Social Settlements Author:Charles Richmond Henderson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: narrow and dark valley of egoistic hedonism up to the sunny highlands of rational and spiritual altruism ; positivism has exalted humanity to a place of worship ... more »; sociology, in the hands of Comte and Spencer, has formulated the idea of the social organism ; the universities have emeiged from mediaeval pedantry into the world of real life; the Charity Organization Society is unifying the chaotic efforts of benevolence ; East London has missionaries and visitors who are acquainted with the people, but who feel themselves cut off from the warm gulf stream of learning, piety and culture. The time is ripe for bringing all these forces into cooperation in some new and vital movement. The Social Settle- ment is one of the many agencies in and through which the modern philanthropy, charged with the spiritual wealth of all past generations, finds expression. The Settlement does not create itself by spontaneous generation. It does not thrust itself upon the world unbidden. It rises at the divine call. It grows naturally out of all previous movements, draws life from them, completes and expands them. Forerunners.—The precursors of the Settlement were driven to the discovery that workingmen must help themselves if they are to be helped. They must grow into their inheritance. Friends can assist them only by increasing intelligence and fortifying character. The Christian Socialists, aroused by the revolution of 1848, and by the revelations of London misery, had sincerely tried to improve the economic condition of the poor byschemes of cooperation in manufacture. Their schemes were wrecked on the shallows of spiritual defect, their own ignorance and the want of moral and intellectual preparation of the working people. Men who had no wealth could not act directly upon the factory system. Polit...« less