JANE ADDAMS 27 her doctor's advice she left America for a two years' stay in * £iiroi>e. There is a tendency today to frown npon the individual who drifts. He who has no settled purpose is, in the opinion of the times, wasting his life. But he who reads biography with open mind wiU find that no inconsiderable number of the earth's great have drifted into their own. They have, it is true, been earnest and serious, but few things are more mis- leading than the notion that one 's life endeavor is necessarily best spent where first inclination may lead. It is, of course, impossible to tell what Miss Addams might have done as a physician to the poor ; but is it presumptuous to say that she has done a far greater work than she could ever have hoped to do professionally f Be that as it may, her experience for the next six years led her unconsciously, step by step, to the work for which she seems to have been most peculiarly fitted. ' ^ There is a des- tiny which shapes our ends," and often it does not ask our consent. One of her first experiences on her European trip was a visit to East London Market on Saturday night. Ner- vous and morbid after her sickness, the impression of the starving, poverty-ridden crowd bidding their scanty coins for decaying vegetables and fruit was not to be eradicated. The midnight hour, the shadows, the upturned hands, the animal hunger of these human beings — all this came to her with the force of a vision. In Italy, in Austria, wherever she went on the continent, the memory of that hideous scene drew her to the haunts of poverty. Knowing little of the efforts even then being made to Ughten the burden of the poor, she was weighed down by the vision. When yet a small child she had suffered from one of those recurring dreams which sensitive children sometimes endure in silence. It seemed that the whole future of the world de- pended upon her making a wagon wheel. Day after day she would watch the village blacksmith, questioning him, and learning how to make a wagon wheel. Something of this same sense of responsibility and helplessness came to her as she suffered over the poverty of the world. Books seemed
