Correction. Mr. Allen T. Burns was speaking, with a fine appreciation of what it costs to be democratic, of some of the social legislation which had been promoted by us social workers, who in our self-sufficiency have been incapable of thinking or too hurried to think in terms of the whole, and which now is being found to be inoperative; inoperative, not necessarily because the basis for the legislation was unsound, but because time had not been given to the task of educating the public, itself, to realize the need of change and of redress. The process must be slower, Mr. Burns said. One measure at a time must be taken and must be followed up to see what is the result of its enforcement. One must have patience and, one might add, faith, to bear the tedium of slowly accumulating results. One must find the point of contact. In trying to find the point of contact, one must be ready to submit to misunderstanding and to make compromises.

To find the point of contact in the home, itself, and in finding the contact there to lose one's sense of being an expert in one's consciousness of being a fellow human being, is the democratic task that lies before us. In making that contact on the basis of mutual understanding, one may come quite naturally to realize what are the simple, fundamental values of home life, and may with patience and farsightedness work for the right relation between school and home, a relationship that may lead us along some path of finer action than the path of mere substitution. To me it seems that that is the pathway we must begin now to tread, we social workers who have been treading the dusty highway of social reform.

In thinking of the enacting of life in the home itself, I was much struck recently by a portfolio of photographs of paintings of Eugène Carrière. "We must consent to life," Frank Jewett Mather' says was Carrière's "favorite aphorism," and one that "conveys the spirit of his philosophy." "He," Mather says, “had to do with an eternal principle of fealty to the race asserted in the face of physical and social conditions that make such loyalty doubly perilous and fraught with sacrifice." One of Carrière's two Maternities of the Luxembourg rests with me as an image of that something which cannot be held by the race except through the medium of the family itself.

For the mother of his art as she leans to kiss the child, not the one on her knee, but the one standing at her side, wears not the mark of placid acceptance of her great lot, but the mark of sacrificial yearning to protect her child against the ravages of life. In the small, earnest face * Estimates in Art, pp. 185 and 193.

turned upwards to hers there is an awareness of the demands of love, which contains a promise of the perpetuity of family fidelity, into whose sharing the baby sleeping on its mother's knee and the third child, the one of an age in between the other two, who with back turned toddles across the floor, will be drawn when their consciousness of love's claim begins to wake.

That spontaneous outpouring of sacrificial love is the simple reality. Like all simple things, its profundity escapes us. The holding fast to the fundamental fact of the value of the family relationship, and holding fast to it for the sake of the children who will grow into manhood, is the need, to hark back to the beginning, that was emphasized for me in my visit to the Farm Colony. To rescue those lives would have meant to be able to turn back to the time when perhaps each individual member of that group had stood by the knee of someone who typified for him or her the age-old, fundamental claim of the home. Four new values have, as Professor Tufts said in his address at the Baltimore meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, to be reckoned with in any present consideration of the ethics of the family; "the value of woman's freedom and development, the value of the child, the value of sex and especially of motherhood, and lastly, the value of sound stock well reared for national life and for the life of the world." I do not believe that in our departments of household administration and of sociology, and in our schools of philanthropy, these values will be ignored in the next quarter century. There may, however, be danger, a danger which Professor Tufts, himself, never could run, of working for a recognition of these several values without an appreciation of what after all the family situation as a whole is or should become. If these values are conceived of as being detached from a total value, which is the family itself, an emphasis laid upon them may bring a result which will tend to undermine family life itself.

The end of the family, Professor Tufts says in the same address, is mutual aid. The healthful method that the family itself can employ is the method of coöperation. What lay implicit in that embrace of mother and child in the picture by Carrière was the promise of coöperation. The one was bound to the other not primarily, as one felt, in order that there might be a sense of possession nor an assertion of rights, but in order that there might be begun the continuing process of mutual aid.

In the home, itself, there is an unpremeditated coming together in order that the business of conducting life may be furthered with mutual advantage; in the home the lesson of how difficult it is to combine, can be learned without conscious tuition; in the home it can be realized, without the effort to put one's mind to the task. how essential it is that one be a coöperator. There, too, one may gather wisdom to grasp the fact that organization of itself does not push our world forward. We move forward not through the logical application of our theories, but through the play of our minds on situations. This play of the minds on actual situations is what stands out for me as our present special need.

The home is continually failing to make good. Our institutions are filled with the victims of its failure, our philanthropic societies are bearing the burden of reconstructing broken homes, our newspapers record daily instances of the failure of the well-to-do home to maintain its integrity.

Though deeply conscious of these failures, I am also conscious of the elements which make for success in the conduct of a home. The splendid preparation for studying results and for teaching method I long to see more and more definitely brought into relation to the home itself. As a result of practical application within the home, there will come a modification of method. The deepening experience will bring new sap from the root into the widely spreading branches.

Our homes are not in peril of extinction, they are rooted in life itself. But our homes do need to be steadied and to be enriched by suffering a material change through drawing in greater measure on the resources of applied science.

The burden of what I have said is: The material values of the home must be seen in relation to the spiritual values. The home itself must be used as the testing ground of our efforts. The principle of coöperation must be nourished in and extended through the home. The home itself must win out, through its own power to absorb the lessons that the school wishes and is ready to teach.

M. Edmond Demolins, a distinguished disciple of Le Play, in an address before the London School of Sociology and Social Economics, delivered in November 1905, said in closing that his only ambition in respect to social science was to meet two, three, or four persons who would take up the study of social science seriously and thoroughly, "not for an hour but for their whole life." In thinking of the great oppor

tunity that has been given to me, a social worker in the field of case work, to speak before you, this ambition of M. Demolins has become more and more my own. The ambition is to see some one or more lovers of their fellows, lovers who have had the rich training of your department, lose themselves in the home life of some few of their fellow citizens, lose themselves in order that they may come back to you with a clearer vision of what the home itself is appropriating, what it is refusing to appropriate, and what it needs to appropriate of the vast store of opportunity which science and the arts are laying on its threshold. Such a study will be a quest. "Kabir says: 'It is the spirit of the quest which helps.'" May such a student be "the slave of this spirit of the quest."

THE BOSTON STUDENTS' UNION1

MRS. KATHARINE OSBORNE

Director

The great problem of housing women in large cities is distinctly emphasized in Boston on the student side, when we consider that out of fifty academic and professional schools one only cares for its students in an adequate or organized way. With the supposed student population of twenty thousand, the housing problem becomes one of serious importance to those who feel their responsibility to the student population of our great cities. I was told in Munich that Boston was the largest lodging house city in the world. Block after block of rooming houses offer their cold exteriors, with no suggestion of a "home table," such as we find in nearly every foreign city, and many of our own; so the prospective lodger is forced to seek her food in the cheap restaurant, with many deteriorating conditions surrounding her.

1 Presented at the meeting of the Institution Economics Section of the American Home Economics Association, Lake Placid, 1915.

It was to meet this menacing condition that a group of thoughtful women in Boston founded the "Boston Students' Union" six years ago with the hope and intention of gathering together in the student quarter the unprotected and inadequately cared for students and offering them protection, inspiration, and the necessities of life under sympathetic and attractive conditions. The experiment has been a success from the first because it met an acute need in a human way.

The Club plant consists of two houses, built for homes, giving at the start the suggestion of home rather than institution. There have been added to these a number of small bedrooms and a large dining room, which have, however, never disturbed the distinctly homelike and personal atmosphere, which has been stamped upon the life of the Club by all most interested.

The Club offers, for a membership fee of one dollar per year, board and room for a limited number at a minimum price, reliable addresses for lodging, the use of the Club House for all personal and social needs, such as callers, teas, and parties and the use of the kitchenette, where a supper may be prepared and served to friends in a parlor, which may be secured in advance; the use of the study, rest room, books, newspapers, and piano; tea free every afternoon from four to five, general information regarding opportunities in Boston; vocational assistance in the procuring of part time work, which was asked for by about onefifth of the membership last year. Many other opportunities are offered the membership in distinctly personal ways, but one of the most necessary and far-reaching requirements is met by the offer of board by the week or separate meals, served under the most comfortable and attractive conditions at a minimum price. Once the doors were opened and the vital needs of the student met, it was only a matter of operating efficiency and personal qualifications on the part of the administration to gather into this group a growing number of eager students, who were anxious to be shielded from the cheapness of the broad highway, with its hideous discomfort and allurements.

The first year the Club had a membership of 195 and served 43,334 meals in nine months. This year there is a membership of 465 and 201,961 meals were served in nine months. The Students' Union is run entirely for the interests of the student body. It aims to be a clearing house for all requirements, both felt and unrecognized, of the students. It is hoped that here, perhaps, more than in dormitory life, the student by the very force of the freedom to which she is exposed