in the financial and personal support of Settlements. It is a beautiful work for them to take up.

The ultimate aim is to make the work self-supporting. With advance in wages and improvement in moral habits almost any community could supply itself with the means of rational enjoyment. The statistics of the saloon in Chicago and New York prove this to be true. The people should be trained to provide for themselves as rapidly as possible. To this end fees, however small, are charged for class instruction and club expenses.

On certain important points a high authority says: "Applicants for residence should be considered both as to their fitness for social work and their ability to work in harmony with the residents. So far as possible, residents should give their whole working time. In order to be sure of this, each Settlement ought to be so financed that scholarships should be provided for residents, and it is a great advantage if they can pursue their study and work under some academical connection. In such ways, the casual, dilettante element can be gradually removed out of Settlement work without in the least removing its appeal to the imagination. The Head Worker should be on an allowance sufficient to justify his giving a term of years to Settlement work. It is, of course, well and admirable for those who have means to live at the Settlements at their own charges, but that is at best an exceptional and temporary arrangement, in this country at least." (R. A. WOODS.)

At the same time the principle of the Settlement is so simple and flexible that any person who has a

gift or message may rent a flat where he wishes to live and so become a neighbor. Indeed it is to be hoped that groups of such persons may frequently be found to give at least a few years of their lives to communities which sadly need them. The sacrifice involved is not nearly so great as many imagine. There is an element of sacrifice in any social service, but the residents who have worked longest among the poor disclaim being candidates for the martyr's crown. They deny that they are doing anything extraordinary. They affirm that they have a good time and they do not see why others should not live as they do. Fashion often requires greater sacrifices than such social service. The attempt to "get into society" often costs much money, care, worry, heart-burning and vexation. The mountain is climbed only to find a bare rock, a cold wind and a misty outlook. Thousands of people who crawl, beg, cringe, and flatter their way to "society" find themselves in an empty room. They are compelled to dress in garments for which they cannot pay, to ride in carriages when they should go awheel or afoot, and at last wake from delirium of petty ambition and fashionable whirl to discover that they have traded life's opportunity for a bubble. Far more satisfactory would it have been to invest in plainer living, higher thinking, nobler aims. This many could do at their own charges, and not depend on philanthropic associations to support and govern them.

SECTION II.-METHODS OF WORK ACTUALLY
IN USE.

The bulletin or report of an advanced Settlement bewilders the reader. The activities are so multifarious and fragmentary that the casual visitor may naturally have a feeling that the residents are working without a plan. In some cases this may be too true. But in Settlements that should be regarded as typical and most useful there is a plan which is carried out consistently and systematically.

The aims of residents as to specific method may be gathered from the "Report on the Questions" submitted to former residents of various women's Settlements. In answer to the question: What reforms or changes have you come to feel are (a) most urgent? (b) Most practicable? (c) Where would you begin?" There is a wide range to the answers, from the home-thrust which suggests that things would go better if our residents would always keep their rooms tidy and refrain from gossip, to the full Socialistic programme. Probably no reform which has occurred to the human mind within the last decade remains unmentioned. First and universal comes Improved Housing of the Poor; in quick succession follow the Organization of Labor-(first with the Head Workers)-the Eight-Hour Movement, Playgrounds and Parks, Improved Schools and School Laws, Municipal Reforms, Persuasion of the Poor to have Smaller Families, TradeSchools, Public Baths, the Introduction of Poetry in the Lives of the Poor, Income Tax, Coffee

Houses, Cooking and Sewing Obligatory in Public Schools, Regeneration of the Upper Classes, Consumers' League, the Inculcation of Thrift, Free Silver, Municipalization of Railways, Lighting, etc.; Temperance Reform, very low in the list; Sweatshop Regulations, and finally-mentioned by one writer only-Direct Religious Work." As to the question, Where begin? "the general impression is given by a resident, who, after a lengthy and minute programme, winds up by saying: 'Personally I should begin wherever I could catch on." "

THE SETTLEMENT NOT A UTOPIA.-A survey of the Table of Activities suggests the fact that the Settlement is not a creator or even an inventor. Inventions unquestionably do arise in the natural order of daily experience. But the Settlement is not itself dependent on an untried theory. It is not building a castle in the air. Every form of service known among residents has been tested somewhere in the world. There are institutions devoted to research and invention, university laboratories and the great school of competitive life itself. But the Settlement does not profess to make something out of nothing. Its ladder rises toward heaven, but the foot is on familiar earth.

What the Settlement does attempt to do is to communicate, to make common property in the best things of life. Health, leisure, money, art, joyous companies, bright skies, participation in political thought, religious worship are all goods that rich people value, in varying scale according to their taste and character. These are human goods. They

would make any life larger, any spirit more perfect. The Settlement is a part of our common land. This aim takes the Settlement out of the region of Utopias and gives it the assured place of a promoter of a good which all the most competent spirits declare beyond all peradventure to be a real good.

EXPLANATION OF THE TABLE OF ACTIVITIES.

It

The Table of Activities is an attempt to show at a glance the organic relations and distinct purposes of the Settlement in its most developed forms. will be understood that no one Settlement presents all these forms of work. But the objects are the same everywhere,-all elements of human welfare for all members of the community.

The Table may serve both for preview and review.

TABLE OF ACTIVITIES IN THE SETTLEMENTS.

I. INFANCY.

I. PHYSICAL HEALTH.

Health talks to mothers.

Physical care in crêches, with practical demonstration and

instruction in the care of infants.

Supply of sterilized milk.

Summer homes.

Sanitary reforms (see 6 and 7).

Charity relief.

2.

ECONOMIC WELFARE.

Infants share advantages secured by parents, family and community.

Beginnings of industrial skill in kindergarten.