twenty years at hull house

which could doubtless claim the Settlement as one of its manifestations. Nevertheless the processes by which so simple a conclusion as

residence among the poor in East London was reached, seemed to me

very involved and roundabout. However inevitable these processes

might he for class-conscious Englishmen, they could not hut seem artiticial to a western American who had been born in a rural community

where the early pioneer life had made social distinctions impossible.

Always on the alert lest American Settlements should become mere

echoes and imitations of the English movement, I found myself assenting to what was shown me only with that part of my consciousness

which had been formed by reading of English social movements, while

at the same time the rustic American inside looked on in detached

comment.

Why should an American be lost in admiration of a group of Oxford

students because they went out to mend a disused road, inspired

thereto by Ruskin's teaching for the bettering of the common life,

when all the country roads in America were mended each spring by

self-respecting citizens, who were thus carrying out the simple method

devised by a democratic government for providing highways. No

humor penetrated my high mood even as I somewhat uneasily recalled

certain spring thaws when 1 had been mired in roads provided by the

American citizen. I continued to fumble for a synthesis which I was

unable to make until I developed that uncomfortable sense of playing

two roles at once. It was therefore almost with a dual consciousness

that I was ushered, during the last afternoon of my Oxford stay, into

^ the drawing-room of the Master of Balliol. Edward Caird's "Evolution

of Religion," which I had read hut a year or two before, had been of

unspeakable comfort to me in the labyrinth of differing ethical teachings and religious creeds which the many immigrant colonies of our

neighborhood presented. I remember that I wanted very much to ask

the author himself, how far it was reasonable to expect the same quality of virtue and a similar standard of conduct from these divers people.

I was timidly trying to apply his method of study to those groups of

homesick immigrants huddled together in strange tenement houses,

among whom I seemed to detect the beginnings of a secular religion or

at least of a wide humanitarianism evolved out of the various exigencies of the situation; somewhat as a household of children, whose

mother is dead, out of their sudden necessity perform unaccustomed

offices for each other and awkwardly exchange consolations, as chi