of the ward work scarcely admitted freedom
for keeping informed as to what was happen-
ing in the world outside. The nurses had no
time for general reading; visits to and from
friends were brief; we were out of the current
and saw little of life save as it flowed into the
hospital wards. It is not strange, therefore,
that I should have been ignorant of the various
movements which reflected the awakening of
the social conscience at the time, or of the birth
of the "settlement," which twenty-five years
ago was giving form to a social protest in Eng-
land and America. Indeed, it was not until
the plan of our work on the East Side was well
developed that knowledge came to me of other
groups of people who, reacting to a humane or
an academic appeal, were adopting this mode
of expression and calling it a "settlement."

Two decades ago the words "East Side"
called up a vague and alarming picture of
something strange and alien: a vast crowded
area, a foreign city within our own, for whose
conditions we had no concern. Aside from its
exploiters, political and economic, few people
had any definite knowledge of it, and its lit-
erary "discovery" had but just begun.

The lower East Side then reflected the popu-
lar indifference--it almost seemed contempt--
for the living conditions of a huge population.

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