The NEXT JANUARY found Miss Starr and myselt in Chicago, searching for a neighborhood in which we might put our plans
into execution. In our eagerness to win friends for the new undertaking, we utilized every opportunity to set forth the meaning of the Settlement as it had been embodied in Toynbee Hall, although in those
days we made no appeal for money, meaning to start with our own
slender resources. From the very first the plan received courteous attention, and the discussion, while often skeptical, was always triendly.
Professor Swing wrote a commendatory column in the Evening Journal,
and our early speeches were reported quite out of proportion to their
worth. I recall a spirited evening at the home of Mrs. Wilmarth,
¥ which was attended by that renowned scholar Thomas Davidson, and
by a young Englishman who was a member of the then new Fabian
society and to whom a peculiar glamour was attached because he had
scoured knives all summer in a camp of high-minded philosophers in
the Adirondacks. Our new little plan met with criticism, not to say