good will is only another name for neighborliness—­the spirit of friendly recognition of all those who come within one’s radius.  Neighborliness is based upon the Christian and democratic proposition that all men are brothers—­a proposition with which the sects and parties of Christianity and democracy often play havoc.  In their zeal for an interpretation or system they sacrifice the very things they were devised to perpetuate and extend among men.  A sectarian or partisan household cannot be a genuinely neighborly household.  It has cut off too large a part of its source of supply.

The most perfect type of this spirit of neighborliness which we have worked out in this country, outside of the thousands of little homes where it exists and of which, in the nature of the case, only those who have felt their influence can know, is undoubtedly Hull House, the Chicago Settlement under the direction of Jane Addams.  Hull House is an “open house” for its neighborhood.  It is a place where men and women of all ages, conditions, and points of view are welcome.  So far as I have been able to discover, genuine freedom of mind and friendliness of spirit are what have made Hull House possible and are what will decide its future after the day of the great woman who has mothered it and about whom it revolves.  There is no formula for building a Hull House—­any more than there is a home.  Both are the florescence of a spirit and a mind.  Each will form itself according to the ideas, the tastes, and the cultivation of the individuality at its center.  Its activities will follow the peculiar needs which she has the brains and heart to discover, the ingenuity and energy to meet.

Hull House serves its neighborhood, and in so doing it serves most fully its own household.  Its own members are the ones whose minds get the most illumination from its activities.  Moreover, Hull House from its first-hand sympathetic dealing with men and women in its neighborhood learns the needs of the neighborhood.  It is and for years has been a constant source of suggestion and of agitation for the betterment of the conditions under which its neighbors—­and indirectly the whole city, even nation—­live and work.  Health, mind, morals, all are in its care.  It is practical in the plans it offers.  It can back up its demands with knowledge founded on actual contact.  It can rally all of the enlightened and decent forces of the city to its help.  Hull House, indeed, is a very source of pure life in the great city where it belongs.

So far as attitude of mind and spirit go, the home should be to the little neighborhood in which it works what Hull House is to its great field.  In its essential structure it is the same thing; i.e. Hull House is really modeled after the home.  Most interesting is the parallel between its organization and its activities and those of many a great home which we know through the lives of their mistresses, that of Margaret Winthrop, of Eliza Pinckney, of Mrs. John Adams.