291. The Social Settlement.—However efficient an official board may be in the discharge of its duties, it cannot expect to call out from the beneficiary so enthusiastic a response as can a real friend. The best friends of the poor are their neighbors. It is well known that a group of families in a tenement house will help one of their number that is in specific difficulty, and that the poor give more generously to help their own kind than do those who are more well-to-do. It was a conviction of these principles of friendliness and neighborliness that led to the first social settlements. Because a person lives in an undesirable part of the city he is not necessarily a subject for charity, and the settlement is in no sense to be thought of as a charitable agency. It is a home established among the less-favored part of the population by educated, refined, sympathetic people who want to be neighborly and to bring courage and cheer and helpfulness to the struggling masses. The original residents of Hull House in Chicago believed that class alienation could be overcome best by the establishment of intimate social relationships, and they were willing to sacrifice their natural social advantages for the larger good.

Settlements are not exclusively of the city, but the stress of life is sternest in the cities, and most of the experiments have been made there. They are oases in the desert of the buildings and pavements of brick, with their grime and monotony, and if the people of the desert will camp for an hour and drink of the spring, those who have planted the oasis will be well pleased. To attract them the settlement workers have organized clubs and classes for united study and activity in matters that naturally interest the people of the neighborhood; they have music and dancing and amateur theatricals, and often they supply domestic or industrial training in a small way for the young people who frequent the settlement. The residents aim to give the people what they want; they do not impose anything upon them. They try to satisfy economic and social wants. They try to stimulate the people of the neighborhood to desire the best things that they can get. They co-operate with the police and other departments of the city government, with the library, and with the school. They assist in procuring work for those who want it; they encourage the people to be thrifty and temperate; they help them to get baths and gymnastic facilities, playgrounds, and social centres. They frequently carry on investigations that are of great value and assist charitable agencies in their inquiries and beneficence. They call frequently upon the people in their homes and encourage them to ask for counsel and help if they are in trouble.

The settlement idea grew out of a growing interest in the common people. It was stimulated by Maurice's establishment at London of a working man's college, with recent Cambridge graduates as teachers, and by university extension work in Cambridge; it was suggested further by the location of Edward Denison in the East End of London in 1867. In 1885 Canon Barnett, of St. Jude's Church, London, founded Toynbee Hall under Oxford auspices. The first settlement in the United States was established in New York in 1887, and soon became known as the University Settlement. Hull House in Chicago was started two years later; the first settlement in Boston was founded under the auspices of the Andover Theological Seminary. Most settlements avoid church connections, because of the danger of misunderstandings among people of widely differing faiths.

The settlement has existed long enough to become a true social institution. It has remained true to its original principle of neighborliness, but it has increased its activities as occasion demanded. It has been a useful object-lesson to churches and city governments; some of its methods have been imitated, and in some of the cities its efforts have become unnecessary in certain directions because the city government itself has adopted its plans. The settlement has its critics and its devoted supporters; it is one of the voluntary experiments that shows the spirit of its promoters and that helps along social progress, and it must be estimated among the assets of a community. Here and there in the country among certain groups, as lumbermen, miners, or construction workers, or even in a settled town, many of the methods of the settlement are likely to find acceptance, and the settlement idea of neighborliness is fundamental to all happy and successful social life.

READING REFERENCES

Devine: Principles of Relief, pages 10-28, 171-181.

Warner: American Charities, pages 301-393.

Conyngton: How to Help, pages 56-219.

Henderson: Modern Methods of Charity, pages 380-511.

Henderson: Social Settlements.