SOCIAL AND UNIVERSITY SETTLE MENTS. Social service is the modern study of people and conditions looking toward the betterment of mankind; a forward movement dealing with life, occupation and environments, embracing the observation and investigation of the relations between employers and employees, co-operation, labor legislation, hours of work, wages, industrial betterment, child labor, factory sanitation and inspection, safety appliances, im provement of civic and municipal conditions, civil service, public ownership, the initiative and referendum, tax reform, marriage and divorce, housing, temperance, pauperism and crime, de fective and delinquent children, education, in stitutional churches and the like. The houses or buildings whence all these activities are directed are known as social settlements and the fact that university men were and are prominent in the movement has caused them to be known frequently as university settlements.
The necessity for systematized social service was impressed originally upon the minds of Englishmen, due to the enormous increase in the indigent and submerged class in London and in other large cities of Great Britain, which became apparent soon after the great expansion of the factory system there in the first half of the 19th century. It was realized that useful aid along a variety of lines could be best given by men and women actually living among the poor and studying the difficulties besetting them. Among the prominent leaders of the movement in England were Arnold Toynbee, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Thomas Hughes, Dickens, Carlyle, Thomas Arnold, Thomas Hill Green and Edward Dennison. A growing sense of social duty and responsibility actuated these men in calling attention to the many social evils of their period. In 1864 Dennison went to Lon don to live in a poor quarter of the East End. In 1871 Arnold Toynbee gave several addresses before the workingmen's organizations in Lon don and in the provinces. He died in 1883 while still in early manhood. It was Toynbee's spirit and ideas more than any work which he individually accomplished that gave to the set tlement movement its chief characteristics and its abiding sense of social obligation. The work
as taken up by Canon Barnett and others im bued with Toynbee's spirit assumed three gen eral forms: (1) Relief through charity and medical attendance; (2) the providing of op portunities of a social and recreative character; (3) the establishment of educational centres for purposes of primary or advanced instruction, including certain phases of culture. In 1860 F. D. Morris established the Workingman's College in London. In 1867 Cambridge Uni versity started its first University Extension scheme. Following this, in 1869, the Charity Organization Society was founded; in 1885 Toynbee Hall was opened by Barnett in East London and in 1887 the Neighborhood Guild, later the University Settlement, was opened in New York City. These initiatory steps were followed by others of a closely allied character in all large cities where the density of popula tion is sufficient to indicate the need for social service.
The dominant idea in settlement work is that of teaching wage-earners to help them selves. The goal sought is individual develop ment stimulated into being under the guidance of teachers. The element to be eliminated in all these efforts is that of patronage. Social serv ice in the nature of direct gifts of food, fuel, clothing or money must be extended with great discrittunation, lest chronic pauperism be en couraged and the already too large class of parasites on the charitable world be increased. In all phases of the work, tact and judgment are required, but these are particularly requisite in dealing with those cases where pride prevents an advertisement of need or forbids the accept ance of unsolicited help. Persons possessed of these qualities and who are capable of advising and preventing the development of acute con ditions in particular cases are of the greatest value in settlement work.