Hull House was started by two ladies who went into one of the worst districts of Chicago and took a house with the idea of making it a radiating centre of orderly and happy life. Their friends backed them up with money and help. After five years the enterprise was incorporated. The buildings, which are of the most substantial kind, now cover a whole city block, some forty or fifty thousand square feet, and, include an apartment house, a boys' club, a girls' club, a theatre, a gymnasium, a day nursery, workshops, class rooms, a coffee-house, and so on. There are forty-four educated men and women in residence who are engaged in self-supporting occupations, and who give their free time to the work of the settlement. A hundred and fifty outside helpers come every week to serve as teachers, friendly visitors, or directors of clubs: 9000 people a week come to the house as members of some one of its organizations or as parts of an audience. There are free concerts, and lectures, and classes of various kinds in study and in handicraft. Investigations of the social and industrial conditions of the neighbourhood are carried on, not officially, but informally; and the knowledge thus obtained has been used not only for the visible transformation of the region around Hull House, but also to throw light upon the larger needs and possibilities of improvement in Chicago and other American cities. Hull House, in fact, is an example of ethical and humane housekeeping on a big scale in a big town. The Henry Street Settlement in New York is quite different in its specific quality. It was begun in 1893 by two trained nurses, who went down into the tenement-house district, to find the sick and to nurse them in their homes. At first they lived in a tenement house themselves; then the growth of their work and the coming of other helpers forced them to get a little house, then another, and another, a cottage in the country, a convalescent home. The idea of the settlement was single and simple. It was to meet the need of intelligent and skilful nursing in the very places where dirt and ignorance, carelessness and superstition, were doing the most harm,-- "in the crowded warrens of the poor." This little company of women, some twenty or thirty of them, go about from tenement to tenement, bringing cleanliness and order with them. In the presence of disease and pain they teach lessons which could be taught in no other way. They nurse five or six thousand patients every year, and make forty or fifty thousand visits. In addition to this, largely through their influence and example, the Board of Education has adopted a trained nursing service in the public schools, and has appointed a special corps of nurses to take prompt charge of cases of contagious disease among the school children. The Nurses' Settlement, in fact, is a repetition of the parable of the Good Samaritan in a crowded city instead of on a lonely road.