ngs--he responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of
nature, he is filled with religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal.
Experience, with young people, easily illustrates the possibility and
value of diffusion."

It is then not only impossible to confine sex to mere reproduction; it
would be a stupid denial of the finest values of civilization. Having
seen that the impulse is a necessary part of character, we must not hold
to it grudgingly as a necessary evil. It is, on the contrary, the very
source of good. Whoever has visited Hull House can see for himself the
earnest effort Miss Addams has made to treat sex with dignity and joy.
For Hull House differs from most settlements in that it is full of
pictures, of color, and of curios. The atmosphere is light; you feel none
of that moral oppression which hangs over the usual settlement as over a
gathering of missionaries. Miss Addams has not only made Hull House a
beautiful place; she has stocked it with curious and interesting objects.
The theater, the museum, the crafts and the arts, games and dances--they
are some of those "other methods of expression which lust can seek." It
is no accident that Hull House is the most successful settlement in
America.

Yet who does not feel its isolation in that brutal city? A little Athens
in a vast barbarism--you wonder how much of Chicago Hull House can
civilize. As you walk those grim streets and look into the stifling
houses, or picture the relentless stockyards, the conviction that vice
and its misery cannot be transmuted by policemen and Morals Commissions,
the feeling that spying and inspecting and prosecuting will not drain the
marsh becomes a certainty. You want to shout at the forcible moralizer:
"so long as you acquiesce in the degradation of your city, so long as
work remains nothing but ill-paid drudgery and every instinct of joy is
mocked by dirt and cheapness and brutality,--just so long will your
efforts be fruitless, yes even though you raid and prosecute, even though
you make Comstock the Czar of Chicago."

But Hull House cannot remake Chicago. A few hundred lives can be changed,
and for the rest it is a guide to the imagination. Like all utopias, it
cannot succeed, but it may point the way to success. If Hull House is
unable to civilize Chicago, it at least shows Chicago and America what a
civilization might be like. Friendly, where our cities are friendless,
beautiful, where they are ugly; sociable and open, wher