a conciliator. And no one would call
Miss Addams "implacable." It is not intended to suggest that Miss Addams
is one of those inveterate compromisers who prefer a bad peace to a good
war. But she has the gift of imaginative sympathy; and it is impossible
for her to have toward either party in a conflict the cold hostility
which each party has for the other. She sees both sides; and even though
one side is the wrong side, she cannot help seeing why its partisans
believe in it.

"If the under dog were always right," Miss Addams has said, "one might
quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but
obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong,
but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly
reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession
of prejudice to the other almost insuperable difficulties in
understanding him."

Miss Addams has taken in good faith the social settlement ideal--"to
span the gulf between the rich and the poor, or between those who have
had cultural opportunities and those who have not, by the process of
neighborliness." In her writings, as in her work, there is never sounded
the note of defiance. Even in defense of the social settlement and its
methods of conciliation (which have been venomously assailed by the
newspapers during Chicago's fits of temporary insanity, as in the
Averbuch case), Miss Addams has not become militant. She has never
ceased to be serenely reasonable.

But when one comes to ask how powerful Miss Addams' example has been,
one is forced to admit that it has been limited. There are two other
settlement houses in Chicago which are managed in the spirit of Hull
House. But all the others--and there are about forty settlement houses
in the city--have discarded almost openly the principle of conciliation.
They are efficient, or religious, or something else, but they are afraid
of being too sympathetic with the working class. They do not, for
instance, permit labor unions to meet in their halls. The splendid
social idealism of the '80s, of which Miss Addams is representative, has
disappeared, leaving two sides angry and hostile and with none but Miss
Addams believing in the possibility of finding any common ground for
action. One event after another from the Pullman strike to the Averbuch
case has brought this hostility out into the open, with Miss Addams
occupying neutral ground, and left