To learn real human nature you have to go among the people, see them and be seen.  I know every man, woman, and child in the Fifteenth District, except them that’s been born this summer---and I know some of them, too.  I know what they like and what they don’t like, what they are strong at and what they are week in, and I reach them by approachin’ at the right side.

For instance, here’s how I gather in the young men.  I hear of a young feller that’s proud of his voice, thinks that he can sing fine.  I ask him to come around to Washington hall and join our Glee Club. He comes and sings, and he’s a follower of Plunkitt for life. Another young feller gains a reputation as a baseball player in a vacant lot.  I bring him into our baseball club.  That fixes him.  You’ll find him workin for my ticket at the polls next election day.

As to the older voters, I reach them, too.  No, I don’t send them campaign literature.  That rot.  People can get all the political they want to read---and a good deal more, too---in the papers.

What tells in holdin’ your grip on your district is to go right down among the poor families and help them in the different ways they need help.  I’ve got a regular system for this.  If there’s a fire in Ninth, I’m usually there with some of my election district captains as soon as the fire engines.  If a family is burned out I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation.  I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up till they get things runnin’ again.  It’s philanthropy, but it’s politics, too---mighty good politics.  Who can tell how many votes one of these fires bring me?  The poor are the most grateful people in the world, and, let me tell you, they have more friends in their neighborhoods than the rich have in theirs…

Another thing, I can always get a job for a deservin’ man. I make it a point to keep on the track of jobs, and it seldom happens that I don't have a few up my sleeve ready for use.  I know every big employer in the district and in the while city, for that matter, and they ain’t in the habit of sayin’ no to me when I ask them for a job…

The question has been asked: Is a politician ever justified in goin’ back on his district leader?  I answer: "No; as long as the leader hustles around and gets al the jobs possible for his constituents."  When the voters elect a man leader, they make a sort of a contract with him.  They say, although it ain’t written out: "We’ve put you here to look out for our interests.  You want to see that this district gets all the jobs that’s comin’ to it.  Be faithful to us, and we’ll be faithful to

This vicarious consumption practiced by the household of the middle and lower classes can not be counted as a direct expression of the leisure-class scheme of life, since the household of this pecuniary grade does not belong within the leisure class.  It is rather that the leisure-class scheme of life here comes to an expression at the second remove. The leisure class stands at the head of the social structure in point of reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of community.  The observance of these standards, in come degree of approximation, becomes incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale. In modern civilized communities the lines of demarcation between social classes have grown vague and transient, and wherever this happens the norm of reputability imposed by the upper class extends its coercive influence with but slight hindrance down through the social structure to the lowest strata.  The result is that the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies to live up to that ideal.  On pain of forfeiting their good name and their self-respect in case of failure, they must conform to the accepted code, at least in appearance.

And so in law, in architecture, in electricity, in bridge-building, in all mechanic arts and technical sciences, our effort must be for the most scientific instruction, the broadest basis of training that will enable men and women students to attain the highest possible proficiency in their chosen profession.  Given two bridge-builders, a man and a woman, given a certain bridge to be built, and given as always the unchangeable laws of mechanics in accordance with which this special bridge and all other bridges must be built, it is simply inconceivable that the preliminary instruction given to the two bridge-builders should differ in quantity, or method of presentation because while the bridge is building one will wear knickerbockers and the other a rainy-day skirt.  You may say you do not think that God intended a woman to be a bridge-builder. You have, of course, a right to this prejudice; but as you live in America, and not in the interior of Asia or Africa, you will probably not be able to impose it on women who wish to build bridges.

So long as men and women are to compete together, and associate together, in their professional life, women’s preparation for the same profession cannot safely differ from men’s.  If men’s preparation is better, women, who are less well prepared, will be left behind in the race; if women’s is better, men will suffer in competition with women…

If it shall appear that the sufferings and the sins of the "other half," and the evil they breed, are but as just punishment upon the community that gave it no other choice, it will be because that is the truth…In the tenements all the influences make for evil; rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wreaks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral contagion…

Nine-tenths of the socialist and semi-socialistic, and sentimental or ethical, suggestions by which we are overwhelmed come from failure to understand the phenomena of the industrial organization and its expansion. It controls us all because we are all in it.  It creates the conditions of our existence, sets the limits of our social activity, regulates the bonds of our social relations, determines our conceptions of good and evil, suggests our life-philosophy, molds our inherited political institutions, and reforms the oldest and toughest customs like marriage and property.

Wealth, in itself considered, is only power, like steam or electricity, or knowledge.  The question of its good or ill turns on the question how it will be used.  To prove any harm in aggregations of wealth is must be shown that great wealth is, as a rule, in the ordinary course of social affairs, put to a mischievous use.  This cannot be shown beyond the very slightest degree, if at all…

If is forgotten, in many schemes of social reformation in which it is proposed to mix what we like with what we do not like, in order to extirpate the latter, that each must undergo a reaction from the other, and that what we like may be extirpated by what we do not like. We may find that instead of democratizing capitalism we have capitalized democracy—that is, have brought in plutocracy.  Plutocracy is a political system in which the ruling force is wealth…

In the summer of 1895, I served as a member on a commission appointed by the mayor of Chicago to investigate conditions in the county poorhouse, public attention having become centered on it through one of those distressing stories which exaggerates the wrong in a public institution while at the same time it reveals conditions which need to be rectified….

This piteous dependence of the poor upon the good will of public officials was made clear to us in an early experience with a peasant woman straight from the fields of Germany, whom we met during our first six months at Hull House.  Her four years in America had been spent in patiently carrying water up and down two flights of stairs in washing the heavy flannel suits of iron foundry workers.  For this her pay had averaged thirty-five cents a day. Three of her daughters had fallen victims to the vice of the city.  The mother was bewildered and distressed, but understood nothing.  We were able to induce the betrayer of one daughter to marry her; the second, after a tedious lawsuit, supported his child; with the third we were able to do nothing.

She did not need charity, for she had an immense capacity for hard work, but she sadly needed the service of the state’s attorney’s office, enforcing the laws designed for the protection of such girls as her daughters.

We early found ourselves spending many hours in efforts to secure support for deserted women, insurance for bewildered widows, damages for injured operations, furniture from the clutches of the installment store.

Another function of the Settlement to its neighborhood resembles that of the big brother whose mere presence on the playground protects the little one from bullies.