disapproval, from Mr. Davidson, who, as nearly as I can remember,
called it "one of those unnatural attempts to understand life through
cooperative living."
It was in vain we asserted that the collective living was not an essential part of the plan, that we would always scrupulously pay our own
expenses, and that at any moment we might decide to scatter through
the neighborhood and to live in separate tenements; he still contended
that the fascination for most of those volunteering residence would lie
in the collective living aspect of the Settlement. His contention was,
of course, essentially sound; there is a constant tendency for the residents to "lose themselves in the cave of their own companionship," as
the Toynbee Hall phrase goes, hut on the other hand, it is doubtless
true that the very companionship, the give and take of colleagues, is
what tends-to keep the Settlement normal and in touch with "the
world of things as they are." I am happy to say that we never resented
this nor any other difference of opinion, and that fifteen years later
Professor Davidson handsomely acknowledged that the advantages of a
group far outweighed the weaknesses he had early pointed out. He was
at that later moment sharing with a group of young men, on the East
Side of New York, his ripest conclusions in philosophy and was much
touched by their intelligent interest and absorbed devotion. I think
that time has also justified our early contention that the mere foothold
of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable, and tolerant
in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so
easily isolate themselves in American cities, would be in itself a sen
viceable thing for Chicago. I am not so sure that we succeeded in our
endeavors "to make social intercourse express the growing sense of the
economic unity of society and to add the social function to democracy." But Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as the social
relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gives a form of expression
that has peculiar value.
In our search for a vicinity in which to settle we went about with the
officers of the compulsory education department, with city missionaries, and with the newspaper reporters whom I recall as a much older
set of men than one ordinarily associates with that profession, or perhaps I was only sent out with the older ones on what they must all
have considered a quixotic mission. One Sunday afternoon in the late