The very morning when my mind was full of the questions
raised by this letter, I received a call from the daughter of the
same business man whom my friend considered so unscrupulous. She
was passing through Chicago and came to ask me to give her some
arguments which she might later use with her father to confute
the charge that Settlements were irreligious. She said, "You
see, he has been asked to give money to our Settlement and would
like to do it, if his conscience was only clear; he disapproves
of Settlements because they give no religious instruction; he has
always been a very devout man."
I remember later discussing the incident with Washington Gladden
who was able to parallel it from his own experience. Now that
this discussion upon tainted money has subsided, it is easy to
view it with a certain detachment impossible at the moment, and
it is even difficult to understand why the feeling should have
been so intense, although it doubtless registered genuine moral
concern.
There was room for discouragement in the many unsuccessful
experiments in cooperation which were carried on in Chicago
during the early nineties; a carpenter shop on Van Buren Street
near Halsted, a labor exchange started by the unemployed, not so
paradoxical an arrangement as it seems, and a very ambitious plan
for a country colony which was finally carried out at Ruskin,
Tennessee.
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