It was in the following winter
that the pioneer effort in this direction, Walter Wyckoff's
account of his vain attempt to find work in Chicago, compelled
even the sternest businessman to drop his assertion that "any man
can find work if he wants it."
The dealing directly with the simplest human wants may have been
responsible for an impression which I carried about with me
almost constantly for a period of two years and which culminated
finally in a visit to Tolstoy--that the Settlement, or Hull-House
at least, was a mere pretense and travesty of the simple impulse
"to live with the poor," so long as the residents did not share
the common lot of hard labor and scant fare.
Actual experience had left me in much the same state of mind I
had been in after reading Tolstoy's "What to Do," which is a
description of his futile efforts to relieve the unspeakable
distress and want in the Moscow winter of 1881, and his
inevitable conviction that only he who literally shares his own
shelter and food with the needy can claim to have served them.
Doubtless it is much easier to see "what to do" in rural Russia,
where all the conditions tend to make the contrast as broad as
possible between peasant labor and noble idleness, than it is to
see "what to do" in the interdependencies of the modern
industrial city.
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