unite the German states and to secure a constitutional 
government, thus concludes: "But not a few saw the whole of their lives 
wrecked, either in prison or poverty, though they had done no wrong, and 
in many cases were the finest characters it has been my good fortune to 
know. They were before their time; the fruit was not ripe, as it was in 
1871, and Germany but lost her best sons in those miserable years." When 
the time is ripe in Russia, when she finally yields to those great forces 
which

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are molding and renovating contemporary life, when her Cavour and her 
Bismark finally throw into the first governmental forms all that yearning 
for juster human relations which the idealistic Russian revolutionists 
embody, we may look back upon these "miserable years" with a sense of 
chagrin at our lack of sympathy and understanding. 

Again it is far from easy to comprehend the great Russian struggle. I 
recall a visit from the famous revolutionist Gershuni, who had escaped 
from Siberia in a barrel of cabbage rolled under the very fortress of the 
commandant himself, had made his way through Manchuria and China to San 
Francisco, and on his way back to Russia had stopped in Chicago for a few 
days. Three months later we heard of his death, and whenever I recall the 
conversation held with him, I find it invested with that dignity which 
last words imply. Upon the request of a comrade, Gershuni had repeated the 
substance of the famous speech he had made to the court which sentenced 
him to Siberia. As representing the government against which he had 
rebelled, he told the court that he might in time be able to forgive all 
of their outrages and injustices save one; the unforgivable outrage would 
remain that hundreds of men like himself, who were vegetarians because 
they were not willing to participate in the destruction of living 
creatures, who had never struck a child even in punishment, who were so 
consumed with tenderness for the outcast and oppressed that

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they had lived for weeks among starving peasants only that they might 
cheer and solace them,­that these men should have been driven into 
terrorism, until impelled to "execute," as they call it,­"assassinate" the 
Anglo-Saxon would term it,­public officials, was something for which he 
would never forgive the Russian government. It was, perhaps, the heat of 
the argument, as much as conviction, which led me to reply that it would 
be equally difficult for society to forgive these very revolutionists for 
one thing they had done, their institution of the use of force in such 
wise that it would inevitably be imitated by men of less scruple and 
restraint; that to have revived such a method in civilization, to have 
justified it by their disinterestedness of purpose and nobility of 
character, was perhaps the gravest responsibility that any group of men 
could assume. With a smile of indulgent pity such as one might grant to a 
mistaken child, he replied that such Tolstoyan principles were as fitted 
to Russia as "these toilettes," pointing to the thin summer gowns of his 
listeners, "were fitted to a Siberian winter." And yet I held the belief 
then, as I certainly do now, that when the sense of justice seeks to 
express itself quite outside the regular channels of established 
government, it has set forth on a dangerous journey inevitably ending in 
disaster, and that this is true in spite of the fact that the adventure 
may have been inspired by noble motives. 

Still more perplexing than the use of force by

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the revolutionists is the employment of the agent-provocateur on the part 
of the Russian government. The visit of Vladimir Bourtzeff to Chicago just 
after his exposure of the famous secret agent, Azeff, filled one with 
perplexity in regard to a government which would connive at the violent 
death of a faithful official and that of a member of the royal household 
for the sake of bringing opprobrium and punishment to the revolutionists 
and credit to the secret police. 

The Settlement has also suffered through its effort to secure open 
discussion of the methods of the Russian government. During the excitement 
connected with the visit of Gorki to this country, three different 
committees of Russians came to Hull-House begging that I would secure a 
statement in at least one of the Chicago dailies of their own view, that 
the agents of the Czar had cleverly centered public attention upon Gorki's 
private life and had fomented a scandal so successfully that the object of 
Gorki's visit to America had been foiled; he who had known intimately the 
most wretched of the Czar's subjects, who was best able to sympathetically 
portray their wretchedness, not only failed to get a hearing before an 
American audience, but could scarcely find the shelter of a roof. I told 
two of the Russian committees that it was hopeless to undertake any 
explanation of the bitter attack until public excitement had somewhat 
subsided; but one Sunday

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afternoon when a third committee arrived, I said that I would endeavor to 
have reprinted in a Chicago daily the few scattered articles written for 
the magazines which tried to explain the situation, one by the head 
professor in political economy of a leading university, and others by 
publicists well informed as to Russian affairs. 

I hoped that a cosmopolitan newspaper might feel an obligation to 
recognize the desire for fair play on the part of thousands of its readers 
among the Russians, Poles, and Finns, at least to the extent of 
reproducing these magazine articles under a noncommittal caption. That 
same Sunday evening, in company with one of the residents, I visited a 
newspaper office only to hear its representative say that my plan was 
quite out of the question, as the whole subject was what newspaper men 
called "a sacred cow." He said, however, that he would willingly print an 
article which I myself should write and sign. I declined this offer with 
the statement that one who had my opportunities to see the struggles of 
poor women in securing support for their children, found it impossible to 
write anything which would however remotely justify the loosening of 
marriage bonds, even if the defense of Gorki made by the Russian 
committees was sound. We left the newspaper office somewhat discouraged 
with what we thought one more unsuccessful effort to procure a hearing for 
the immigrants.

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I had considered the incident closed, when to my horror and surprise 
several months afterward it was made the basis of a story with every 
possible vicious interpretation. One of the Chicago newspapers had been 
indicted by Mayor Dunne for what he considered an actionable attack upon 
his appointees to the Chicago School Board of whom I was one, and the 
incident enlarged and coarsened was submitted as evidence to the Grand 
Jury in regard to my views and influence. Although the evidence was thrown 
out, an attempt was again made to revive this story by the managers of 
Mayor Dunne's second campaign, this time to show how "the protector of the 
oppressed" was traduced. The incident is related here as an example of the 
clever use of that old device which throws upon the radical in religion, 
in education, and in social reform, the oduim of encouraging "harlots and 
sinners" and of defending their doctrines. 

If the under dog were always right, one might quite easily try to defend 
him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely right, sometimes 
only partially right, and often quite wrong; but perhaps he is never so 
altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly reprehensible as he is 
represented to be by those who add the possession of prejudices to the 
other almost insuperable difficulties of understanding him. It was, 
perhaps, not surprising that with these excellent opportunities for 
misjudging Hull-House, we should have suffered

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attack from time to time whenever any untoward event gave an opening as 
when an Italian immigrant murdered a priest in Denver, Colorado. Although 
the wretched man had never been in Chicago, much less at Hull-House, a 
Chicago ecclesiastic asserted that he had learned hatred of the Church as 
a member of the Giordano Bruno Club, an Italian Club, one of whose members 
lived at Hull-House, and which had occasionally met there, although it had 
long maintained clubrooms of its own. This club had its origin in the old 
struggles of united Italy against the temporal power of the Pope, one of 
the European echoes with which Chicago resounds. The Italian resident, as 
the editor of a paper representing new Italy, had come in sharp conflict 
with the Chicago ecclesiastic, first in regard to naming a public school 
of the vicinity after Garibaldi, which was of course not tolerated by the 
Church, and then in regard to many another issue arising in 
anticlericalism, which, although a political party, is constantly 
involved, from the very nature of the case, in theological difficulties. 
The contest had been carried on with a bitterness impossible for an 
American to understand, but its origin and implications were so obvious 
that it did not occur to any of us that it could be associated with Hull-
House either in its motive or direction. 

The ecclesiastic himself had lived for years in Rome, and as I had often 
discussed the prob-

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lems of Italian politics with him, I was quite sure he understood the 
raison d'être for the Giordano Bruno Club. Fortunately in the midst of the 
rhetorical attack, our friendly relations remained unbroken with the 
neighboring priests from whom we continued to receive uniform courtesy as 
we cooperated in cases of sorrow and need. Hundreds of devout communicants 
identified with the various Hull-House clubs and classes were deeply 
distressed by the incident, but assured us it was all a misunderstanding. 
Easter came soon afterwards, and it was not difficult to make a connection 
between the attack and the myriad of Easter cards which filled my mail. 

Thus a Settlement becomes involved in the many difficulties of its 
neighbors as its experiences make vivid the consciousness of modern 
internationalism. And yet the very fact that the sense of reality is so 
keen and the obligation of the Settlement so obvious may perhaps in itself 
explain the opposition Hull-House has encountered when it expressed its 
sympathy with the Russian revolution. We were much entertained, although 
somewhat ruefully, when a Chicago woman withdrew from us a large annual 
subscription because Hull-House had defended a Russian refugee while she, 
who had seen much of the Russian aristocracy in Europe, knew from them 
that all the revolutionary agitation was both unreasonable and unnecessary!

Page 426

It is, of course impossible to say whether these oppositions were 
inevitable or whether they were indications that Hull-House had somehow 
bungled at its task. Many times I have been driven to the confession of 
the blundering Amiel: "It requires ability to make what we seem agree with 
what we are." 

[image caption: A VIEW BETWEEN HULL-HOUSE GYMNASIUM AND THEATER.]



Page 427

CHAPTER XVIII
SOCIALIZED EDUCATION

IN a paper written years ago I deplored at some length the fact that 
educational matters are more democratic in their political than in their 
social aspect, and I quote the following extract from it as throwing some 
light upon the earlier educational undertakings at Hull-House:­ 

Teaching in a Settlement requires distinct methods, for it is true of 
people who have been allowed to remain undeveloped and whose facilities 
are inert and sterile, that they cannot take their learning heavily. It 
has to be diffused in a social atmosphere, information must be held in 
solution, in a medium of fellowship and good will. 
Intellectual life requires for its expansion and manifestation the 
influences and assimilation of the interests and affections of others. 
Mazzini, that greatest of all democrats, who broke his heart over the 
condition of the South European peasantry, said: "Education is not merely 
a necessity of true life by which the individual renews his vital force in 
the vital force of humanity; it is a Holy Communion with generations dead 
and living, by which he fecundates all his faculties. When he is withheld 
from this Communion for generations, as the Italian peasant has

Page 428

been, we say, 'He is like a beast of the field; he must be controlled by 
force.'" Even to this it is sometimes added that it is absurd to educate 
him, immoral to disturb his content. We stupidly use the effect as an 
argument for a continuance of the cause. It is needless to say that a 
Settlement is a protest against a restricted view of education. 

In line with this declaration, Hull-House in the very beginning opened 
what we called College Extension Classes with a faculty finally numbering 
thirty-five college men and women, many of whom held their pupils for 
consecutive years. As these classes antedated in Chicago the University 
Extension and Normal Extension classes and supplied a demand for 
stimulating instruction, the attendance strained to their utmost capacity 
the spacious rooms in the old house. The relation of students and faculty 
to each other and to the residents was that of guest and hostess, and at 
the close of each term the residents gave a reception to students and 
faculty which was one of the chief social events of the season. Upon this 
comfortable social basis some very good work was done. 

In connection with these classes a Hull-House summer school was instituted 
at Rockford College, which was most generously placed at our disposal by 
the trustees. For ten years one hundred women gathered there for six 
weeks, in addition there were always men on the faculty, and a small group 
of young men among the students

Page 429

who were lodged in the gymnasium building. The outdoor classes in bird 
study and botany, the serious reading of literary masterpieces, the boat 
excursions on the Rock River, the cooperative spirit of doing the 
housework together, the satirical commencements in parti-colored caps and 
gowns, lent themselves toward a reproduction of the comradeship which 
college life fosters. 

As each member of the faculty, as well as the students, paid three dollars 
a week, and as we had little outlay beyond the actual cost of food, we 
easily defrayed our expenses. The undertaking was so simple and gratifying 
in results that it might well be reproduced in many college buildings 
which are set in the midst of beautiful surroundings, unused during the 
two months of the year when hundreds of people, able to pay only a 
moderate price for lodgings in the country, can find nothing comfortable 
and no mental food more satisfying than piazza gossip. 

Every Thursday evening during the first years, a public lecture came to be 
an expected event in the neighborhood, and Hull-House became one of the 
early University Extension centers, first in connection with an 
independent society and later with the University of Chicago. One of the 
Hull-House trustees was so impressed with the value of this orderly and 
continuous presentation of economic subjects that he endowed three courses 
in a downtown center, in which the lectures were free

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to anyone who chose to come. He was much pleased that these lectures were 
largely attended by workingmen who ordinarily prefer that an economic 
subject shall be presented by a partisan, and who are supremely 
indifferent to examinations and credits. They also dislike the balancing 
of pro and con which scholarly instruction implies, and prefer to be 
"inebriated on raw truth" rather than to sip a carefully prepared draught 
of knowledge. 

Nevertheless Bowen Hall, which seats seven hundred and fifty people, is 
often none too large to hold the audiences of men who come to Hull-House 
every Sunday evening during the winter to attend the illustrated lectures 
provided by the faculty of the University of Chicago and others who kindly 
give their services. These courses differ enormously in their popularity: 
one on European capitals and their social significance was followed with 
the most vivid attention and sense of participation indicated by groans 
and hisses when the audience was reminded of an unforgettable feud between 
Austria and her Slavic subjects, or when they wildly applauded a Polish 
hero endeared through his tragic failure. 

In spite of the success of these Sunday evening courses, it has never been 
an easy undertaking to find acceptable lectures. A course of lectures on 
astronomy illustrated by stereopticon slides will attract a large audience 
the first week, who hope

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to hear of the wonders of the heavens and the relation of our earth 
thereto, but instead are treated to spectrum analyses of star dust, or the 
latest theory concerning the milky way. The habit of research and the 
desire to say the latest word upon any subject often overcomes the 
sympathetic understanding of his audience which the lecturer might 
otherwise develop, and he insensibly drops into the dull terminology of 
the classroom. There are, of course, notable exceptions; we had twelve 
gloriously popular talks on organic evolution, but the lecturer was not 
yet a professor­merely a university instructor­and his mind was still 
eager over the marvel of it all. Fortunately there is an increasing number 
of lecturers whose matter is so real, so definite, and so valuable, that 
in an attempt to give it an exact equivalence in words, they utilize the 
most direct forms of expression. 

It sometimes seems as if the men of substantial scholarship were content 
to leave to the charletan the teaching of those things which deeply 
concern the welfare of mankind, and that the mass of men get their 
intellectual food from the outcasts of scholarship, who provide millions 
of books, pictures, and shows, not to instruct and guide, but for the sake 
of their own financial profit. A Settlement soon discovers that simple 
people are interested in large and vital subjects, and the Hull-House 
residents themselves at one time, with only

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partial success, undertook to give a series of lectures on the history of 
the world, beginning with the nebular hypothesis and reaching Chicago 
itself in the twenty-fifth lecture! Absurd as the hasty review appears, 
there is no doubt that the beginner in knowledge is always eager for the 
general statement, as those wise old teachers of the people well knew, 
when they put the history of creation on the stage and the monks 
themselves became the actors. I recall that in planning my first European 
journey I had soberly hoped in two years to trace the entire pattern of 
human excellence as we passed from one country to another, in the shrines 
popular affection had consecrated to the saints, in the frequented statues 
erected to heroes, and in the "worn blasonry of funeral brasses"­an 
illustration that when we are young we all long for those mountaintops 
upon which we may soberly stand and dream of our own ephemeral and 
uncertain attempts at righteousness. I have had many other illustrations 
of this; a statement was recently made to me by a member of the Hull-House 
Boys' club, who had been unjustly arrested as an accomplice to a young 
thief and held in the police station for three days, that during his 
detention he "had remembered the way Jean Valjean behaved when he was 
everlastingly pursued by that policeman who was only trying to do right"; 
"I kept seeing the pictures in that illustrated lecture you gave about 
him, and I thought it would be queer if I couldn't behave

Page 433

well for three days when he had kept it up for years." 

The power of dramatic action may unfortunately be illustrated in other 
ways. During the weeks when all the daily papers were full of the details 
of a notorious murder trial in New York and all the hideous events which 
preceded the crime, one evening I saw in the street a knot of working 
girls leaning over a newspaper, admiring the clothes, the beauty, and 
"sorrowful expression" of the unhappy heroine. In the midst of the trial a 
woman whom I had known for years came to talk to me about her daughter, 
shamefacedly confessing that the girl was trying to dress and look like 
the notorious girl in New York, and that she had even said to her mother 
in a moment of defiance, "Some day I shall be taken into court and then I 
shall dress just as Evelyn did and face my accusers as she did in 
innocence and beauty." 

If one makes calls on a Sunday afternoon in the homes of the immigrant 
colonies near Hull-House, one finds the family absorbed in the Sunday 
edition of a sensational daily newspaper, even those who cannot read, 
quite easily following the comic adventures portrayed in the colored 
pictures of the supplement or tracing the clew of a murderer carefully 
depicted by a black line drawn through a plan of the houses and streets. 

Sometimes lessons in the great loyalties and group affections come through 
life itself and yet in such

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a manner that one cannot but deplore it. During the teamsters' strike in 
Chicago several years ago when class bitterness rose to a dramatic climax, 
I remember going to visit a neighborhood boy who had been severely injured 
when he had taken the place of a union driver upon a coal wagon. As I 
approached the house in which he lived, a large group of boys and girls, 
some of them very little children, surrounded me to convey the exciting 
information that "Jack T. was a 'scab'," and that I couldn't go in there. 
I explained to the excited children that his mother, who was a friend of 
mine, was in trouble, quite irrespective of the way her boy had been hurt. 
The crowd around me outside of the house of the "scab" constantly grew 
larger and I, finally abandoning my attempt at explanation, walked in only 
to have the mother say: "Please don't come here. You will only get hurt, 
too." Of course I did not get hurt, but the episode left upon my mind one 
of the most painful impressions I have ever received in connection with 
the children of the neighborhood. In addition to all else are the lessons 
of loyalty and comradeship to come to them as the mere reversals of class 
antagonism? And yet it was but a trifling incident out of the general 
spirit of bitterness and strife which filled the city. 

Therefore the residents of Hull-House place increasing emphasis upon the 
great inspirations and solaces of literature and are unwilling that it

Page 435

should ever languish as a subject for class instruction or for reading 
parties. The Shakespeare club has lived a continuous existence at Hull-
House for sixteen years during which time its members have heard the 
leading interpreters of Shakespeare, both among scholars and players. I 
recall that one of its earliest members said that her mind was peopled 
with Shakespeare characters during her long hours of sewing in a shop, 
that she couldn't remember what she thought about before she joined the 
club, and concluded that she hadn't thought about anything at all. To feed 
the mind of the worker, to lift it above the monotony of his task, and to 
connect it with the larger world, outside of his immediate surroundings, 
has always been the object of art, perhaps never more nobly fulfilled than 
by the great English bard. Miss Starr has held classes in Dante and 
Browning for many years, and the great lines are conned with never failing 
enthusiasm. I recall Miss Lathrop's Plato club and an audience who 
listened to a series of lectures by Dr. John Dewey on "Social Psychology" 
as geniune intellectual groups consisting largely of people from the 
immediate neighborhood, who were willing to make "that effort from which 
we all shrink, the effort of thought." But while we prize these classes as 
we do the help we are able to give to the exceptional young man or woman 
who reaches the college and university and leaves the neighborhood of his 
childhood behind him, the

Page 436

residents of Hull-House feel increasingly that the educational efforts of 
a Settlement should not be directed primarily to reproduce the college 
type of culture, but to work out a method and an ideal adapted to the 
immediate situation. They feel that they should promote a culture which 
will not set its possessor aside in a class with others like himself, but 
which will, on the contrary, connect him with all sorts of people by his 
ability to understand them as well as by his power to supplement their 
present surroundings with the historic background. Among the hundreds of 
immigrants who have for years attended classes at Hull-House designed 
primarily to teach the English language, dozens of them have struggled to 
express in the newly acquired tongue some of these hopes and longings 
which had so much to do with their emigration. 

A series of plays was thus written by a young Bohemian; essays by a 
Russian youth, outpouring sorrows rivaling Werther himself and yet 
containing the precious stuff of youth's perennial revolt against accepted 
wrong; stories of Russian oppression and petty injustices throughout which 
the desire for free America became a crystallized hope; an attempt to 
portray the Jewish day of Atonement, in such wise that even 
individualistic Americans may catch a glimpse of that deeper national life 
which has survived all transplanting and expresses itself in forms so 
ancient that they appear

Page 437

grotesque to the ignorant spectator. I remember a pathetic effort on the 
part of a young Russian Jewess to describe the vivid inner life of an old 
Talmud scholar, probably her uncle or father, as of one persistently 
occupied with the grave and important things of the spirit, although when 
brought into sharp contact with busy and overworked people, he inevitably 
appeared self-absorbed and slothful. Certainly no one who had read her 
paper could again see such an old man in his praying shawl bent over his 
crabbed book, without a sense of understanding. 

On the other hand, one of the most pitiful periods in the drama of the 
much-praised young American who attempts to rise in life, is the time when 
his educational requirements seem to have locked him up and made him 
rigid. He fancies himself shut off from his uneducated family and 
misunderstood by his friends. He is bowed down by his mental accumulations 
and often gets no farther than to carry them through life as a great 
burden, and not once does he obtain a glimpse of the delights of 
knowledge. 

The teacher in a Settlement is constantly put upon his mettle to discover 
methods of instruction which shall make knowledge quickly available to his 
pupils, and I should like here to pay my tribute of admiration to the dean 
of our educational department, Miss Landsberg, and to the many men and 
women who every winter come regularly to

Page 438

Hull-House, putting untiring energy into the endless task of teaching the 
newly arrived immigrant the first use of a language of which he has such 
desperate need. Even a meager knowledge of English may mean an opportunity 
to work in a factory versus nonemployment, or it may mean a question of 
life or death when a sharp command must be understood in order to avoid 
the danger of a descending crane. 

In response to a demand for an education which should be immediately 
available, classes have been established and grown apace in cooking, 
dressmaking, and millinery. A girl who attends them will often say that 
she "expects to marry a workingman next spring," and because she has 
worked in a factory so long she knows "little about a house." Sometimes 
classes are composed of young matrons of like factory experiences. I 
recall one of them whose husband had become so desperate after two years 
of her unskilled cooking that he had threatened to desert her and go where 
he could get "decent food," as she confided to me in a tearful interview, 
when she followed my advice to take the Hull-House courses in cooking, and 
at the end of six months reported a united and happy home. 

Two distinct trends are found in response to these classes; the first is 
for domestic training, and the other is for trade teaching which shall 
enable the poor little milliner and dressmaker

Page 439

apprentices to shorten the years of errand running which is supposed to 
teach them their trade. 

 The beginning of trade instruction has been already evolved in connection 
with the Hull-House Boys' club. The ample Boys' club building presented to 
Hull-House three years ago by one of our trustees has afforded well-
equipped shops for work in wood, iron, and brass; for smithing in copper 
and tin; for commercial photography, for printing, for telegraphy, and 
electrical construction. These shops have been filled with boys who are 
eager for that which seems to give them a clew to the industrial life all 
about them. These classes meet twice a week and are taught by intelligent 
workingmen who apparently give the boys what they want better than do the 
strictly professional teachers. While these classes in no sense provide a 
trade training, they often enable a boy to discover his aptitude and help 
him in the selection of what he "wants to be" by reducing the trades to 
embryonic forms. The factories are

Page 440

so complicated that the boy brought in contact with them, unless he has 
some preliminary preparation, is apt to become confused. In pedagogical 
terms, he loses his "power of orderly reaction" and is often so 
discouraged or so overstimulated in his very first years of factory life 
that his future usefulness is seriously impaired. 

One of Chicago's most significant experiments in the direction of 
correlating the schools with actual industry was for several years carried 
on in a public school building situated near Hull-House, in which the 
bricklayers' apprentices were taught eight hours a day in special classes 
during the non-bricklaying season. This early public school venture 
anticipated the very successful arrangement later carried on in 
Cincinnati, in Pittsburgh and in Chicago itself, whereby a group of boys 
at work in a factory alternate month by month with another group who are 
in school and are thus intelligently conducted into the complicated 
processes of modern industry. But for a certain type of boy who has been 
demoralized by the constant change and excitement of street life, even 
these apprenticeship classes are too strenuous, and he has to be lured 
into the path of knowledge by all sorts of appeals. 

It sometimes happens that boys are held in the Hull-House classes for 
weeks by their desire for the excitement of placing burglar alarms under 
the door mats. But to enable the possessor of even a

Page 441

little knowledge to thus play with it, is to decoy his feet at least 
through the first steps of the long, hard road of learning, although even 
in this, the teacher must proceed warily. A typical street boy who was 
utterly absorbed in a wood-carving class, abruptly left never to return 
when he was told to use some simple calculations in the laying out of the 
points. He evidently scented the approach of his old enemy, arithmetic, 
and fled the field. On the other hand, we have come across many cases in 
which boys have vainly tried to secure such opportunities for themselves. 
During the trial of a boy of ten recently arrested for truancy, it 
developed that he had spent many hours watching the electrical 
construction in a downtown building, and many others in the public library 
"reading about electricity." Another boy who was taken from school early, 
when his father lost both of his legs in a factory accident, tried in vain 
to find a place for himself "with machinery." He was declared too small 
for any such position, and for four years worked as an errand boy, during 
which time he steadily turned in his unopened pay envelope for the use of 
the household. At the end of the fourth year the boy disappeared, to the 
great distress of his invalid father and his poor mother whose day 
washings became the sole support of the family. He had beaten his way to 
Kansas City, hoping "they wouldn't be so particular there about a fellow's 
size." He came

Page 442

back at the end of six weeks because he felt sorry for his mother who, 
aroused at last to a realization of his unbending purpose, applied for 
help to the Juvenile Protective Association. They found a position for the 
boy in a machine shop and an opportunity for evening classes. 

Out of the fifteen hundred members of the Hull-House Boy's club, hundreds 
seem to respond only to the opportunities for recreation, and many of the 
older ones apparently care only for the bowling and the billiards. And yet 
tournaments and match games under supervision and regulated hours are a 
great advance over the sensual and exhausting pleasures to be found so 
easily outside the club. These organized sports readily connect themselves 
with the Hull-House gymnasium and with all those enthusiasms which are so 
mysteriously aroused by athletics. 

Our gymnasium has been filled with large and enthusiastic classes for 
eighteen years in spite of the popularity of dancing and other possible 
substitutes, while the Saturday evening athletic contests have become a 
feature of the neighborhood. The Settlement strives for that type of 
gymnastics which is at least partly a matter of character, for that 
training which presupposes abstinence and the curbing of impulse, as well 
as for those athletic contests in which the mind of the contestant must be 
vigilant to keep the body closely to the rules of the game. As one sees in 
rhythmic motion

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the slim bodies of a class of lads, "that scrupulous and uncontaminate 
purity of form which recommended itself even to the Greeks as befitting 
messengers from the gods, if such messengers should come," one offers up 
in awkward prosaic form the very essence of that old prayer, "Grant them 
with feet so light to pass through life." But while the glory stored up 
for Olympian winners was at the most a handful of parsley, an ode, fame 
for family and city, on the other hand, when the men and boys from the 
Hull-House gymnasium bring back their cups and medals, one's mind is 
filled with something like foreboding in the reflection that too much 
success may lead the winners into the professionalism which is so 
associated with betting and so close to pugilism. Candor, however, compels 
me to state that a long acquaintance with the acrobatic folk who have to 
do with the circus, a large number of whom practice in our gymnasium every 
winter, has raised our estimate of that profession. 

Young people who work long hours at sedentary occupations, factories and 
offices, need perhaps more than anything else the freedom and ease to be 
acquired from a symmetrical muscular development and are quick to respond 
to that fellowship which athletics apparently affords more easily than 
anything else. The Greek immigrants form large classes and are eager to 
reproduce the remnants of old methods of wrestling, and other bits of 
classic

Page 444

lore which they still possess, and when one of the Greeks won a medal in a 
wrestling match which represented the championship of the entire city, it 
was quite impossible that he should present it to the Hull-House trophy 
chest without a classic phrase which he recited most gravely and 
charmingly. 

It was in connection with a large association of Greek lads that Hull-
House finally lifted its long restriction against military drill. If 
athletic contests are the residuum of warfare first waged against the 
conqueror without and then against the tyrants within the State, the 
modern Greek youth is still in the first stage so far as his inherited 
attitude against the Turk is concerned. Each lad believes that at any 
moment he may be called home to fight this long-time enemy of Greece. With 
such a genuine motive at hand, it seemed mere affectation to deny the use 
of our boys' club building and gymnasium for organized drill, although 
happily it forms but a small part of the activities of the Greek 
Educational Association. 

Having thus confessed to military drill countenanced if not encouraged at 
Hull-House, it is perhaps only fair to relate an early experience of mine 
with the "Columbian Guards," and organization of the World's Fair summer. 
Although the Hull-House squad was organized as the others were with the 
motto of a clean city, it was very anxious for military drill. This 
request not only shocked my nonresistant principles, but

Page 445

seemed to afford an opportunity to find a substitute for the military 
tactics which were used in the boys' brigades everywhere, even in those 
connected with churches. As the cleaning of the filthy streets and alleys 
was the ostensible purpose of the Columbian guards, I suggested to the 
boys that we work out a drill with sewer spades, which with their long 
narrow blades and shortened handles were not so unlike bayoneted guns in 
size, weight, and general appearance, but that much of the usual military 
drill could be readapted. While I myself was present at the gymnasium to 
explain that it was nobler to drill in imitation of removing disease-
breeding filth than to drill in simulation of warfare; while I 
distractedly readapted tales of chivalry to this modern rescuing of the 
endangered and distressed, the new drill went forward in some sort of 
fashion, but so surely as I withdrew, the drillmaster would complain that 
our troops would first grow self-conscious, then demoralized, and finally 
flatly refuse to go on. Throughout the years since the failure of this 
Quixotic experiment, I occasionally find one of these sewer spades in a 
Hull-House storeroom, too truncated to be used for its original purpose 
and too prosaic to serve the purpose for which it was bought. I can only 
look at it in the forlorn hope that it may foreshadow that piping time 
when the weapons of warfare shall be turned into the implements of civic 
salvation.

Page 446

Before closing this chapter on Socialized Education, it is only fair to 
speak of the education accruing to the Hull-House residents themselves 
during their years of living in what at least purports to be a center for 
social and educational activity. 

While a certain number of the residents are primarily interested in 
charitable administration and the amelioration which can be suggested only 
by those who know actual conditions, there are other residents identified 
with the House from its earlier years to whom the groups of immigrants 
make the historic appeal, and who use, not only their linguistic ability, 
but all the resource they can command of travel and reading to qualify 
themselves for intelligent living in the immigrant quarter of the city. I 
remember one resident lately returned from a visit in Sicily, who was able 
to interpret to a bewildered judge the ancient privilege of a jilted lover 
to scratch the cheek of his faithless sweetheart with the edge of a coin. 
Although the custom in America had degenerated into a knife slashing after 
the manner of foreign customs here, and although the Sicilian deserved 
punishment, the incident was yet lifted out of the slough of mere brutal 
assault, and the interpretation won the gratitude of many Sicilians. 

There is no doubt that residents in a Settlement too often move toward 
their ends "with hurried and ignoble gait," putting forth thorns in their 
eagerness to bear grapes. It is always easy for

Page 447

those in pursuit of ends which they consider of overwhelming importance to 
become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and temper, to gradually 
develop a dark mistaken eagerness alternating with fatigue, which 
supersedes "the great and gracious ways" so much more congruous with 
worthy aims. 

Partly because of this universal tendency, partly because a Settlement 
shares the perplexities of its times and is never too dogmatic concerning 
the

Page 448

final truth, the residents would be glad to make the daily life at the 
Settlement "conform to every shape and mode of excellence." 

It may not be true 

"That the good are always the merry
 Save by an evil chance,"

but a Settlement would make clear that one need not be heartless and 
flippant in order to be merry, nor solemn in order to be wise. Therefore 
quite as Hull-House tries to redeem billiard tables from the association 
of gambling, and dancing from the temptations of the public dance halls, 
so it would associate with a life of upright purpose those more engaging 
qualities which in the experience of the neighborhood are too often 
connected with dubious aims. 

Throughout the history of Hull-House many inquiries have been made 
concerning the religion of the residents, and the reply that they are as 
diversified in belief and in the ardor of the inner life as any like 
number of people in a college or similar group, apparently does not carry 
conviction. I recall that after a house for men residents had been opened 
on Polk Street and the residential force at Hull-House numbered twenty, we 
made an effort to come together on Sunday evenings in a household service, 
hoping thus to express our moral unity in spite of the fact that we 
represented many creeds. But although all of us reverently knelt when the

Page 449

High Church resident read the evening service and bowed our heads when the 
evangelical resident led in prayer after his chapter, and although we sat 
respectfully through the twilight when a resident read her favorite 
passages from Plato and another from Abt Vogler, we concluded at the end 
of the winter that this was not religious fellowship and that we did not 
care for another reading club. So it was reluctantly given up, and we 
found that it was quite as necessary to come together on the basis of the 
deed and our common aim inside the household as it was in the neighborhood 
itself. I once had a conversation on the subject with the warden of Oxford 
House, who kindly invited me to the evening service held for the residents 
in a little chapel on the top floor of the Settlement. All the residents 
were High Churchmen to whom the service was an important and reverent part 
of the day. Upon my reply to a query of the warden that the residents of 
Hull-House could not come together for religious worship because there 
were among us Jews, Roman Catholics, English Churchmen, Dissenters, and a 
few agnostics, and that we had found unsatisfactory the diluted form of 
worship which we could carry on together, he replied that it must be most 
difficult to work with a group so diversified, for he depended upon the 
evening service to clear away any difficulties which the day had involved 
and to bring the residents to a religious consciousness of their common 
aim. I replied that

Page 450

this diversity of creed was part of the situation in American Settlements, 
as it was our task to live in a neighborhood of many nationalities and 
faiths, and that it might be possible that among such diversified people 
it was better that the Settlement corps should also represent varying 
religious beliefs. 

A wise man has told us that "men are once for all so made that they prefer 
a rational world to believe in and to live in," but that it is no easy 
matter to find a world rational as to its intellectual, aesthetic, moral, 
and practical aspects. Certainly it is no easy matter if the place 
selected is of the very sort where the four aspects are apparently 
furthest from perfection, but an undertaking resembling this is what the 
Settlement gradually becomes committed to, as its function is revealed 
through the reaction on its consciousness of its own experiences. Because 
of this fourfold undertaking, the Settlement has gathered into residence 
people of widely diversified tastes and interests, and in Hull-House, at 
least, the group has been surprisingly permanent. The majority of the 
present corp of forty residents support themselves by their business and 
professional occupations in the city, giving only their leisure time to 
Settlement undertakings. This in itself tends to continuity of residence 
and has certain advantages. Among the present staff, of whom the larger 
number have been in residence for more than twelve years, there are the 
secretary of

Page 451

the City club, two practicing physicians, several attorneys, newspapermen, 
businessmen, teachers, scientists, artists, musicians, lecturers in the 
School of Civics and Philanthropy, officers in The Juvenile Protective 
Association and in The League for the Protection of Immigrants, a visiting 
nurse, a sanitary inspector, and others. 

We have also worked out during our years of residence a plan of living 
which may be called cooperative, for the families and individuals who rent 
the Hull-House apartments have the use of the central kitchen and dining 
room so far as they care for them; many of them work for hours every week 
in the studios and shops; the theater and drawing-rooms are available for 
such social organization as they care to form; the entire group of 
thirteen buildings is heated and lighted from a central plant. During the 
years, the common human experiences have gathered about the House; funeral 
services have been held there, marriages and christenings, and many 
memories hold us to each other as well as to our neighbors. Each resident, 
of course, carefully defrays his own expenses, and his relations to his 
fellow residents are not unlike those of a college professor to his 
colleagues. The depth and strength of his relation to the neighborhood 
must depend very largely upon himself and upon the genuine friendships he 
has been able to make. His relation to the city as a whole comes largely 
through his identification

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with those groups who are carrying forward the reforms which a Settlement 
neighborhood so sadly needs and with which residence has made him 
familiar. 

Life in the Settlement discovers above all what has been called "the 
extraordinary pliability of human nature," and it seems impossible to set 
any bounds to the moral capabilities which might unfold under ideal civic 
and educational conditions. But in order to obtain these conditions, the 
Settlement recognizes the need of cooperation, both with the radical and 
the conservative, and from the very nature of the case the Settlement 
cannot limit its friends to any one political party or economic school. 

The Settlement casts side none of those things which cultivated men have 
come to consider reasonable and goodly, but it insists that those belong 
as well to that great body of people who, because of toilsome and 
underpaid labor, are unable to procure them for themselves. Added to this 
is a profound conviction that the common stock of intellectual enjoyment 
should not be difficult of access because of the economic position of him 
who would approach it, that those "best results of civilization" upon 
which depend the finer and freer aspects of living must be incorporated 
into our common life and have free mobility through all elements of 
society if we would have our democracy endure.

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The educational activities of a Settlement, as well its philanthropic, 
civic, and social undertakings, are but differing manifestations of the 
attempt to socialize democracy, as is the very existence of the Settlement 
itself.