Introduction

A more illuminating interpretation of the settlement idea than Miss Furman’s stories “Sight to the Blind” and “Mothering on Perilous” does not exist.  Spreading what one has learned of cheerful, courageous, lawful living among those that need it has always been recognized as part of a man’s work in the world.  It is an obligation which has generally been discharged with more zeal than humanity.  To convert at the point of a sword is hateful business.  To convert by promises of rewards, present or future, is hardly less hateful.  And yet much of the altruistic work of the world has been done by one or a union of these methods.

That to which we have converted men has not always been more satisfactory than our way of going at it.  It has often failed to make radical changes in thought or conduct.  Our reliance has been on doctrines, conventions, the three R’s.  They are easily sterile—­almost sure to be if the teacher’s spirit is one of cock-sure pride in the superiority of his religion and his cultivation.

The settlement in part at least is the outgrowth of a desire to find a place in which certain new notions of enlightening men and women could be freely tested and applied.  The heart of the idea lies in its name.  The modern bearers of good tidings instead of handing down principles and instructions at intervals from pulpit or desk settle among those who need them.  They keep open house the year around for all, and to all who will, give whatever they have learned of the art of life.  They are neighbors and comrades, learners as well as teachers.

It would be hard to find on the globe a group of people who need more this sort of democratic hand-to-hand contact than those Miss Furman describes, or a group with whom it is a greater satisfaction to establish it.  Tucked away on the tops and slopes of the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee are thousands of families, many of them descendants of the best of English stock.  Centuries of direful poverty combined with almost complete isolation from the life of the world has not been able to take from them their look of race, or corrupt their brave, loyal, proud hearts.  Encircled as they are by the richest and most highly cultivated parts of this country, near as they are to us in blood, we have done less for their enlightenment than for that of the Orient, vastly less than we do for every new-come immigrant.  On the religious side all that they have had is the occasional itinerant preacher, thundering at them of the wrath of God; and on the cultural what Aunt Dalmanutha calls the “pindling” district school.  In the teachings of both is an over-weight of sternness and superstition, little “plain human kindness,” almost nothing that points the way to decent, happy, healthy living.

The results are both grotesque and pitiful.  Is it strange that the feud should flourish in a land ruled by a “God of wrath?” Is anything but sickness and death to be expected where both are looked on as visitations of an angry God?