Jane Addams's Own Story of Her Work
How the Work at Hull-House Has Grown
By Jane Addams
The lack of municipal regulation referred to in the last article was in the early days of Hull-House paralleled by the inadequacy of the charitable efforts of the city and an unfounded optimism that there was no real poverty among us. At that time there was no Charity Organization Society in Chicago and the Visiting Nurse Association had not yet begun its beneficent work. The relief societies, although conscientiously administered, were inadequate in extent and antiquated in method.
As social reformers gave themselves over to discussion of general principles, so the poor invariably accused poverty itself of their destruction. I recall a certain Mrs. Moran, who was returning one rainy day from the office of the County Agent with her arms full of paper bags containing beans and flour which alone lay between her children and starvation. Although she had no money she boarded a street-car in order to save her booty from complete destruction by the rain; and as the burst bags dropped "flour on the ladies' dresses" and "beans all over the place" she was sharply reprimanded by the conductor, who was further exasperated when he discovered she had no fare. He put her off, as she had hoped he would, almost in front of Hull-House. She related to us her state of mind as she stepped off the car and saw the last of her wares disappearing: she admitted she forgot the proprieties and "cursed a little," but, curiously enough, she pronounced her malediction not against the rain nor the conductor, nor yet against the worthless husband who had been sent up to the city prison, but, true to the Chicago spirit of the moment, went to the root of the matter and roundly "cursed poverty."
This Spirit of Generalization and lack of organization among the charitable forces of the city was painfully revealed in that terrible winter after the World's Fair, when the general financial depression throughout the country was much intensified in Chicago by the numbers of unemployed stranded at the close of the Exposition. When the first cold weather came the police stations and the very corridors of the City Hall were crowded by men who could afford no other lodging. They made huge demonstrations on the Lake Front reminding one of the days of Trafalgar Square.
It was the winter in which Mr. Stead wrote his indictment of Chicago. I can vividly recall his visits to Hull-House, some of them between eleven and twelve o'clock at night, when he would come in wet and hungry from an investigation of the levee district, and while he was drinking a cup of hot chocolate before an open fire, would relate in one of his curious monologues his experience as an out-of-work laborer standing in line without a topcoat for two hours in the sleet that he might have a chance to sweep the streets, or his adventures with a crook, who mistook him for one of his own kind and offered him a place as a barker for a gambling-house, which he promptly accepted. Mr. Stead was much impressed with the mixed goodness in Chicago, the lack of rectitude in many high places, the simple kindliness of the most wretched to each other. Before he published "If Christ Came to Chicago" he made his attempt to rally the diverse moral forces of the city in a huge mass-meeting, which resulted in a temporary organization, later developing into the Civic Federation. I was one of the first of a little group of five who were appointed to carry out the suggestions made in this remarkable meeting, and our first concern was to appoint a committee to deal with the unemployed. But when has a committee ever dealt satisfactorily with the unemployed? Relief stations were opened in various parts of the city, temporary lodging-houses were established, Hull-House undertaking to care for the homeless women who could be received nowhere else, employment stations were opened giving sewing to the women, and street-sweeping for the men was organized.
A Beginning Also was Then Made toward a Bureau of Organized Charities, the main office being put in charge of a young man recently come from Boston who lived at Hull-House. But to employ scientific methods for the first time at such a moment involved difficulties, and the most painful episode of the winter for me came from an attempt on my part to conform to carefully-received instructions. A shipping clerk whom I had known for a long time had lost his place, as so many people had that year, and came to the relief station established at Hull-House four or five times to secure help for his family. I told him one day of the opportunity on the Drainage Canal and intimated that if any work were obtainable he ought to exhaust that possibility before asking for help. The man replied that he had always been indoors and that he could not endure outside work in winter. I am grateful to remember that I was too uncertain to be severe, although I remembered my instructions and held to my point. He did not come again for relief and obtained work for two days digging on the canal, and then he contracted pneumonia and died a week later. I have never lost trace of the two little children he left behind him, although I never see them without a bitter consciousness that it was at their expense that I learned that life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations, that wisdom to deal with a difficult situation comes only through some knowledge of a man's life and habits as a whole, and that to treat an isolated episode is almost sure to invite blundering.
Perhaps Nothing is More Unfair than to know the poor only during a crisis. I remember one family in which the father had been out of work for this same winter, most of the furniture had been pawned, and as the worn-out shoes could not be replaced the children could not go to school and could scarcely leave the house. The mother was ill and barely able to come for the supplies and medicines. She came to see me two years afterward to invite me to Sunday supper in the little home which had been completely restored, and she gave as one reason for the invitation that she couldn't bear to have me remember them as they had been during that one winter, which she insisted had been unique in her twelve years of married life. She said quite simply that it was as if she had met me, not as I am ordinarily, but as I should appear during a siege of illness, when I might be misshapen with rheumatism or present a face distorted by neuralgic pain; that it wasn't fair to judge poor people that way. She perhaps unconsciously illustrated the difference between the relief-station relation to the poor and the settlement relation to its neighbors, the latter wishing to know them through all the varying conditions of life, to stand by when they are in distress, but by no means to drop intercourse with them when normal prosperity had returned and enables the relation to become more social and free from the economic disturbance.
Possibly something of the same effort had to be made within the settlement itself to keep its own sense of proportion in regard to the relation of the crowded city quarter to the rest of the country. It was in the spring following this horrible winter, during a journey to California, that I found myself amazed at the large stretches of open country and prosperous towns through which we passed day by day, whose existence I had quite forgotten. It was also during this winter --although it had continued during all the years following -- that we learned to see the public institutions from the point of view of the inmates rather than of the managers. One of the Hull-House residents, Miss Julia C. Lathrop, who served for two terms upon the Illinois State Board of Charities, and who has recently been returned upon the Board, has made, perhaps, her most valuable contribution toward the enlargement and reorganization of the charitable institutions of the State through her intimate knowledge of the experiences of the beneficiaries.
As legal regulation has often proved the shortest method to neighborhood improvement, so in the line of charity much time has been spent in working for the Civil Service method of appointment for the employees in the County and State institutions, for the establishment of a more effective bureau for sanitary inspection, and for a dozen other enterprises which occupy that [borderland] between charitable effort and legislation protecting the people of a crowded industrial quarter; for it is this [borderland] which more and more seems to belong legitimately to the modern philanthropist.
In the First Year of its Existence Hull-House opened what we then called College Extension Classes, using the word college because the teaching was done by men and women who had recently taken their degrees and who used subjects and methods approximating those of the colleges. Because these classes antedated the University Extension and the Normal Extension Classes, because among teachers and others there was a demand for stimulating instruction and for "reading parties," the attendance strained to their utmost capacity the spacious rooms in the old house. In connection with these classes a Hull-House Summer School was instituted at Rockford College. The use of all the buildings on the campus was most generously placed at our disposal by the trustees, and for ten years we occupied them for six weeks during the summer. Two or three members of the college faculty always remained, and the rest of the little corps was filled from the teachers of the College Extension Classes.
The school consisted of about one hundred students, mostly young women, although there were always men on the faculty, and a small group of young men among the students 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 made of cheesecloth, all 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 few expenses beyond the actual cost of food, we not only made our expenses every year but were also able to leave behind us at the college a gift of linen or furniture. The undertaking was so simple and so 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 the piazza gossip.[page 2]
Classes of this early character are still found at Hull-House -- the Shakespeare Club led by an instructor from the University of Chicago, and Miss Starr's reading classes in Browning and Dante for example; but while these are valuable, as is 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 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 and by his power to supplement their present surrounding with the historic background which legitimately belongs to them.
Perhaps the Power to See Life as a Whole is more needed in the immigrant quarter of a large city than anywhere else, but this power has to be cultivated quite as seriously and persistently as is the ability to understand and utilize a new language, for instance. The lack of this power is perhaps the most fruitful source of misunderstanding between the immigrants and the first generation of children born in America, and does much to deepen that chasm between fathers and sons which is ready to yawn between each generation and its successors, but which may be made unnecessarily cruel and impassable.
Several of the Hull-House educational enterprises have developed through the effort made to bridge the past life in Europe with American experiences in such wise as to give them both some meaning and sense of relation. The Hull-House Labor Museum was in the first instance suggested by many people in the neighborhood who had come directly from country places in Southeastern Europe in which industrial processes are still carried on by the most primitive methods. It was not unusual to find an old Italian woman with her distaff against her homesick face patiently spinning a thread by the simple stick spindle which had certainly been used in the days when David tended his sheep at Bethlehem. We found in the immediate neighborhood at least four varieties of these most primitive methods of spinning and at least three distinct variations of the same spindle put in connection with wheels. It was possible to put these seven into historic sequence and order, and to connect the whole with the present method of factory spinning. The same thing was done for weaving, and on every Saturday evening a little exhibit is made of these "various forms of labor" in the textile industry. Within one room the Syrian, the Greek, the Italian, the Slav, the German and the Celt enable even the most casual observer to see that there is no break in orderly evolution if we look at history from the industrial standpoint. As the occupation itself is cosmopolitan, adapting itself merely to local conditions and materials, so it is possible to connect this old-time craft with the garments of the department stores, quite as we may make, do we but take the pains, the simple human experience of the immigrants the foundation of a more inclusive American life. It is possible to cite some instances in which this has been accomplished.
I Recall a Certain Italian Girl, who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit, and yet the daughter always left her mother at the front door while she herself went around to a side door because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, this girl, Angelina, saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from the School of Education, who openly admired her work, and Angelina concluded from their conversation that her mother was "the best stick-spindle spinner in America."
When she inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction I took occasion to describe the village in which her mother lived, something of her free life in tending goats, and, because of the opportunity to drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice, she and the other women of the mountain village had retained and developed a skill beyond that of women in the neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life, how hard it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement; that most Italian women had never seen a washtub until they came to America, because they had always washed in the open stream or in the wash-house in company with the other villagers; that her mother had never baked bread in her own house any more than her long line of grandmothers had, for Italian women only mixed their bread, and took it to the village oven for baking, so that, of course, she could not learn all at once to manage an American cook-stove and a washtub any more than she could exchange her beautiful homespun kerchief for a cheap department store hat; that it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, and that while she must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways she always had a right to expect her daughter to know something of the old ways.
It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, but at least one thing resulted: she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden away as uncouth, and to wear them; and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of her mastery of the craft which had been so much admired by the "university ladies" who ought to know.
There was a Club of Necktie Workers who persistently resented any attempt on the part of their director to improve their minds. The president once said that she "wouldn't be caught dead at a lecture," that she came to the club "to get some fun out of it," and indeed it was most natural that she should crave recreation after a hard day's work. And yet one winter, when the Labor Museum was giving weekly lectures upon the History of Industry, illustrated as far as possible by the actual processes, I once saw the entire club listening to quite a stiff lecture on the effect upon English life of steam applied to the manufacture of textiles. To my rather wicked remark that I was surprised to see her enjoying a lecture the president replied that he did not call this a lecture; she called this "getting next to the stuff you work with all the time." To give the workers some [clue] as to the material which they constantly handle, and to the development of the machine that they may at least know what all the whirring is about, is perhaps the most valuable education they can possibly receive. Certainly the best education cannot do more for any of us than constantly to reconstruct our daily experience and to give it significance.
The Labor Museum also tends to put the immigrants in the position of teachers and occasionally of entertainers, and must be a pleasant change for them from the attitude of tutelage, in which all Americans, including their own children, are so apt to hold them. I recall a number of Russian women who filled a sewing-room near Hull-House, and who heard one Christmas week that the House was going to give a party to which they might come. Thy arrived one afternoon, when unfortunately there was no party on hand, and although the residents did their best to entertain them with impromptu music and refreshments, it was quite evident that they were greatly disappointed. Finally it was suggested that they be shown the Labor Museum—when gradually the thirty sodden, tired women were transformed. They knew how to use the spindles and were delighted to find the Russian "spinning-frame." Many of them had never seen the spinning-wheel, which has not penetrated to certain parts of Russia, and they regarded it as a new and wonderful invention. They turned up their dresses to show their homespun petticoats, they tried the looms, they explained the difficulty of holding the patterns; in short, from having been stupidly entertained, they themselves did the entertaining; and I think we will all agree that we are apt to call that party successful in which we have taken a share and have shone as a social success. At any rate the party suddenly became animated because of a direct appeal to former experiences, and the immigrant visitors were able for the moment to instruct their American hostesses in an old and honored craft, as was indeed becoming to their age and experience.
In Some Such Ways as These have the Labor Museum and the Shops pointed out the possibilities which Hull-House has scarcely begun to develop, and which may in time make clear that culture is an understanding of the long-established occupations and thoughts of men, of the arts with which they have solaced their toil, of the poesy into which they have poured their aspirations; that the human is not of necessity the cultivated, but it is that which has been much beloved and long tried by the generations.
Something of the latter has been worked out though the Hull-House Music School, which was started in the fourth year of Hull-House, although Miss Eleanor Smith and Miss Hannig, who are its heads, had almost from the beginning held weekly classes here. The Music School is designed to give a thorough musical instruction to a limited number of children. Many of the children receive four lessons a week, two on the piano and two in singing, but from the beginning they are taught to compose and to reduce to order the musical suggestion which may come to them. Some of them during the years have developed into trained musician and are supporting themselves in their chosen profession, but quite aside from the success of the individuals, the work of the group as a whole has contributed much to the understanding and appreciation of music in the neighborhood. Their recitals and concerts are attended by serious and appreciative audiences. The school consists of a faculty of five and a membership of a hundred and twenty, many of whom have continued through the years. They sometimes find folk-songs in the possession of their Old Country relatives which have never been committed to paper, but which have survived through the centuries because of some touch of that undying poetry which the world has always cherished. They preserve the plaint of a Russian who is digging a post-hole and finds his task dull and difficult until he strikes a stratum of red sand, which, in addition to making digging easy, reminds him of the red hair of his lady, and all goes merrily as the song lifts into a joyous melody.
Miss Smith's Compositions are Well Known to the musical world and she is most generous in her help with the educational plans of the House. In connection with the program of old labor songs, which the Music School rendered for the Labor Museum, she found an abrupt break at the time of the industrial revolution, for, naturally, since textiles were put into factories no spinning songs have been written. Miss Smith set to music the only words we could find written by a modern worker in textiles, the sweat-shop song by Morris Rosenfield. The whole was so realistic and presented so graphically the bewilderment an tedium of the Yiddish poet in the New York shop that the sewing-girls in the school, although they wept when they reproduced it, insisted that it expressed what for them had always been inexpressible. It may be that we shall have to wait for the artist born in the midst of the industrial situation before we can have an adequate expression of the maladjustment of this transitional period, when electric power is first applied to the old processes of sewing, really much more complicated than that situation which George Eliot epitomized in "Silas Marner," the belated weaver who could not adjust himself to the new factory life of England.
Two years ago a beautiful memorial organ was erected at Hull-House, which had greatly added to the resources of the Music School. The following words were spoken at the time of its dedication: "It may quite easily be true that the sense of unity, a compact of our better natures, must be first attained through music, through that which had traditionally been the most potent agent for making the universal appeal and inducing men to forget their differences." The organ is used almost every week during the winter months at the Sunday afternoon concerts, which for fifteen years have been given at Hull-House by artist form all parts of the city, and by the directors and members of the Music School. These concerts are attended by appreciative audiences, many of whom are genuine lovers of good music.
Another Method of Education, which has been gradually used more and more at Hull-House, is that made possible through dramatics, largely amateur, although professionals have form time to time been most generous with their services. The attendance at the [theater] is a marked feature of the life of the neighborhood, especially on the part of the young boys, who look toward an afternoon every week in the gallery of the Halsted Street Theatre as their one opportunity to enjoy life. When one remembers the early history of the stage, the place it occupied equally with the church and school as a public teacher of morality, one cannot but regret that so many good people finally decided to consider it of the Evil One and to allow it to teach and portray whatever of falsity and vice it chose to set forth. The little dramas at Hull-House were produced in the gymnasium until they seemed to justify the erection of a well-equipped stage in a room called the Theatre, although it is really used for many other purposes.
In the immediate vicinity of Hull-House is a large colony of Greeks, who often feel that their history and classic background are completely ignored by the Americans in Chicago, and that they easily confuse them with the more ignorant immigrants from other parts of Southeastern Europe. The Greeks therefore welcome an opportunity to present Greek plays in the ancient text. Two of these plays have been remarkably successful; they were carefully staged by Miss Barrows, and the "Ajax" of Sophocles was a genuine triumph to the Greek colony of Chicago, who felt that they were "showing forth the glory of Greece" to "ignorant Americans." The scholars who came with a copy of Sophocles in hand and followed the play with real enthusiasm did not in the least realize that the revelation of the love of the Greek poets was mutual between the audience and the actors. The little Hull-House stage has presented many Italian plays and a few in other tongues, but, of course, the Hull-House Dramatic Association present their productions in English and have gradually built up a little clientele of admirers from all parts of town, and have developed in the course of years some genuine dramatic ability.
There are Also Junior Dramatic Associations, through which it seems possible to give a training in manners and morals more directly than through any other medium, and among whom Shakespeare is astonishingly popular. The plays presented year after year vary greatly in kind and significance. One produced but a few weeks ago was a labor play written by Miss Florence Converse, who herself superintended its first presentation, which was at Hull-House. It was the untutored effort of a union man to secure for his side the beauty of self-sacrifice, the [glamor] of martyrdom which so often in the public minds seems to belong solely to the non-union forces. The play was attended by an audience of trades-unionists and employers, and those people in between these who are supposed to make public opinion, and altogether they felt the moral beauty of the man's acceptance of the simple statements that "it's the side that suffers most that will win out in this war—the saints is the only ones that has got the world under their feet—we've got to do the way they done if the unions is to stand"—so completely that it seemed quite natural that he should forfeit his life upon them.
Through such humble experiments as the Hull-House Theatre is able to make, as well as through the more ambitious reforms which are attempted in various parts of the country, it may be that the [theater] will at last be restored to its rightful place in the community, which so sadly needs the teaching of righteousness in dramatic form because it pays so little heed to formal pedagogic instruction.
During the Fifteen Years the House has Grown in response to increasing needs. The Men's Club has moved into a building of its own on Halsted Street, equipped with a billiard-room and a reading-room. The club pays rent to Hull-House for its use, and the lease contains but one restrictive clause, by which it is forfeited if gambling or alcoholic drinks are indulged in on the premises.
The Shops and the Labor Museum continually demanded more space, as the latter was enriched by a fine textile exhibit lent by the Field Museum, and later by carefully-selected specimens from the Philippine Exhibit at the World's Fair. A little group of women, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, have become a permanent working force in the textile department, which has developed in to a self-supporting industry through the sale of the homespun products.
An apartment house, which shelters twelve families, gave a chance of growth in the residential force, and also provided more convenient quarters for old friends and neighbors of the House who were glad to occupy them. Smaller buildings on the quadrangle furnish studios for several artists, who find something of the same spirit in the contiguous Italian colony that the French artist is traditionally supposed to discover in his beloved Latin Quarter. They uncover something of the picturesque of the foreign colonies, and they have reproduced it in paint, etching and lithography. They teach classes and are most generous with their services in the production of the drama and in the carrying out of a plan of mural decoration which has been begun upon the walls of the [theater]. The artists have there portrayed the heroes who have become great through identification with the common lot, rather than those who are distinguished by mere achievement. The series began with [Tolstoy] plowing his field, and the young Lincoln pushing his flat-boat down the Mississippi and receiving his first impression of the great iniquity.
The Jane Club Seven Years Ago moved into a house built expressly for its use. It provides bedroom space for thirty members, twenty-four of them single rooms, with a library and a living-room, and a dining-room large enough to use for social gatherings. The Woman's [page 3] Club is housed in a building of its own. It has exclusive control of the library and sewing-room, but the large hall, which seats seven hundred and fifty people, is used every evening for other purposes, and even its seating capacity is not sufficient to care for the large audiences of men who come to attend the illustrated lectures provided by the University Extension Department of the University of Chicago once a week throughout the winter. At present the course on European Capitals and their social significance is followed with the most vivid attention and sense of participation. During a lecture on St. Petersburg a picture of the Czar, which was introduced on the screen, was so persistently hissed at that it had to be withdrawn in the interest of good order.
The Total Attendance at the Various Clubs and classes varies from year to year only as we are able to provide more room, and it sometimes seems as if nothing but available space could limit it. The present attendance of an average week of activities is seven thousand. The residential force numbers thirty-four, equally divided in numbers as to men and women, although others who live in the Hull-House apartments are most constant in their service to the House, and are not voted in as residents simply because it seems desirable to keep the group within definite limits. The people from other parts of town who contribute single days or evenings number approximately one hundred a week; but growth either in building or numbers counts for little unless the settlement is able to evoke valuable resources of moral energy and social ability from the neighborhood itself.
As an Illustration of This Last I may be permitted to cite once more from the Woman's Club. The Juvenile Court officer, who is a resident of Hull-House, has put under his charge the boys and girls of the neighborhood who have been arrested for some petty offense, but who, it is hoped, may be kept out of penal institutions by the help and guidance given them in their own homes.
I discovered quite accidentally one day that a Woman's Club member, who has a large family of her own, and one of her boys sufficiently difficult, had undertaken to care for a ward of the Juvenile Court who lived on the street next to her house, and whom she had kept in the path of rectitude for six months. In reply to my congratulations upon this successful bit of reform she said that she was quite ashamed that she had not undertaken it earlier; that she had known the boy's mother for years, had known that she went to her work, which was scrubbing a downtown office building, every evening at five, and did not return until eleven, during the very time the boy could most easily find opportunities for wrongdoing; but that her obligation toward this boy had not occurred to her until quite suddenly one day, when the club members were making pillowcases for the Detention Home of the Juvenile Court, all at once it seemed perfectly obvious that her share in the salvation of wayward children, in which the whole city was interested, was to care for this particular boy, and she had asked the Juvenile Court officer to commit him to her. She invited the boy to her house to supper every evening that she might know just where he was at the crucial moment of twilight, and she adroitly managed to keep him under her own roof for the evening if she did not approve of the plans he had made. She concluded with the remark that it was queer that the sight of the boy himself hadn't appealed to her, but that the suggestion had to come in such a roundabout way.
She was, of course, reflecting upon a common trait in human nature: none of us really sees the duty at hand until we see it in relation to the social movement of which it is a part.
When we realize that an effort is being made throughout all the large cities in the United States to reclaim the city boy, to provide him with reasonable amusement, and to give him his chance for growth and development, and when we are ready to take our share in that movement, the concrete case which we did not recognize before suddenly comes revealed to us.
We are Slowly Learning that social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty. One could cite many illustrations which show that we do not see the special until we have apprehended the general. I was at one time chairman of the Child Labor Committee in the General Federation of Woman's Clubs, which sent out a schedule asking each club to report as nearly as possible all the working children under fourteen living in the county.
A Florida club filled out the schedule with an astonishing number of Cuban children who were at work in the sugar-mills, and they registered a complaint that our committee had not sent the schedule before, for if they had realized the condition earlier they might have presented a bill to the Legislature, which had, unhappily, now adjourned. Of course the children had been working in the sugar-mills for years and had probably gone back and forth under the very eyes of the club women, but they had never seen them, much less counted them or felt any obligation to protect them, until they joined the club, and the club joined the Federation, and the Federation appointed a Child Labor Committee, who sent them a schedule. They then opened their eyes and saw the children who had been there all the time, but whom they had not seen. The knowledge of a general Child Labor movement which had enlisted the energies of conscientious women through the country, the conviction that a social evil can be met only by a concerted, collective effort, had quickened their perceptions and enlarged their sense of social obligation.
This May Illustrate, perhaps, that which a settlement attempts to do in a neighborhood which had failed to keep pace with the rest of the city. The sanitary conditions of such a neighborhood are poor, the educational resources limited, the record of juvenile delinquency unduly large. But the moral energy of the community is aroused only when the people realize that they may become part of general movements which make for the reform and healing of such conditions, that they have a right to claim fellowship with the powers which make for civic righteousness, and that their dire need may evoke in them a proportionate energy. So far as Hull-House had been able to contribute to this end it may be said to have performed the legitimate functions of a settlement.
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