It is difficult to
analyze a living thing; the analysis is at best imperfect. Many
more motives may blend with the three trends; possibly the desire
for a new form of social success due to the nicety of
imagination, which refuses worldly pleasures unmixed with the
joys of self-sacrifice; possibly a love of approbation, so vast
that it is not content with the treble clapping of delicate
hands, but wishes also to hear the bass notes from toughened
palms, may mingle with these.
The Settlement then, is an experimental effort to aid in the
solution of the social and industrial problems which are
engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It
insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of
a city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the
overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the
other; but it assumes that this overaccumulation and destitution
is most sorely felt in the things that pertain to social and
educational privileges. From its very nature it can stand for no
political or social propaganda. It must, in a sense, give the
warm welcome of an inn to all such propaganda, if perchance one of
them be found an angel. The only thing to be dreaded in the
Settlement is that it lose its flexibility, its power of quick
adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment
may demand.
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