The music classes and choruses give much joy to the people, and here it seems possible to bring together in a common feeling those widely separated by tradition and custom. Music is the universal language of the heart. Bohemian and Polish women sing their tender and stirring folk-songs. The voices of men and women of many lands mingle in Schubert's lovely melodies and in the mighty choruses of Handel. As Miss Addams went about among her neighbors she longed to lead them to a perception of the relation between the present and the past. If only the young, who were impatiently breaking away from all the old country traditions, could be made to appreciate what their parents held dear; if the fathers and mothers could at the same time understand the complex new order in which their children were struggling to hold their own. When, one day, she saw an old Italian woman spinning with distaff and spindle, an idea came to her. A Labor Museum, that would show the growth of industries in every country, from the simplest processes to the elaborate machinery of modern times, might serve the purpose. The working-out of her plan far exceeded her wildest dream. Russians, Germans, and Italians happily foregathered to demonstrate and compare methods of textile work with which they were familiar. Other activities proved equally interesting. The lectures given among the various exhibits met with a warm welcome. Factory workers, who had previously fought shy of everything "improving," came because they said these lectures were "getting next to the stuff you work with all the time." Hull-House has worked not only _with_ the people but _for_ them, by trying to secure laws that will improve the conditions under which they labor and live. The following incident will speak for the fight that Miss Addams has made against such evils as child labor and sweat-shop work. The representatives of a group of manufacturers waited upon her and promised that if she would "drop all this nonsense about a sweat-shop bill of which she knew nothing," certain business men would give fifty thousand dollars for her Settlement. The steady look which the lady of Hull-House gave the spokesman made him wish that some one else had come with the offer of the bribe. "We have no ambition," said Miss Addams, "to make Hull-House the largest institution in Chicago; but we are trying to protect our neighbors from evil conditions; and if to do that, the destruction of our Settlement should be necessary, we would gladly sing a Te Deum on its ruins." The girl who saw what she looked on with "the eye of the heart," had become a leader in the life and the reforms of her time. "On the whole," one writer has said of her, "the reach of this woman's sympathy and understanding is beyond all comparison wider in its span--comprehending all kinds of people--than that of any other living person."