Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/189

 SCIENTIFIC VALUE OF THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 175

with their surrounding society, or to disregard the present conditions and motives of life. On the contrary, it plants itself in the midst of the modern city. DR. STANTON COIT, in Neighborhood Guilds.

East Side House, New York.

The settlement is not a machine ; its education must be empirical and reciprocal, its ruling principle closer mutual understanding and sympathy ; it stands for the giving of life by life. All men of every class have something to give and something to get. Everyone should be eager to share his own and take his meed. Let the disposition to do good through others' agency be supplanted as far as possible by the desire to know and to do at first hand. Second Annual Report.

Philadelphia College Settlement.

The best thing that a settlement offers its residents is not experience, but

sincerity of life In a settlement one knows that, whether one achieves

much or little, one has at least placed one's life at the point of greatest need in the modern world, between those alienated classes which cry out for a mediator. Miss VIDA D. SCUDDER, in Wellesley Magazine, February 1893.

This language, from the deep experience of the most thought- ful and hard-working residents, expresses what the work that has grown up in their neighborhood means to them ; and when we have summed up these expressions into a general statement, we have the following idea of the present status of this movement, which might almost serve as a definition :

The social settlement, being in nowise Utopian or institu- tional in its aims, but empirical, reciprocal, and broadly reli- gious in its method, plants itself at the point of greatest need in the modern city to make life more wholesome and sincere, the environment more elevating, and to mediate between the alienated classes by making a sincere effort toward adding the social function to democracy.

The method of this work, as I shall now attempt to explain, is scientific in that it is empirical, reciprocal, mediatory, and positive along the lines of social evolution. It takes society as it finds it, and

I. It tries to understand it, (a) by studying the real facts of the lives of the people, sympathetically and helpfully, (6) by studying the social forces of the community.