Social settlement

“ That a Settlement is drawn into the labor issues of its city can seem remote to its purpose only to those who fail to realize that so far as the present industrial system thwarts our ethical demands, not only for social righteousness but for social order, a Settlement is committed to an effort to understand and, as far as possible, to alleviate it. That in this effort it should be drawn into fellowship with the local efforts of trades-unions is most obvious. This identity of aim apparently commits the Settlement in the public mind to all the faiths and works of actual trades-unions. ”

“ A settlement accepts the ethics of its contemporaries that the sharing of the life of the poor is essential to the understanding and bettering of that life; but by its very existence it adopts this modern code somewhat formally. The social injury of the meanest man not only becomes its concern, but by virtue of its very locality it has put itself into a position to see, as no one but a neighbor can see, the stress and need of those who bear the brunt of the social injury. ”

“ The settlement has its critics and its devoted supporters; it is one of the voluntary experiments that shows the spirit of its promoters and that helps along social progress, and it must be estimated among the assets of a community. Here and there in the country among certain groups, as lumbermen, miners, or construction workers, or even in a settled town, many of the methods of the settlement are likely to find acceptance, and the settlement idea of neighborliness is fundamental to all happy and successful social life. ”

“ Its direct tendency is to 203depress the social condition and character of the people; for by narrowing the field of labour, and binding individuals to a particular locality, not perhaps favourable to the development or most profitable employment of their faculties, improvement is checked, independence is destroyed, and the working classes, without resource or elasticity of spirit, are led to depend upon their place of settlement in every contingency, instead of upon themselves. ”

“ One such means is the University Settlement. Men who have knowledge may become friends of the poor and share that knowledge and its fruits as, day by day, they meet in their common rooms for talk or for instruction, for music or for play.
The settlers will be able to join in that which is done by other societies, while they share all their best with the poor, and in the highest sense make their property common. They may be some of the best charity agents, for they will have an experience out of the reach of others, which they will have accumulated through their different agencies. ”

“ The coöperative plans that often 105fail in serving the family of father, mother, and children, may be found exactly suited to special classes, and among them the aged. The Social Settlements were started to serve and have served the neighborhood needs of the poor and the immigrant. ”

“ He urged that the significance of the settlement for the future, as for the past, lay not in any specific type of service or reform—valuable as nearly all such effort is—but in the development of social self sufficiency among the people from neighborhood to neighborhood throughout the country. ”

“ It follows from all these considerations that a new settlement should be composed of young, healthy, and moral persons; that all should not be labourers, nor all capitalists; and that there should be a sufficient concentration of their numbers on the new lands to insure a facility of exchanges. ”

“ The strongest incitements to industry are required, those of proprietorship and ultimate independence, to induce settlers to encounter all the privations and toil of a new settlement in such a country. ”

“ The fundamental laws of the country, land and water regulations, labor legislation, fiscal and commercial statutes, must be entirely altered to match intensive settlement, the speedy building up of industries, the growth of town and village. ”

“ A settlement has not only taken a pledge towards those thus injured, but it is placed where the motive-power for the fulfilment of such a pledge is constantly renewed. Propinquity is an unceasing factor in its existence. ”

“ Nothing surely can be more reasonable, that a life spent in active labor should convey a right of settlement: it is to be supposed his services have contributed to the wealth and prosperity of the spot. ”

“ From such a measure it is obvious that many advantages must result. It would effectually separate the convict from the free population: the labour of forming a new settlement would afford constant means of employment, and that of a severe description. ”

“ Whenever I hear of any new settlement, I pay it a visit once or twice a year, on purpose to observe the different steps each settler takes, the gradual improvements, the different tempers of each family, on which their prosperity in a great nature depends; their different modifications of industry, their ingenuity, and contrivance; for being all poor, their life requires sagacity and prudence. ”

“ The position of a settlement, which attempts at one and the same time to declare its belief in this eventual, industrial democracy, and to labor toward that end, to maintain a standard of living, and to deal humanely and simply with those in actual want, often seems utterly untenable and preposterous. ”

“ The Colonial Treasurer began to prepare another brilliant Public Works Policy, the Premier hinted that sweeping reforms would be placed before the House, the Minister for Lands busied himself with a scheme of land settlement that would give homes to large numbers of people, and would lead to a great revival of settlement and of the agricultural industry. ”

“ Still some of the finest portions of the state are yet unpenetrated—luxuriant wildernesses left in a state of nature; but these are being rapidly cleared, and there is room enough for another million of workers and a promising field for their speculations.{112} Let the settlers flock in as fast as they may, provided they come with an adequate supply of patience, industry, and discrimination in their choice of a settlement, a prosperous career may be assured to 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. ”

“ A new class of men at once took possession of these regions as owners of the soil, brought their families with them, laid the foundations of social order, expelled the semi-barbarians who had secured a temporary occupancy, and thus, at once promoted their own welfare, the prosperity of the country, and the financial interests of the Government. ”

“ In the workhouse every able-bodied man must work; it was not fair that the industrious should be called upon to support an increasing race of paupers raised in the workhouse, husbands and wives must therefore be separated; for the sake of training and education, children must be kept from the possible contamination of the adult paupers; and as the maintenance of industry was one of the chief objects of the reform, free circulation of labour and the removal of most of the restrictions of the old law of settlement were indispensable. ”

“ Projects of mighty settlement, and of sudden population, however successful in the end, are always expensive to mankind. Above a hundred thousand peasants, we are told, were yearly driven, like so many cattle, to Petersburgh, in the first attempts to replenish that settlement, and yearly perished for want of subsistence. ”

“ No part of society can afford to get along without the others.
The settlement, then, urges first, the organization of working people in order that as much leisure and orderly life as possible may be secured to them in which to carry out the higher aims of living; in the second place, it should make a constant effort to bring to bear upon the labor movement a consciousness of its historic development ”

“ It is our will and pleasure that the productions of all descriptions acquired by the labour of the convicts should be considered as a public stock, which we so far leave to your disposal that such parts thereof as may be requisite for the subsistence of the said convicts and their families, or the subsistence of the civil and military establishments of the settlement may be applied by you to that use. ”

“ When the corporation has a sufficient number of members, that is to say, when the land is fairly occupied, and when the addition of more land would unduly increase the hardship of working it from the town, or would spread out the farmers, and make it difficult for them to attend to their religious and civil duties, the original settlement throws out a new shoot. ”

“ Nearly the whole population of the country are agriculturists, and live in one way or another upon the cultivation of the land. The effect of a permanent settlement will therefore create a greater feeling of security, and to encourage the outlay of capital and labour on land will be beneficial to the entire population. ”

“ I maintain, further, that the change in the law of settlement, joined to the increasing facilities and cheapness of locomotion, together with an imperfect administration of the Poor Law throughout this country, has had the effect of throwing upon the large towns great masses of pauperism which, though created elsewhere, yet fall upon their local rates. ”

“ A man who expects to go to the alms-house in his old age may regard a law of settlement as his patent of security, because it defines and secures his place of refuge. A man who is in the same status, but who is determined to better his condition by energy and enterprise, and tries to move, finds the law of settlement a curse, which may hold him down and force him to become a pauper. ”

“ It is good policy, especially in times of depression and uncertainty in other business pursuits, with a vast area of uncultivated, and hence unproductive, territory, wisely opened to homestead settlement, to encourage by every proper and legitimate means the occupation and tillage of the soil. ”

“ If the design of the settlement is not so much the initiation of new measures, but fraternal co-operation with all good which it finds in its neighborhood, then the most obvious line of action will be organization through the trades-unions, a movement already well established. ”

“ However, even if the menace of population is avoided, even if the general level of production is raised, and if, besides, the distributive outcome laid down as a goal for the policy of wage settlement is attained, nevertheless, there would remain a considerable measure of inequality of wealth. ”

“ This obstructive policy keeps up a continual ill-feeling amongst the independent population of the settlement, who naturally enough have little belief in the justice of laws framed, as they imagine, for the protection of the Company rather than for the general good. ”

“ But it appears that many persons still consider some law of settlement necessary for securing local co-operation based upon local interests, for the protection of particular unions from undue pressure, and for guarding the towns on the eastern coast from being burdened with the destitute who may flock thither, or be sent thither from England or Scotland, or with the families of the large body of migrants who proceed to Great Britain in the harvest season and return at its conclusion. ”

“ The settlement of that province had lately been begun, but, instead of being made with hardy, industrious husbandmen, accustomed to labor,—the only people fit for such an enterprise,—it was with families of broken shopkeepers and other insolvent debtors, many of indolent and idle habits, taken out of the jails, who, being set down in the woods, unqualified for clearing land and unable to endure the hardships of a new settlement, perished in numbers, leaving many helpless children unprovided for. ”

“ Settlement would be closer, and, consequently, labor and capital would be enabled to produce much more with the same exertion. The dog in the manger who, in this country especially, so wastes productive power, would be choked off. ”

“ Complex association.—A more complex association is found in even the rudest settlement when one man undertakes a particular kind of labor for all his neighbors, they in turn doing a different kind of work for him. A farmer in a new settlement found the children of himself and neighbors without a school, and agreed for several winters to teach a school as many days as his neighbors would chop in his clearing. ”

“ Provision will be made by law, at the earliest opportunity for rendering those capitalists, who may be engaged in taking out labouring persons to this settlement, liable for the future maintenance of those persons, should they, from infirmity, of any other cause, become unable to maintain themselves there.
5. The license of occupation of land will be granted to the settler, on satisfactory proof being exhibited to the Lieutenant Governor (or other officer administering the Local Government,) of the amount of property brought into the colony. ”

“ And if persons were permitted to take up their grants wherever they pleased, in any unallotted part of the Settlement, the whole country would be interspersed with patches of land, greatly in the way of any extensive capitalist, who would naturally wish to take up his grant in one place, without the annoyance of having it intersected by the estate of another ”

“ In this report he observes that 'the progress of the settlement during the present year, although not unopposed by many adverse circumstances, has been as rapid as could have been expected or desired.' He says, indeed, 'that a greater increase than that which has taken place of ships, persons, and property, would probably have been disadvantageous to the welfare of the settlement while struggling in its infancy;' and he adds, 'that although individuals may have suffered in the undertaking, the settlement is now securely established, and its future prosperity no longer doubtful. ”