Among these victims of our neglect and our blundering methods of teaching the settlement school has gone.  It goes to stay.  Not three months, but twelve months its teaching goes on; not one Sabbath in the month, but three hundred and sixty-five days in the year it preaches.  Literally it is a new world which the settlement opens to the mountaineers, one ruled by cleanliness, thrift, knowledge and good-will.  The beauty of it is that living day after day under this order they come to know that its principles are practical truths; that they work out.  To be told that the baby is dying not because the Lord is angry with the family but because the milk is impure may seem little better than impiety at first, but save the baby by proper care and you have gone a long way to proving that pure milk is God’s law and that all the prayers in the world will not change His ruling.

For distorted imaginings of the way the world is run the settlement is giving to the mountaineers something of the harmony and beauty of science.

New notions of heroism and honor are filtering into the country along with the notions of sanitation and health.  That injuries can be honorably forgiven and forgotten is a hard doctrine to swallow in Eastern Kentucky, but when you see it practiced by those from the great world of which you have only dreamed it comes easier.

The contrast between the two ways of living—­that in the settlement and that in their mountain homes—­is not long in doing its work.  Decent living even in great poverty is possible if you know how, and the settlement shows what can be done with what you have.  The relation of their poverty and ill-health to their lack of knowledge and their perpetual lawless warfare is quickly enough grasped by the young, and means a new generation with vastly improved morals, health, self-control.

What more fruitful and appealing world for work, particularly for women, do these United States offer?  If there is an idle or lonely woman anywhere revolting against the dullness of life, wanting work with the flavor and virility of pioneering in it, let her look to these mountains.  She ’ll find it.  And what material to work with will come under her hands!  “I often ask myself,” says the heroine of “Mothering on Perilous,” one of Miss Furman stories of the settlement school, “What other boys have such gifts to bring to their nation?  Proud, self-reliant, the sons of heroes, bred in brave traditions, knowing nothing of the debasing greed for money, strengthened by a hand-to-hand struggle with nature from their very infancy (I have not known of one who did not begin at five or six to shoulder family responsibilities such as hoeing corn, tending stock, clearing new ground, grubbing, hunting, gathering the crops) they should bring to their country primal energy of body and spirit, unquenchable valor, and minds untainted by the lust of wealth.”

IDA M. TARBELL