Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/646

 630 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

themselves according to a natural convenience, and adding to themselves in slow accretions, much as the function adds its tool, the organ.

A few fortunate open spaces, bare or bricked as they are, defend the mass of buildings from the dread likeness to an institution. The playground porches of the Children's Building, where there are flowers up to the last moment, and the easy- going aspect of the outside benches and their frequenters, help out the welcome.

The house has suffered a variety of nomenclature. To the children it is usually and comprehensively "the Kindergarten;" the Italian neighbors with their invincible poetry call it "la casa di Dio," while in spite of its own simply chosen name of a social settlement, to most of its immediate friends and to many at a remote distance it is the place "where Miss Addams lives ;" for this name has come to have a generic meaning, and stands for a real presence to many who have no personal or visual knowledge of her.

To those who must have a definition of a thing whose being is essentially plastic, there is no better reply to be given than that of a young Englishman at a conference of good people. Upon being pestered for an exact statement he burst out with : "Why, hang it, madam, we settle." It is the personality of the "settlers" which determines the character of each group, and forms differ with their environment. The one necessary element is permanency. Individuals come and go ; the attitude, the move- ment, the activity remain. Hull House itself is not unlike a rock of permanence, about which the tide of population flows and shifts and changes, bringing to it and taking away, altering it and wearing it into certain forms, but feeling it always firmly based, or as one of its neighbors expressed it "well grounded in the mud." This was at once a statement and a compliment. About the house are its tributaries, some in material form and some visible only in spirit. Around the southern corner is a brick building, the home of the Jane Club, an active club of working women who in a life of five years have solved some of