the
tenement, and the street is not the place for it, yet it has got to be
done; a place to make their elders feel that they are men and women,
something else than mere rent-paying units. Why, it was this very need
that gave birth to the social settlement among us, and we see now that
with the old machinery it does not supply it and never can. "I can reach
the people of just about two blocks about me here," said this same head
worker of the same settlement to me an evening or two ago, "and that is
all." But there are hundreds of blocks filled with hungry minds and
souls. A hundred settlements would be needed where there is one.

The churches could not meet the need. They ought to and some day they
will, when we build the church down-town and the mission up-town. But
now they can't. There are not enough of them, for one thing. They do
try; for only the other day, when I went to tell the Methodist ministers
of it, and of how they ought to back up the effort to have the public
school thrown open on Sundays for concerts, lectures, and the like,
after the first shock of surprise they pulled themselves together
manfully and said that they would do it. They saw with me that it is a
question, not of damaging the Lord's Day, but of wresting it from the
devil, who has had it all this while over there on the East Side, and on
the West Side too. All along the swarming streets with no church in
sight, but a saloon on every corner, stand the big schoolhouses with
their spacious halls, empty and silent and grim, waiting to have the
soul breathed into them that alone can make their teaching effective for
good citizenship. They belong to the people. Why should they not be
used by the people Sunday and week-day and day and night, for whatever
will serve their ends--if the janitor has a fit?

Now here come the social settlements with their plan of doing it. What
claim have they to stand in the gap?

This one, that they are there now, though they do not fill it. The gap
has been too much for them. They need the help of those they came to
succor quite as much as _they_ need them. I have no desire to find fault
with any one who wants to help his neighbor. God forbid! I am not even a
settlement worker. But when I read, as I did yesterday, a summing up of
the meaning of settlements by three or four residents in such houses,
and see education, reform politics, local improvements, legislation,
characterized as the aim and objects of settlemen