"Which is better," asks Professor Cooley in his Social Organization, "fellowship or distinction? There is much to be said on both sides, but the finer spirits of our day lean toward the former, and find it more human and exhilarating to spread abroad the good things the world already has than to prosecute a lonesome search for new ones. I notice among the choicest people I know—those who seem to me most representative of the inner trend of democracy—a certain generous contempt for distinction and a passion to cast their lives heartily on the general current." This penetrating observation is suggested by Miss Jane Addams's new book on her life at Hull-House. About a third of the material has previously appeared in the magazines; but unlike the author's previous books setting forth conclusions based on her experience, this traces the experiences themselves with the invaluable sidelight emanating from her own early history.

Miss Addams was born in the village of Cedarville, Illinois, in 1860, the daughter of a Hicksite Quaker who, from 1854 to 1870, was a member of the State Senate, and sufficiently conversant with politics to enjoy the intimate confidence of Lincoln. Her mother died when the future founder of Hull-House was a baby. Despite her physical infirmity—a curvature of the spine—her childhood was a joyous one. The family was well-to-do, if not prosperous; there was an ample air of public interest and public spirit stirring in the household circle; and more than the ordinary heritage of culture. She records that even as a child, her "mind was busy, however, with the old question eternally suggested by the inequalities of the human lot". Like her older sisters before her, Miss Addams went to the seminary, now college, at Rockford, Illinois, one of the earliest schools in the West for the higher education of women, and dubbed, because of affinity of spirit, "The Mount Holyoke of the West." All the fine enthusiasms of those early days of collegiate education for women found in Miss Addams hospitable lodgment, though she records with a bit of waggishness how once upon occasion, in an intercollegiate oratorical contest, she was pitted against no less a competitor than William Jennings Bryan. Her father's death occurred soon after she left college. Diverted from the professional study of medicine by a long illness, she spent some years in study, and in travel and residence abroad, until Hull-House in Chicago was opened in 1889. She speaks with an amusing impatience of "the snare of preparation," and with true feminine relief at the thought that "I had at last finished with the everlasting preparation for life," however ill-prepared I might be".

The social settlement has become so familiar an institution that an estimate of its nature and functions is less necessary than an insight into the convictions and character of the best known of its early founders in this country—and this, for the reason that Miss Addams's work has had so strong a formative influence upon settlements everywhere in the United States. The fundamental motive which seems to have actuated her proceeded from her conviction of the utter futility of a detached attainment of moral excellence. This root idea she expresses at times negatively in terms of revolt, or at least of reaction, against a premature overdose or individualistic cultivation, "a moral revulsion against this feverish search after culture". Positively, the same dominant impulse she describes almost passionately as a belief in the supreme moral worth of democracy in social relationships. During the eight years that fell wasted in "the snare of preparation" she "was absolutely at sea so far as any moral purpose was concerned, clinging only to the desire to live in a really living world and refusing to be content with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reflection of it". At times, a note almost bitter against the intellectual surfeiting of college training is sounded—"lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes". Or again, when she avers that the "first generation of college women had taken their learning too quickly, had departed too suddenly from the active emotional life led by their grandmothers" … "had lost that simple almost automatic response to the human appeal".

Her positive attachment to democracy, in the sense of "universal fellowship" in the life-adventure of the race, will appear most clearly if treated conjointly with Miss Addams's second ruling trait, a curious detachment coupled with skepticism about any system, religion, or panacea which falls short of her dominating idea of "universal fellowship." She herself ascribes her rejection of the evangelical assault upon her at college as due to her father's insistence upon "moral integrity" in the forum of conscience as the supreme law of the soul. But some years after, when all outside pressure was withdrawn, she voluntarily was baptized and became a communicant. The recital of the episode is exquisite—as "mere literature" finer than St. Augustine's conversion, in our opinion—but, while explicit as to the absence of disturbance of soul or strong compunction, she adds this revelatory comment:

There was also growing within me an almost passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy, and when in all history had these ideals been so thrillingly expressed as when the faith of the fisherman and slave had been boldly opposed to the accepted moral belief that the well-being of a privileged few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many?

After this one does not wonder that the single-taxer who sought to convert her to his cult by sudden prayer for her in her presence went away sorrowful; or that she failed to convert herself to Socialism, though she conscientiously made the effort.

It is interesting to notice how this underlying conviction and motive determine her attitude—and incidentally the attitude of settlement workers so largely—upon public issues. Of factory legislation in behalf of the weak, children and women, they approve. With trades-unionism so far as "it is a general social movement concerning all members of society and not merely a class struggle", they are in sympathy. For a discriminating State regimentation they stand, for "if certain industrial conditions are forcing workers below the standard of decency, it becomes possible to deduce the right of State regulation" on the ground mat "the very existence of the State depends upon the character of its citizens".

There is a fortunate sanity of temper and attitude flowing from the ground idea of "universal fellowship" in social relations which, while misrepresented and at times maligned, has kept the settlements close on the track of their quest of social betterment. Even when outbreaks of individual anarchists have driven the proud logicians into panic and grotesque absurdity, the settlement workers, and Miss Addams in particular, have emerged with signal credit. Even their hero-worship has been in a way trans-figured by their guiding motive. Miss Addams confesses that, instead of Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero-Worship" which she had once purposed to give to young boys of promise, she actually presented Schurz's "Abraham Lincoln." Moreover, in retrospect as to "the actual attainment of these early hopes," she remarks, "so far as they have been realized at all, [they] seem to have come from men of affairs rather than from those given to speculation".

The various experiments of Hull House, its failures and triumphs, its inner life as well as its outer activities, are all set forth engagingly in this volume, with a surprising modesty as regards general scientific conclusions such as the professional sociologist would expect. Miss Addams has generally a direct way of putting things, and an enjoyment of humorous by-products. Occasionally, however, there is a note of wistful pathos—"the sense of universality thus imparted to that mysterious injustice, the burden of which we are all forced to bear and with which I have become only too familiar".

Miss Addams's narration of her visit to Tolstoy, and her appraisal of Tolstoyism, will be of particular interest at this juncture. The prophet in his peasant's garb glanced disapprovingly at her large sleeves which were then in vogue, and, "pulling out one sleeve to an interminable breadth, said quite simply that 'there was enough stuff on one arm to make a frock for a little girl'." He would have said something similar about an historic alabaster box of ointment. Miss Addams is fortunate in her illustrator. There are an arresting power and a suggestive charm about some of the plates that entitle the artist to distinction.