[The following essay appraises Twenty Years at Hull-House as not just a personal account of one life, but of a time and place.]

[Twenty Years at Hull-House is] a book which is assured of a place among the noblest life records of the time.… It is not formally autobiographic in method, but Miss Addams has the rare faculty of stating or implying the essential personal facts, in the fewest possible words, during the process of describing the experiences which led her to follow a certain course of public action, or showing the relation in which Hull House has stood to the political and economic forces of the past two decades. It is a wonderful and deeply moving record, the power and inspiration of which no reviewer can hope to reproduce.

We get, in the opening pages, an exquisite reminiscence of the Addams home at Cedarville, Illinois; a glimpse of the American worship of Lincoln; an account of the boarding-school ideals and the varied European influences which led, by ways not difficult to follow, to the founding of the settlement among the slums of Chicago. Halstead Street, in which Hull House stands, has a length of thirty-two miles.

Polk Street crosses it midway between the stockyards to the south and the shipbuilding yards on the north bank of the Chicago River. For six miles between these two industries the street is lined with shops and saloons. Polk Street running west becomes more prosperous; running a mile east to State Street it grows steadily worse, and crosses a network of vice on the corners of Clark Street and Fifth Avenue.… Between Halstead Street and the river live about 10,000 Italians, Neapolitans, Sicilians, and Calabrians, with an occasional Lombard or Venetian. To the south on Twelfth Street are many Germans, and side-streets are given over almost entirely to Polish and Russian Jews. Still further south, these Jewish colonies merge into a huge Bohemian colony, so vast that Chicago ranks as the third Bohemian city in the world.

Settlement life, still in its infancy in England, was in 1889 unknown in the United States and Miss Addams and her colleagues began work in an atmosphere of critical bewilderment, so far as observers were concerned, and with, on their own part, theories of happily sufficient fluidity to reinforce their abundant enthusiasms. The story of the first days is brilliantly told, and it is followed by a rapid and vivid description of the years of discussion and experiment—the invention and adjustment of social machinery, the gradual conquest of the neighbourhood, the many experiments undertaken, not merely in providing means of culture and recreation, but in co-operative enterprise, and later in general civic re-construction. The narrative of schemes begun and developed, or attempted and abandoned, is interwoven with passages of personal reminiscence and confession, with stories of tragedy and heroism, drawn from a marvellously full store. At intervals, too, we learn of visits to Europe and contact with kindred workers on this side.

Miss Addams has some interesting comments to make on the changes in the intellectual and emotional aspects of England, at intervals of a few years before and during the South African War; and she tells of a visit to Tolstoy, which had a disconcerting effect upon her spiritual outlook. Beaten by the old prophet's questions as to her mode of life in the city, and caught by the idea of "bread labour," she resolved to pay toll, on her return to Chicago, by spending two hours every morning in the little bakery of Hull House—with this result:—

It may be that I had thus to pacify my aroused conscience before I could settle down to hear Wagner's "Ring" at Bayreuth; it may be that I had fallen a victim to the phrase "bread labour"; but at any rate I held fast to the belief that I should do this, throughout the entire journey homeward, on land and sea, until I actually arrived in Chicago, when suddenly the whole scheme seemed to me as utterly preposterous, as it undoubtedly was. The half-dozen people invariably waiting to see me after breakfast, the piles of letters to be opened and answered, the demand of actual and pressing human wants,—were these all to be pushed aside and asked to wait while I saved my soul by two hours' work at baking bread?

It would need many pages of quotation to give any adequate impression of a book which breathes on every page the spirit of the dedicated life. No one who would know the best of the religion of service, which is the highest ethical product of our age, can afford to miss the reading.