feeling of civic capacity and the zest for organised local action. In New York, at the present time, the spread of these local improvement organisations under the auspices of settlement and other social workers is one of the most inspiriting facts in the life of the city.

Developing thus new institutional facilities and fresh social initiative, the residents of the settlement, far from finding their occupation gone, place themselves in a position of greater responsibility than ever. The best friends alike of the School-Centres and of the Neighbourhood Improvement Societies see with increasing clearness the necessity of capable and resourceful leadership, in order to preserve standards both of work and play, to draw in the less alert and responsive members of the community by unremitting and ingenious effort; to see to it that the new forms of association do not weaken but reinforce the old-the home, the church, the informal intercourse of neighbours from door to door; to watch always lest new rallying centres may not perchance simply furnish a transition to degrading forms of recreation like that of the cheap theatre and the public dance-hall, or to acquaintanceships that are charged with political and moral corruption. The very increase in the complexity of social organisation and administration indicates the necessity of transplanting resourceful citizenship into districts from which indigenous civic resource has disappeared, and maintaining it there until civic self-sufficiency has ceased to be fortuitous.

It is such considerations as these that have led to a remarkable growth in the number of settlement-houses in the United States. For a score of years, each five-year period has seen the number doubled, until the total is now over four hundred. There is, of course, a very wide range in the quality of work done. Perhaps one-fourth of the total might be left out of account as being hardly worthy of the name. Not a few missions, with an essentially proselytising motive, call themselves settlements, to the injury of the broadly constructive purpose which is being wrought out at so great a cost. In other cases, a few children's clubs and a measure of doubtful charity work are deemed sufficient to establish a claim to a title which, by being thus sought, at least proves itself to have won wide-spread respect.

Chicago, which is, of course, the typically American large city, shows the most striking settlement achievements. Hull House, which for nearly a quarter of a century has been under the lead of Miss Jane Addams, is in some important respects the chief centre of the city's best life, as she herself is often called its first citizen. The foremost woman in the country to-day, she is looked up to as a leader and a shining example by a great number of women, to whom the settlement system has appeared a normal avenue by which to enter, through adventurous hospitality and neighbourly intercourse, into some of the most vital phases of municipal and national life. Since women engaged in settlement work outnumber men four times, whatever has been achieved in this direction may fairly be regarded as among the first fruits of the higher education of women in the United States. The importance of women's work is emphatically recognised in Chicago, which, largely as the result of the efforts of Miss Addams and her colleagues, recently qualified as the first great city in the world to extend the municipal suffrage so as to include women.

Hull House is, in the first place, a remarkably complete system of well-equipped facilities for every form of recreative and educational association, provided in a group of buildings covering two city blocks. It has a school of music and a school of art, in which peculiarly suggestive results are achieved. The settlement has its own well-equipped theatre; and the Hull House Players have just returned after giving a performance by invitation at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Miss Addams has always exemplified the ingenuity of tactful sympathy in relation to the immigrant. Greeks, Italians and members of other nationalities are encouraged to present the classic dramas of their respective races. In the Labour Museum, the handicrafts of the immigrants are cultivated; and such skill as is possessed by the older people finds an opportunity inspiring to them and instructive to their children. Hull House is the centre of the Juvenile Protective League, which covers the whole city and is perhaps the most effective agency in America for reaching the social roots of moral delinquency among children. All the equipment and organisation of Hull House, however, count for much less than its personnel

a group of forty residents, with hundreds of allies, who among themselves include a substantial part of the knowledge and skill which formulate progressive social programmes and push on social reform in Chicago.

In New York, Boston and a few other cities, the settlements are linked together into effective federations. In Boston the federation includes twenty-five neighbourhood agencies; in New York, forty. Among the objects which are thus being pursued are, the elimination of competition and cross-purposes; the systematic raising of standards of work in each specialised branch of service at the different houses; the mission of experts in certain branches, such as domestic science, hygiene, and dramatics, from settlement to settlement; the organisation of large forms of recreation in which club members from the various houses participate; the combination of settlement workers in any particular city, with their neighbourhood constituents, in the advocacy of large measures calling for municipal and legislative action. The federations are thus serving to give the settlements a broad and strong front, to deepen and intensify their local knowledge and influence, and thus to utilise their collective powers in really statesmanlike activities.

Settlement-houses throughout the United States have recently formed themselves into a National Federation. It is intended that the Federation shall be something quite other than the innumerable national conventions. It is to be a working body, gathering by careful and comprehensive methods the total experience of the settlements as to matters of definite and peculiar experience, and thus creating a powerful organ through which the whole force of the settlement system can be brought to bear upon the different State Legislatures, upon Congress, and upon public opinion at large. The first fruits of this method, embodied in a work mentioned at the head of this paper, are shown in the collated evidence of two thousand experienced workers upon the question of young working girls in large cities. That the settlements are in touch with the centres of broadest influence, and may be enabled to carry the logical outcome of such studies into effect on a large scale, is shown by the recent appointment of Miss Julia Lathrop, of Hull House, to be

director of the new Children's Bureau which has been established by the national Government.

Nor are we to suppose that the benefits of the system are confined to the poor and outcast who directly profit by its efforts. It is generally agreed among settlement workers that one of the most important results of their efforts is to be seen in the reaction upon the educated classes. Well-informed observers have not unfrequently noted the effect of the settlement spirit and method upon the whole attitude of thoughtful people toward the profound problems of American democracy and of American cosmopolitanism. There is no doubt that the settlements have produced a striking change in the outlook of the colleges and universities, which are no longer dominated by that exclusive intellectualism which surprised Thomas Hughes and other socially-minded English visitors.

It is perhaps a sign of substantial achievement that American settlements have of recent years been the object of a considerable body of criticism. It is questioned whether, on account of their necessary financial dependence upon the rich, they can expect to have a significant rôle in the midst of the further developments of industrial democracy. It is often thought that municipal action will accomplish, upon a broader and far more comprehensive basis, the ends at which the settlements now aim. It is said that the settlements are no longer in the lead of progress, but are content to drop back into an attitude of mere eclectic philanthropy. The fundamental answer to all these objections is that, whatever may ultimately happen to the individual settlementhouses, a new spirit and a new method in the organisation of the common life have been developed; that this spirit and this method are spreading everywhere in city, town and open country; and that the settlement will in the end have been one of the profoundest influences in training the rank and file of democracy, rural as well as urban, to meet and solve, not in the bitterness of class hatred, but in the compact loyalty of an organic homogeneous nation, the great common issues which the national life shall evolve.

ROBERT A. WOODS.

Art. 11.-THE ISSUES OF KIKUYU.

1. Ecclesia Anglicana. An Open Letter. By Frank, Bishop of Zanzibar. Third Impression. London: Longmans, 1913.

2. The Kikuyu Conference. A Study in Christian Unity. By J.J. Willis, Bishop of Uganda. London: Longmans, 1914.

3. Proposals for a Central Missionary Council of Episcopal and Non-episcopal Churches in East Africa. By Frank Weston, D.D., Bishop of Zanzibar. London: Longmans, 1914.

4. A History of Protestant Missions. By Gustav Warneck. Third English Edition. Edinburgh and London Oliphant, 1906.

5. Eighteen Years in Uganda and East Africa. By Alfred R. Tucker, Bishop of Uganda. London: Arnold, 1908.

6. History of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa. By A. E. M. Anderson-Morshead. New and Revised Edition. London: U.M.C.A., 1909.

7. Report of the U.M.C.A. for 1913. London: U.M.C.A., 1909.

8. Report of the Foreign Mission Committee to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Given in by the Rev. J. N. Ogilvie, D.D., Convener. May, 1914.

And other works.

THE first great forward movement in the evangelisation of East Africa was due to an act of comity in Missions. In 1857 David Livingstone, a Scottish Presbyterian in the service of the London Missionary Society, appealed to the Universities to send out some of their best men as missionaries. I go back to Africa,' he said, 'to make an open path for commerce and Christianity; do you carry out the work which I have begun.' The appeal made at such a time could be addressed only to the Church of England, for the degrees and honours of the two Universities were then open only to those in communion with her, and very few Nonconformists were to be found at Oxford or Cambridge. Livingstone, moreover, knew quite well what he was about. 'It is deplorable,' he said, that one of the noblest of our