The Ethical Culture Societies held a summer
school at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1892, to which they invited
several people representing the then new Settlement movement, that
they might discuss with others the general theme of Philanthropy and
Social Progress.
I venture to produce here parts of a lecture I delivered in Plymouth,
both because I have found it impossible to formulate with the same
freshness those early motives and strivings, and because, when pub'
lished with other papers given that summer, it was received by the Set'
dement people themselves as a satisfactory statement.
I remember one golden summer afternoon during the sessions of the
summer school that several of us met on the shores of a pond in a pine
wood a few miles from Plymouth, to discuss our new movement. The
natural leader of the group was Robert A. Woods. He had recently re^
turned from a residence in Toynbee Hall, London, to open Andover
House in Boston, and had just issued a book, "English Social Move