At the evening meeting Jane E. Robbins spoke in behalf of definite work in training young Italian Americans as social workers who would contribute their enthusiasm for and knowledge of their own people definitely to the task of social re-construction and Americanization. Vida D. Scudder believed settlement work should be made more fundamentally democratic and should give itself more definitely to the task of fostering and championing working class movements as such. The great danger of the settlement, she held, is that it will become one of the regular philanthropies rather than an advance station, as it were, in the progressive democratization of the national life. Settlement residents should be free at times of crisis to drop detail work for the larger task of assisting in the great forward movement of the people themselves. George Hodges, dean of the Episcopal Theological School, believed that the church also should work along the lines suggested by Miss Scudder. He believed, however, the best achievement could be secured only on the high levels of personality. John L. Elliott of the Hudson Guild held that it should more and more be the final effort of the settlement to bring the mothers and fathers into the streets, into the schools and into the dance halls that they may come to understand the conditions under which their children live, and contribute of their own experience and power in reorganizing communal life. The meeting on Monday morning was opened by Abraham Rosenberg, the president of the Cloak and Suit Makers’ Union, who spoke of the work of the various settlement leaders in securing the New York protocol. He admitted a growing recognition on the part of labor leaders of the factor of public good will and service. Mary P. Follett of the Roxbury League urged the continued necessity for social workers in the civic centre, and Gaylord S. White suggested the need of such influence in enlarging the scope and horizon of church work. Robert A. Woods summed up the more telling lines of interest opened up in the meeting. He urged that the significance of the settlement for the future, as for the past, lay not in any specific type of service or reform—valuable as nearly all such effort is—but in the development of social self sufficiency among the people from neighborhood to neighborhood throughout the country. The use which the younger element made of a question box as the meeting ended led to the motion that at future conferences the junior speakers should have the floor for at least one session. “BOXING” THE COST OF LIVING The cost of living was the very live subject taken up by the seventeenth annual meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science held in Philadelphia in April. With the exception of the tariff, which was omitted for lack of time, the session may be said to have covered the whole field.