Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1923

528

PUBLIC OPINION

tlements as justified by what the family budget shows the cost of living to be. A
minimum wage has been urged as the surest defense against the injustice and injuriousness of sweated industries. The protection of maternity from the overwork and underpay of women, and from the excessive and preventable death rate in childbirth tolerated
in the United States, has been demanded as the birthright of the child, as the motherright of womanhood, and as the nation's right to perpetuate its population and to
progress. The child's right to grow, learn, play, and thus fit itself for domestic,
industrial, social, and civic life has rallied settlements to the aggressive support of legislation against child labor and for compulsory school attendance, as well as for public
and voluntary support of infant-welfare work, nutrition clinics, directed playgrounds,
and indoor-recreation centers. The Federal Children's Bureau is perhaps the most
outstanding evidence of settlement influence upon national policies, since it contributed
not only initiative toward the establishment of the bureau, but also the services of two
residents of Hull House to head it up and staff assistants from several other settlements.
In pleading for shorter hours in the working day and for week-end leisure, the balance between work and play, so essential to every normal life, has steadily been claimed
for the workers by their settlement neighbors. Labor's right to organize for protecting
and advancing the standard of living, for safeguarding life and limb, and for sharing
control over working conditions has been recognized as much as an economic necessity
as for capital to combine. In the investigation of economic conditions and in the conciliation and arbitration of industrial differences many settlement residents have taken
active part. Members of their staffs have been drafted by the Federal Coal Commission to report to it their findings as to the home conditions of the miners' families in the
mining fields of several states. '
Third, inter-racial relations have been studied, reported, and improved through the
neighborly knowledge that the settlement household has acquired concerning the cosmopolitan populations in the midst of which most of them are located. Thus mutual
understanding has been demonstrated to be the only foundation of justice. Sympathetic interpretation has been proved to be the only basis of public policies for the protection and assimilation of the foreign-born. The Immigrants' Protective League of
Chicago, mainly due to the initiative, support, and leadership of its settlement constituency, may possibly be taken over by the Department of Public Welfare of the City
of Chicago, of which Mary E. McDowell, head resident of the University of Chicago
Settlement, has recently been appointed commissioner by the new mayor of Chicago,
William E. Dever, who began his political career by speaking from the platform of
Chicago Commons in his candidacy for the city council twenty-three years ago.
During the war many settlements rendered effective service in administering the
selective service law in the neighborly spirit. Then, as before and since, the settlement
found good cause to cherish both ends of the "hyphen," because the love of old fatherlands was found to deepen and intensify the loyal allegiance of the foreign-born to their
adopted country.
Inter-racial relations of a just and peaceful kind are also found to point the way
logically and necessarily to our country's international relations as a loyal member of
the family of nations. The American patriotism of foreign-born, liberty-loving neighbors has banished the craven fear of foreign aggression as a bar to national friendship
with their kindred in the old-world fatherlands. The personal and public dealings with
the peoples of foreign lands are realized as so natural, necessary, and inevitable as to