"FRIENDSHIP FIRST."
"Distrust of People Disarmed by Tact and Kindness."
"Easy to Bring Out Latent Good in All Classes."
Miss Jane Addams, the well-known social settlement organizer and founder of the Hull House in Chicago, who has been in Boston for several days, and gave a lecture on social settlements before the Century club Monday, left Boston for Chicago yesterday.
[image: MISS JANE ADDAMS, Noted Social Settlement Worker and Founder of Hull House, Chicago.]
Speaking of social settlement work Miss Addams said to a Globe reporter:
"Any list of the achievements of settlements must be pitifully meager when compared with the needs to be met. Merely to build a great institution is not the main object, for there is a natural distrust of institutionalism. The real object is to get into personal relations with those who need our help, and, in spite of their needs, we shall find that there is in their lives a pathos, dignity and worth which is like that of those who are more pleasantly situated.
"It is not so difficult to cultivate relations of friendship with persons who at first are prone to distrust you, because you are better dressed, speak a more refined tongue, and have greater advantages. It is not necessary to go to the home of some unfortunate person, seat yourself down, and announce firmly that you have come to make friends. That is not the way to go about it. Friendships are never founded in this way.
"Friendship is a far more subtle thing, something like a growing flower that ripens into beauty, the feeling first a suspicion that you mean well, and have no thought of intrusion, a kindness in the eyes and in the voice, and an illustration by the hands that you are willing and ready, even eager to be of assistance. Before long the women cleaning the ash can, and the man tending the furnace, the laborer, his wife and his children, come to trust you and to appreciate you as a friend, the sort of friend, indeed, they can come to when in need.
"In our work in Hull House we have steadily grown in tolerance until we sometimes have to ask ourselves if we are not in danger of going too far and of reaching that optimism, which will accept everything as good, and that is a very useless and dangerous optimism. Yet we are convinced that there is a latent force, a creative power in the people themselves with whom we deal, which will come out if it only has the chance.
"There are few who know how much good these immigrants bring with them, the love of art and useful accomplishments for which they find no market. I know a man in Chicago who was put out of his rooms in a tenement because he had carved his door in the evenings when he came home weary from work, and sought to tell what there was better in him. It was exquisite work, the same he had done in a church in Italy, he said proudly, which is double starred in Baedeker.
"Another had trouble with his landlord because he decorated his ceiling with stucco. This man said that he had been paid for such work at home, but he supposed he ought not to have attempted it here, where the 'American people like everything smooth and such a queer white.' These men were artists, but they were not appreciated in their new surroundings.
"We once had a Greek play in Hull House, played by the fruit [peddlers]. We found that these Greeks know and read the stories of Homer, and were delighted to play before Americans, that they might illustrate and emphasize the fact that they were not barbarians.
"One man always prayed before rehearsing his part, and I asked him the reason for his prayer. He told me that he prayed for power to properly present the honor and glory of ancient Greece to the ignorant people of America, and he was absolutely sincere. We very freely express our opinion of the immigrants to this country, but we don't always stop to think or to question what they may think of us."
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