Jane Addams

“ The English economists and philanthropists have started a crusade against destitution; the most intrepid of revolutionists are those who have been stung into revolt by the poverty and degradation of Russia's peasants; the social democrats of Germany are three and a half million men vowed to the destruction of poverty; the part America shall take in this international crusade of the compassionate, in this standing army of humanity's self-pity suddenly mobilized for a new conquest, it lies largely with the members of this conference to determine. ”

“ We have here an epitome of the most advanced philanthropy, stimulation of inventions which shall relieve the poor from degrading drudgery, co-operation with commercial enterprises, and finally protective legislation. But these obscure people whose hearts were wrung over the condition of chimney sweeps did even better than that. They were pioneers in the establishment of the modern principle of inspection, which when taken over by the government as an extension of the function of the state, is ably defended by the economist, but which was after all inaugurated by the philanthropist. ”

“ I can recall a very intelligent woman who long brought her children to the Hull-House Day Nursery with this result at the end of ten years of devotion: the one little girl is almost totally deaf owing to neglect following a case of measles because her mother could not stop work in order to care for her; the youngest boy has lost a leg flipping cars; the oldest boy has twice been arrested for petty larceny; the twin boys, in spite of prolonged sojourns in the parental school, have been such habitual truants that their natural intelligence has secured little aid from education. ”

“ Here we will admit at once that it is impossible for the non-professional to realize the difficulties of prison administration, that most difficult of all the tasks which society commissions, and although it may seem at moments as if the state held too firmly to the tradition of penal justice and retribution, certainly with our young offenders it has already become a question of cure and education. As we fail to connect the downfall of the boy with inadequate recreation, so we fail to make many other obvious connections -- that of the wayward girl with insufficient housing, for instance. ”

“ The negative policy of relieving destitution, or even the more generous one of preventing it, is giving way to the positive idea of raising life to its highest value.
If at times the moral fire seems to be dying out of the good old words, relief and charity, it has undoubtedly filled. ”

“ Moreover, in its unending undertaking to reduce the sum of human misery, charity has shared the changes of the passing generations, until like all of its contemporaries, it too has become less dogmatic and has assumed the evolutionary way of understanding life; with them it has grown more democratic and has attained greater flexibility of temper. Moreover, modern charity, continually discovering new obligations, has been obliged to call to its aid economics, sanitary science, statistical research, and many other agencies as the program of this conference will testify. ”

“ It is as if the charitable had been brought through the care of the individual to a contemplation of social causes, and as if the radical had been forced to test his social doctrine by a sympathetic observation of actual people. ”

“ In addition to this, both groups when brought close to the mysterious shortcoming on the part of life itself, when oppressed by that "grief of things as they are" over and above the griefs of circumstance or wrong-doing, have come to realize that what we need in the world over against man's misadventure is a "certain power of compassion, humanity standing force of self-pity as an elementary ingredient in our social atmosphere if we are to live in it at all." ”

“ We do not venture to say whether or not the saints in heaven forbear but we are very certain that no saint on earth could forbear in the presence of contemporaneous social and industrial conditions, and both saint and sinner know that the conditions can only be made more righteous and more human by the increasing devotion of countless generations of men. ”

“ From the human standpoint there is certainly an obligation resting upon the charity and correction people to discover how much of their material comes to them as the result of social neglect, remedial incapacity, and the lack of industrial safeguards. ”

“ To consider the affairs of the committee on the relation of school and community, we will recall that the first free public education in England was established by the Poor Law Guardians, because they resolved that children should no longer be subject to that curious penal discipline which characterized the unions, and segregated the pauper children altogether from the poorhouses into district schools. ”

“ But quite as the first commission to inquire into the condition of great towns, appointed through the solicitation of the philanthropic folk of Manchester in 1844 and as sanitary science, both in knowledge and municipal authority has leapt forward under pressure of epidemics raging through the poorer quarters of crowded cities, so the advocates of the most advanced measures in city hygiene and preventive sanitary science are those hood and neglected disease are the most who have realized that neglected childproof of this we may instance the two potent causes of social insufficiency. ”

“ It has therefore through dire need, been forced to recognize that charitable effort is part of the general social movement; somewhat as John Stuart Mill, when he was hard pressed by the problems of life, restored political economy to its proper place as a branch of social philosophy, insisting that it was not a thing by itself, but was an important part of the great whole. ”

“ Long ago the English economist was horrified over an administration of the poor law which paid "rates in aid of wages," and designated such charity as a "bounty" paid to employers; but the employer who pays starvation wages to his employes and who "sweats" them without regard to their health or endurance comes to rely absolutely upon the "bounty" with which his wages are supplemented. mented. The long struggle to establish a living wage which is carried on by trade unionists has its charitable as well as its economic aspects. ”

“ Although the public schools in America are quite free from the odor of charity, and were inaugurated and conducted as a matter of public policy, they are greatly indebted to the educational results obtained from the care of defective and delinquent children. Certainly the training of the brain through the co-ordinating muscles was first painstakingly worked out by those dealing with children whose minds could not be approached through the more conventional methods of education. ”

“ At the present moment the best agricultural training given to boys as well as the most thorough trade instruction is to be found in institutions for the wayward.
If we consider the work of another committee of this conference, that on health and sanitation, the argument becomes easy, for public health is a magic word which ever grows more potent as we realize that the very existence of the modern city would be an impossibility, had it not been discovered that the health of the individual is dependent upon the hygienic condition of his surroundings. ”

“ In this period of intense and overwrought industrialism there are no other institutions which could perform so great a service to the community, if they could only determine how many patients became insane because of black terror lest they lose their work, how many through mal-nutrition when they had lost it, and how many because of the sheer monotony of their employment. Psychiatry is doing something to show us the after effects of fear upon the minds of children, but little has yet been done to show how far that fear of the future, arising from economic insecurity has superinduced insanity. ”

“ But the philanthropists also found that when they actually appeared before a parliament or legislature they were obliged to wield the weapon of statistics, if only that they might appear as men of science and not as sentimentalists. though the philanthropist has often spoken slightingly of "mere knowledge" which informs the mind without resulting in action, he knows in his heart that knowledge is never "mere knowledge," and that it is indispensable to right conduct. ”

“ But with the knowledge all charitable people possess, why do we not sternly accuse the state both with the loss of the mother, and with the many results of imperfectly nourished and uneducated childhood? ”

“ Perhaps the most revolutionary proposition ever seriously put before a modern government, was the plan for a public organization of the labor market placed before the English Parliament in 1909, and although it was written in its final form by two economists, its material was collected by those trained in charitable administrations, and it was put forth as a report of a Poor Law Commission. ”

“ Had the overworked woman taken her own life, the state would have cared for her children either by the most approved method of boarding them out or in institutions for dependent children. Would it, therefore, seem so unreasonable to board them with their own mother, requiring a standard of nutrition and school attendance? ”

“ THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS AT THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF CHARITIES AND CORRECTION
JANE ADDAMS
In an attempt to review the recent trend in the development of charity, that which has appeared most striking to your President is a gradual coming together of two groups of people, who have too often been given to a suspicion of each other and sometimes to actual vituperation. One group who have traditionally been moved to action by "pity for the poor" we call the charitable; the other, larger or smaller in each generation but always fired by a "hatred of injustice," we designate as the radicals. ”

“ The charitable have been brought to this combination through the conviction that the poverty and crime with which they constantly deal are often the result of untoward industrial conditions, while the radicals have been slowly forced to the conclusion that if they would make an effective appeal to public opinion they must utilize carefully collected data as to the effect of existing conditions upon the poor and the criminal. ”

“ Who cannot recall at least one of these desperate mothers, overworked and harried through a long day, prolonged by the family washing and cooking into the evening, followed by a night of foreboding and misgiving because the very children for whom her life is sacrificed are slowly slipping away from her control and affection? ”

“ With the cooperation of the audience I may be able to demonstrate that modern Charity is committed to this newer service of increasing the positive value of life, by recalling with you some of the many agencies designed to safeguard and enhance the life of the citizen which have had purely philanthropic origins. ”

“ Lord Shaftsbury's calculation of the distance daily traveled by a child tending a machine brought to his cause those members of Parliament who had been quite untouched by his humanitarian enthusiasm and religious zeal, but the advocates of child labor legislation had before them a century of struggle with the "freedom of contract" people, before it was made clear to the British mind that to protect the children of the nation is not in "restraint of trade" but the preservation of the most valuable asset of commerce. ”

“ This latter will quickly bring us back to the social movement itself, for the effort to adjust a man's work to his powers is largely at the base of the entire labor struggle.
Let us consider next the affairs of that most important committee on state supervision and administration. Institutions as well as men are so prone to forget the pit whence they were digged! That most beneficent of institutions, the modern hospital, had its origin in the eighteenth century pest house which must have killed more people than it cured. ”

“ It is true that the British board schools have suffered from this humble beginning, but the indications are that the next great advance in English education will also be indebted to a charitable source. The minority report of the Poor Law Commission, without apology for entering the field of education, recommends that "the legally permissible hours for the employment of boys must be shortened, that they must be required to spend the hours so set free, in physical and technological training, that the manufacturing of the unemployable may cease." ”

“ After all, sympathetic knowledge is the only way of approach to any human problem. The line of least resistance into the jungle of human wretchedness must always be through that region which is most thoroughly explored, not only by the information of the statistician but by the understanding of the charitable. ”

“ But how about discontinuous employment as a factor in the breeding of discouragement and poverty? Of this the charitable people say never a word. In a pottery factory instanced by Professor Edsoll of the University of Pennsylvania, men are chiefly engaged who are already afflicted with tuberculosis and cancer, because, knowing they have but little time to live, they do not resent the fate of lead poisoning. ”