That Miss Jane Addams has become known chiefly through other activities does not matter here. It is temperament and career in which we are immediately interested. What is perhaps the most outstanding fact in the temperament of Miss Addams is revealed only indirectly in her autobiography: it may be called the passion of conciliation.
Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst has by her actions written herself down for a fighter. She has but recently been released from Holloway jail, where she was serving a term of imprisonment for "conspiracy and violence." In a book by H. G. Wells, which contains a very bitter attack on the woman's suffrage movement (I refer to "Ann Veronica"), she is described as "implacable"; and I believe that it is she to whom Mr. Wells refers as being "as incapable of argument as a steam roller broken loose." The same things might have been said of Sherman on his dreadful march to the sea. These phrases, malicious as they are, contain what I am inclined to accept as an accurate description of Mrs. Pankhurst's temperament.
No one would call Mrs. Pankhurst a conciliator. And no one would call Miss Addams "implacable." It is not intended to suggest that Miss Addams is one of those inveterate compromisers who prefer a bad peace to a good war. But she has the gift of imaginative sympathy; and it is impossible for her to have toward either party in a conflict the cold hostility which each party has for the other. She sees both sides; and even though one side is the wrong side, she cannot help seeing why its partisans believe in it.
"If the under dog were always right," Miss Addams has said, "one might quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong, but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession of prejudice to the other almost insuperable difficulties in understanding him."
Miss Addams has taken in good faith the social settlement ideal--"to span the gulf between the rich and the poor, or between those who have had cultural opportunities and those who have not, by the process of neighborliness." In her writings, as in her work, there is never sounded the note of defiance. Even in defense of the social settlement and its methods of conciliation (which have been venomously assailed by the newspapers during Chicago's fits of temporary insanity, as in the Averbuch case), Miss Addams has not become militant. She has never ceased to be serenely reasonable.