So, whichever way we turn, we come back to the commandment: “My children, love one another.” Doing that, we can leave the results with Him who said it. But we can make them out even now. We can see how things are beginning to tend back towards the home where love grows naturally in the family. The neighborhood idea, that is the heart of the settlement movement, rouses civic pride, rouses ideals that were dead, restores to the neighborhood individuality and to the family dignity. The mothers’ club, what does it mean, what does it discuss, but home-making? The home library brings the visitor to the home, picks it out and gives it separate existence, and ties the children to it with a new loyalty. The boys’ club belongs there in its ultimate development and will yet go there for its meetings, and the girls’ club too. That must be the ultimate aim of the settlement, which is now preparing the ground for it. Everywhere, consciously or unconsciously, the movement is in the air, and growing, to rescue the home from neglect, to put a stop to child labor and to home-work that would exclude the family life; the movement to send mother and children back to the home where they are safe.
You, in Philadelphia, have your Octavia Hill Association, that has shown us how to redeem a whole street. I have told you of our efforts in our worse slum. It is so everywhere. I _am_ my brother’s keeper, and I am ashamed at last not to own it. That is the key-note of the whole modern reform movement, the new charity, the new school, the social settlement and all; and thank God for it!
How long we were finding out that we were neighbors! A year or two ago, I went to a suburb of New York to speak of these things, even as I am now speaking to you. And when that evening I sat at the family board with my host, who was a clergyman, a secretary in a foreign mission board, he said, looking around upon his little ones, that, if I could find him a poor widow in the city with five children of their ages, whom they could go along with and help as they grew, I would be doing a good thing for them and a better thing for his children. And I promised, for that was ideal charity, neighbor with neighbor.
But it was not easy. Weeks passed before I found a family in an East-side tenement that just filled the requirements. It was Christmas Eve, and, while I stayed to look them over, I came to love them, the good children and the brave little woman fighting her fight all unaided. She told me that she was a scrub-woman in a public building; but it was not until I had gone half way over to the office, to tell my friend on the telephone that I had found what he sought, that I thought of asking Where she scrubbed. I went back to ask her.