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passive resistance of mine, this clinging to an individual conviction,

was the best moral training I received at Rockford College. During the

first decade of Hull- House, it was felt by propagandists of divers social

theories that the new Settlement would be a fine coign of vantage from

which to propagate social faiths, and that a mere preliminary step

would be the conversion of the founders; hence I have been reasoned

with hours at a time, and I recall at least three occasions when this was

followed by actual prayer. In the first instance, the honest exhorter

who fell upon his knees before my astonished eyes, was an advocate of

single tax upon land values. He begged, in that indirect phraseology

which is deemed appropriate for prayer, that "the sister might see the

beneficent results it would bring to the poor who live in the awful congested districts around this very house.''

The early socialists used every method of attack, —a favorite one

being the statement, doubtless sometimes honestly made, that I really

was a socialist, hut "too much of a coward to say so.'' I remember one

socialist who habitually opened a very telling address he was in the

habit of giving upon the street corners, by holding me up as an awful

example to his fellow-socialists, as one of their number "who had been

caught in the toils of capitalism.'' He always added as a final clinching

of the statement, that he knew what he was talking about because he

was a member of the Hull-House Men's Club. When I ventured to say

to him that not all of the thousands of people who belong to a class or

club at Hull-House could possibly know my personal opinions, and to

mildly inquire upon what he founded his assertions, he triumphantly

replied that I had once admitted to him that I had read Sombart and *Loria, and that any one of sound mind must see the inevitable conclusions of such master reasonings.

I could multiply these two instances a hundred-fold, and possibly

nothing aided me to stand on my own feet and to select what seemed

reasonable from this wilderness of dogma, so much as my early encounter with genuine zeal and affectionate solicitude, associated with what

I could not accept as the whole truth.

I do not wish to take callow writing too seriously, hut I reproduce

from an oratorical contest the following hit of premature pragmatism,

doubtless due much more to temperament than to perception, because

I am still ready to subscribe to it, although the grandiloquent style is, I hope, a thing of the past: "Those who believe that Justice is hut a poet