"BOULEVARD SETTLEMENTS."-Professor Graham Taylor has given this title to the extension of the idea of social fellowship to fashionable streets. The children of capitalists are evidently beginning to feel that no one "set" of society can meet all the needs of the common human heart. Life in a class must lack something vital and wholesome. That comparatively small class of them who possess property are not safe in ignorance of the powerful currents of conviction and purpose which sway the mass of the voting population. We have all seen, time and again, all the clubs, bankers, preachers, merchants and " great dailies" unite upon a movement and regard its success as absolutely certain, and yet witness the hope go down like a card house under a street roller. When "everybody" is out of town, shutters all closed, the majority of voters are still at their posts. All the summer residents of great hotels along the Atlantic coast and in the mountains might be swept away in an epidemic, and the majority of voters would have no acquaintance or friendship which would move them to tears. The rich and strong and cultivated are in need of knowledge of the aspirations of their political masters. And if they will invite representative labor leaders, in all sincerity of kindness, and with patience for their plain speech, they will have their eyes opened. Parlor conferences have been put to good uses in promoting missions to the heathen and charity relief to the dependent; but they may serve a still higher and nobler use if they bring the sons and daughters of toil into the mansions of

beauty and taste for music, pictures and noble speech.

OUTLOOK.-Prophecy is natural to man. Yet when we pass from description, analysis and explanation of past facts to prognostication of the future, we are venturing on new territory. The element of faith bulks more largely than strict knowledge. And yet science itself forecasts the future; the mathematician describes the unseen part of the curve from the segment in view; the astronomer informs the mariner of coming tides and planetary appearances; and the economist predicts the probable tendency of particular banking laws. It is the future which is really most interesting. What can we hope from the forces set free by the Settlement?

May we not reasonably hope to see the end of "slums"? They are not natural, and they are not necessary. The Settlements have shown that social coöperation can modify both human dispositions and outward environment. This is the hope expressed by the founder of Hull House: The Settlement movement is, from its nature, a provisional one. . . . I believe now that there will be no wretched quarters in our cities at all when the conscience of each man is so touched that he prefers to live with the poorest of his brethren, and not with the richest of them his income will allow. It is to be hoped that this moving and living will at length be universal and need no name.

The workers are hopeful and confident. Truth Personal influence of a good, upright,

cannot fail.

industrious and religious person cannot be in vain. Let us hear the workers state the grounds of their hopes.

You ask me if it has paid," said Miss Addams. We may as well challenge life itself. What is the good of having these things if we make no use of them? . . . We might as well go to the priests over here at the cathedral and point out to them that they have not redeemed the people who live in every direction around them; that in spite of their preaching and service, and the example of their pure lives, all manner of sin still exists in their neighborhood and among the very people who are reached by them. They do not think their work They have done some

has been a failure. good. They are doing good every day. . . . The people here are better. They are getting better every day. They will grow better to the end. The number of young women who have different ideas and different ideals of life is vastly encouraging. The number of young men who view the questions of morality and purity as you view them, and as I view them, has grown. It would not be easy to mass this evidence so it would be convincing to a stranger, to one who simply looked over the situation. But it is here. We who live in it, and are a part of it, know."

It is always difficult and often misleading to speak of the results of work; but in the principles and the short experience of St. Margaret's House there does seem to be much to justify great hopes for its future. Every year's experience, every resi

dent's effort to enter into the needs of those whom she is trying to help, will add to the fitness of the House to be regarded as a centre for the religious and social work of women in East London, and a practical witness among its people to the Christianity which would care for all human needs, and believes that they can only be met by patient personal service." (Miss Mary Talbot, London.)

"It is all very simple, very commonplace, but out of just such ordinary materials can chains be forged, delicate, intangible, yet stronger than steel, capable of linking together class and class, church and people, earth and heaven." (Mrs. Mace, Cheltenham Ladies' College Guild.)

Mr. Gerard Fiennes: "The prospect before us is almost limitless; who knows what may spring from the linking and welding of all classes together in social intercourse, in pastimes, in discussions of great questions? In working-men's clubs, free from the taint of the pot-house, with ramifications extending into all the manifold sides of human life, helping in the home, in the workshop, in the playing-field, Englishmen may be made one in humdrum days of peace, as they would be one when face to face with a foreign invader."

Canon Barnett writes: "if now the question be asked, 'What is the result of such hospitality? Is there any increase of good will between rich and poor? Do the meetings bring together the rich nation and the poor nation? Are they checking the horizontal cleavage of society?' the answer must be that Settlements are too few to have much

visible result of any part of their efforts. It is remarkable that they should be so few; remarkable that men should recognize the needs and the power of the industrial classes; remarkable that they should be willing to do so much that seems hard, and yet refuse to make the sacrifice of giving up residence in a fashionable quarter. The attractions of society cannot be so overwhelming; it must be that men's imagination fails to grasp the use of residence among the poor, and that they go on living in the old way because the new way seems fanciful. Until, however, the practice becomes more common it is impossible to collect results, to judge the gain which comes from knowledge, or to measure the power of friendship to harmonize conflicting in

terests.

If Settlements became so frequent as to cease to seem Settlements, if they kept clear of all appearance of a mission, then rich and poor would so know one another that legislation and government would be armed to do the greatest good in the best way; then people of different pursuits and with different incomes might, by equal manners and equal tastes, form the friendships which would hold them together in good times and in bad times."

The workers of Settlements have shown that life under such conditions can be healthy, joyful, interesting and fruitful in a very high degree, and they have won rapidly increasing numbers to their way of thinking. A solitary instance is given of a wealthy family going to reside in on of the poorest