A Modern Lear

Jane Addams, “A Modern Lear,” Survey v. XXIX, no. 5 (November 2, 1912); 131-137.

[This was written in 1894, just after the Pullman strike and read before the Chicago Woman’s Club and the

Twentieth Century Club of Boston.  It was not published at the time because of its personal nature.  By chance it

was written in a tense “as if it were already long past.”  Its present publication, however, has more than

grammatical appropriateness; there is a message for today in its powerful analysis of the human equation in

industry. –Ed.]

Those of us who lived in Chicago during the summer of 1894 were confronted by a drama which epitomized

and, at the same time, challenged the code of social ethics under which we live, for a quick series of unusual

events had dispelled the good nature which in happier times envelopes the ugliness of the industrial situation. It

sometimes seems as if the shocking experiences of that summer, the barbaric instinct to kill, roused on both

sides, the sharp division into class lines, with the resultant distrust and bitterness, can only be endured if [end

page 131] we learn from it all a great ethical lesson. To endure is all we can hope for. It is impossible to justify

such a course of rage and riot in a civilized community to whom the methods of conciliation and control were

open. Every public-spirited citizen in Chicago during that summer felt the stress and perplexity of the situation

and asked himself, "How far am I responsible for this social disorder? What can be done to prevent such

outrageous manifestations of ill-will?"

If the responsibility of tolerance lies with those of the widest vision, it behooves us to consider this great social

disaster, not alone in is legal aspect nor in its sociological bearings, but from those deep human motives, which,

after all, determine events.

During the discussions which followed the Pullman strike, the defenders of the situation were broadly divided

between the people pleading for individual benevolence and those insisting upon social righteousness; between

those who held that the philanthropy of the president of the Pullman company had been most ungratefully

received and those who maintained that the situation was the inevitable outcome of the social consciousness

developing among working people.