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merits," in which he had gathered together and focused the manyforms of social endeavor preceding and contemporaneous with the Em* glish Settlements. There were Miss Vida D. Scudder and Miss Helena

Dudley from the College Settlement Association, Miss Julia C. Lathrop and myself from Hull-House. Some of us had numbered our years

as far as thirty, and we all carefully avoided the extravagance of statement which characterizes youth, and yet I doubt if anywhere on the

continent that summer could have been found a group of people

more genuinely interested in social development or more sincerely

convinced that they had found a clew by which the conditions in

crowded cities might be understood and the agencies for social betterment developed.

We were all careful to avoid saying that we had found a "life work,"

perhaps with an instinctive dread of expending all our energy in vows

of constancy, as so often happens; and yet it is interesting to note that

all of the people whom I have recalled as the enthusiasts at that little

conference, have remained attached to Settlements in actual residence for longer or shorter periods each year during the eighteen years

which have elapsed since then, although they have also been closely

identified as publicists or governmental officials with movements outside. It is as if they had discovered that the Settlement was too valuable as a method as a way of approach to the social question to be

abandoned, although they had long since discovered that it was not a

"social movement" in itself. This, however, is anticipating the future,

* whereas the following paper on "The Subjective Necessity for Social

Settlements" should have a chance to speak for itself. It is perhaps too

late in the day to express regret for its stilted title.

This paper is an attempt to analyze the motives which underlie

a movement based, not only upon conviction, but upon genuine

emotion, wherever educated young people are seeking an outlet

for that sentiment of universal brotherhood, which the best spirit

of our times is forcing from an emotion into a motive. These

young people accomplish little toward the solution of this social

problem, and bear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished, oversensitive lives. They have been shut off from the common labor by which they live which is a great source of moral

and physical health. They feel a fatal want of harmony between