Jacob A. Riis 1849–1914. The Battle with the Slum. 1902.
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| citizenship. They belong to the people. Why should they not be used by the people Sunday and weekday and day and night, for whatever will serve their ends—if the janitor has a fit? |
| Now here come the social settlements with their plan of doing it. What claim have they to stand in the gap? |
| This one, that they are there now, though they do not fill it. The gap has been too much for them. They need the help of those they came to succor quite as much as they need them. I have no desire to find fault with any one who wants to help his neighbor. God forbid! I am not even a settlement worker. But when I read, as I did yesterday, a summing up of the meaning of settlements by three or four residents in such houses, and see education, reform politics, local improvements, legislation, characterized as the aim and objects of settlement work, I am afraid somebody is on the wrong track. Those things are good, provided they spring naturally from the intellectual life that moves in and about the settlement house; indeed, unless they do, something has quite decidedly miscarried there. But they are not the object. When I pick up a report of one settlement and another, and find them filled with little essays on the people and their ways and manners, as if the settlement were some kind of a laboratory where they prepare |