Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/193

 SCIENTIFIC VALUE OF ///A SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 179

But in all of these cases, sooner or later, there comes a change of point of view, and the resident becomes a student of the facts of the life of his neighborhood, and begins to study the social forces as they are, not as he pictured them from the outside. A scientific way of viewing facts has unconsciously taken possession of him, because he is viewing them from the inside. He has put himself in the social stream, and if he is a student at all must be scientific.

On the other hand, this method of viewing facts and working from the inside with a neighborhood to discover the best way of improving its standard of life is a prime source of difference between settlements. The Hull House, for example, in a com- munity of Italians and Russian Jews, where less than 10 percent, of the population are Protestant, and where the sweating system seems to center, differs widely from Chicago Commons, where the Italians are mostly fruit peddlers and where the Scandinavi- ans, a Protestant people, have a decided sentiment for independent citizenship.

The residents of a settlement have two methods of carrying on this work the organized and the unorganized. There is a feeling, especially among those who have been the longest in residence at the settlements, that the unorganized work is the most valuable and vital, and where organization is necessary it should simply supplement the unorganized or personal work. Those who believe that the settlement movement is opening up the correct method of social service are fearful of any tendency to institutionalize the work. The organized work is made the servant of the unorganized work. It is far better, we say, to study the organizations already in the community and develop their social possibilities than to think out some new form of organization and force it upon the people. The organizations already here have grown out of the natural needs of the people. No matter how much evil has crept into them, they began and have developed along the lines of social evolution, and have tin- principles of nature underlying them. The settlement residents study to find a way to turn existing organizations into the chan-