make radical changes in thought or conduct. Our reliance has been
on doctrines, conventions, the three R's. They are easily
sterile--almost sure to be if the teacher's spirit is one of
cock-sure pride in the superiority of his religion and his
cultivation.

The settlement in part at least is the outgrowth of a desire to
find a place in which certain new notions of enlightening men and
women could be freely tested and applied. The heart of the idea
lies in its name. The modern bearers of good tidings instead of
handing down principles and instructions at intervals from pulpit
or desk _settle_ among those who need them. They keep open house
the year around for all, and to all who will, give whatever they
have learned of the art of life. They are neighbors and comrades,
learners as well as teachers.

It would be hard to find on the globe a group of people who need
more this sort of democratic hand-to-hand contact than those Miss
Furman describes, or a group with whom it is a greater satisfaction
to establish it. Tucked away on the tops and slopes of the
mountains of Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee are thousands of
families, many of them descendants of the best of English stock.
Centuries of direful poverty combined with almost complete
isolation from the life of the world has not been able to take from
them their look of race, or corrupt their brave, loyal, proud
hearts. Encircled as they are by the richest and most highly
cultivated parts of this country, near as they are to us in blood,
we have done less for their enlightenment than for that of the
Orient, vastly less than we do for every new-come immigrant. On
the religious side all that they have had is the occasional