t work, I am afraid
somebody is on the wrong track. Those things are good, provided they
spring naturally from the intellectual life that moves in and about the
settlement house; indeed, unless they do, something has quite decidedly
miscarried there. But they are not the object. When I pick up a report
of one settlement and another, and find them filled with little essays
on the people and their ways and manners, as if the settlement were same
kind of a laboratory where they prepare human specimens for inspection
and classification,--stick them on pins like bugs and hold them up and
twirl them so as to let us have a good look,--then I know that somebody
has wandered away off, and that _he knows he has_, for all he is making
a brave show trying to persuade himself and us that it was worth the
money. No use going into that farther. The fact is that we have all been
groping. We saw the need and started to fill it, and in the strange
surroundings we lost our bearings and the password. We got to be
sociological instead of neighborly. It is not the same thing.

[Illustration: A Cooking Lesson in Vacation School: the Best Temperance
Sermon.]

Here is the lost password: "neighbor". That is all there is to it. If a
settlement isn't the neighbor of those it would reach, it is nothing at
all. "A place," said the sub-warden of Toynbee Hall in the discussion I
spoke of, and set it on even keel in an instant, "a place of good will
rather than of good works." That is it. We had become strangers, had
drifted apart, and the settlement came to introduce us to one another
again, as it were, to remind us that we were neighbors. And because that
was the one thing above all that was wanted, it became an instant
success where it was not converted into a social experiment station; and
even that could not kill it. If any one doubts that I have the right
password, let him look for the proof in the organization this past month
of a new "cooeperative social settlement," to be carried on "in
conjunction and association with the people in the neighborhood." Not a
new idea at all, only a fresh grip taken on the old one. It is sound
enough and strong enough to set itself right if we will only let it.
Only last week Dr. Elliot of the Hudson Guild over in West Twenty-sixth
Street told me of his boys' and their fathers' subscribing their savings
with the hope of owning the guild house themselves. They had never let
go their grip on the idea over there.