race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot
boy. Its residents must he emptied of all conceit of opinion and all
self-assertion, and ready to arouse and interpret the public opinion of their neighborhood. They must be content to live quietly
side by side with their neighbors, until they grow into a sense of
relationship and mutual interests. Their neighbors are held apart
by differences of race and language which the residents can more
easily overcome. They are bound to see the needs of their neighborhood as a whole, to furnish data for legislation, and to use
their influence to secure it. In short, residents are pledged to devote themselves to the duties of good citizenship and to the arousing of the social energies which too largely lie dormant in every
neighborhood given over to industrialism. They are bound to regard the entire life of their city as organic, to make an effort to
unify it, and to protest against its overdifferentiation.
It is always easy to make all philosophy point one particular
moral and all history adorn one particular tale; but I may be forgiven the reminder that the best speculative philosophy sets forth
the solidarity of the human race; that the highest moralists have
taught that without the advance and improvement of the whole,
no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral
or material individual condition; and that the subjective necessity for Social Settlements is therefore identical with that necessity, which urges us on toward social and individual salvation.