Home Missions in Action | Page 5

the indifference of well-to-do people who do not come into personal contact with the wrongs and sufferings of the working people.
Still we are confronted by the sad spectacle of more than a million of the nation's children at work in factories and cotton mills for their living, and helping to support their families.
"The child is the embodied future. We can never have good citizenship without protected childhood. Child labor is a process of squandering future wealth to satisfy present need." [Footnote: See report of Eleventh Conference of Child Labor held at Washington, January, 1915.]
Defrauded childhood! Children, loaded with heavy tasks beyond their strength, robbed of the light and joy of life, plead for childhood's rights and that spiritual development that should make known to them the companionship of the Saviour and the love of the Heavenly Father.
The testimony printed in the fall of 1912, concerning child labor in the canning factories of the Empire State, shows that more than a thousand children were employed in the canning industry that summer; one hundred and forty-one were less than ten years old.
An experienced manufacturer has said, "You can protect a machine, you can guide the buzz-saw, but no law that you can enact can, in a large industry, protect the heart and soul of the child."
A marked improvement has been made in the last five years in combating the evils of child labor. Many states forbid the employment of children under fourteen years of age in factories and mills--but in North and South Carolina, in Georgia and Alabama, children under fourteen are still permitted to labor in factories ten or twelve hours a day.
To reach this evil from the Federal standpoint, the powers of the Inter-State Commerce Commission should be invoked.
A bill is now pending (February, 1915) before Congress to bar from interstate commerce the products of mills, mines, quarries, factories and workshops employing child labor.
Home Missions must also face to-day the infinitely complex and rapidly increasing problem involved in the adjustment of our population to cities and away from rural districts. Thus cities are becoming dominant factors to be reckoned with in all the elements that enter into the question of religious and moral uplift, as well as the ideals and the welfare of our nation.
Here the aggregation of immigrants focuses acutely the complex problems peculiar to them.
Here is the child laborer in factories and on the streets.
Here women and girls struggle under fearful economic pressure.
Here is the political boss--and what ex-President Roosevelt terms "organized alliance between the criminal rich and the criminal poor."
Here is the class consciousness and hatred--the cry of anarchy and socialism.
"To-day seventy-six per cent of the population of Massachusetts live in cities; of New York, eighty-five and one-half per cent; New Jersey, sixty-one and two-tenths; Connecticut, fifty-three and two-tenths; Illinois is one-half urban, and forty per cent of California's people live under city conditions." [Footnote: Frederic C. Howe--The City, the Hope of Democracy.]
Contrasted with this peculiar burden of the city, there is the country church and the adaptation needed to maintain it in any degree of effectiveness, when its very life blood has been drained for the city. It has made untold contributions of ministers, missionaries, church officers and members to the cities and distant fields, leaving the mother church childless and weak in its advancing years.
Changes that leave almost none of its former constituency confront the country church.
Old farms and village stores pass into the hands of aliens--in many instances Hebrews--summer boarders claim the attention of the faithful women of the congregation for the most favorable months of the year. Sunday sports engage the interests of the indifferent, and there are many other disintegrating elements.
In a land where progress calls to progress, where the results of hasty development create a large share of its problem--a land where the need of Christian effort is paramount, and where such effort is so vital to the world, the decadence of the country church is of far-reaching significance. Home Missions is called to direct its energizing, constructive ability to the solution of this baffling and discouraging feature of its problem to a greater degree than ever before.
Home Missions at this time also confronts a new opportunity and obligation--to make its voice heard, its influence felt, for international peace.
These winter days of 1914, in which the world has apparently lost its soul in the fury of slaughter, speak very loudly to the heart of Christianity.
No force for the upbuilding of the Christ power on earth can ignore the significance and solemnity of this time.
Has Christianity failed in these warring lands, or have they who are controlled by Christian standards and ethics in other relations, failed to apprehend that the Christ test--His principles--must be brought to bear upon all of life--upon personal, individual, national and international relations?
The fruition of Christianity must at