SOCIAL IDEALS 
 
 OF 
 
 A FREE CHURCH 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 ELMER SEVERANCE FORBES 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 
 1913
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 This volume contains a number of the papers 
 and addresses delivered at a Conference held in 
 Boston under the auspices of the Department of 
 Social and Public Service of the American Uni- 
 tarian Association. The addresses have been re- 
 vised for this book by their authors, but they 
 retain the informality as well as the freshness and 
 directness of extemporaneous speech. The au- 
 thority of the speakers, the timeliness of the 
 themes, and the value of the papers created a de- 
 mand for their publication in permanent form, and 
 this book is issued as a response to that call. 
 
 ELMER S. FORBES.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 1 
 
 Francis G. Peabody, D.D. 
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH ... 12 
 Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer 
 
 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS FOR SERVICE . . . 2(5 
 Frederic Almy 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL UNREST ... 38 
 Samuel M. Crothers, D.D. 
 
 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 50 
 
 Elmer S. Forbes 
 
 THE SOCIAL SERVICE COMMITTEE IN ACTION . 61 
 Mrs. Annie M. Chesley 
 
 THE SOCIAL SERVICE COMMITTEE IN ACTION . 72 
 Rev. Edgar S. Wiers 
 
 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 91 
 
 James O. Fagan 
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 104 
 
 Charles F. Dole, D.D. 
 
 WHAT SOME CHURCHES ARE DOING . . . 122 
 Rev. P. R. Frothingham 
 
 WHAT SOME CHURCHES ARE DOING . . . 127 
 Rev. Edwin Alfred Rumball
 
 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 
 FRANCIS G. PEABODY, D.D. 
 
 Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, Harvard 
 University 
 
 The series of meetings of which this is the first 
 is to be held in the name of religion but in the cause 
 of social service, and the first thing for us who 
 gather here to do is to make plain to ourselves what 
 is the relation between these two supreme interests 
 of modern life. This is a matter which is much 
 debated in our day, and is approached with very 
 different emotions ; on the one hand, with a consid- 
 erable degree of apprehension and alarm, and on the 
 other, with an extraordinary quality of confidence 
 and sanguine hope. What is to happen to religion 
 in its organized form when it is reached by this new 
 wave of enthusiasm for social service? Are the 
 churches to be turned into workshops ? Is worship 
 to be supplanted by work? Are sermons to be in- 
 distinguishable from talks on current events or 
 tracts on socialism? Years ago, when the famous 
 Dr. Putnam in Roxbury had for his assistant a man 
 whose distinction in other spheres has obscured his 
 beginnings as a minister, Mr. John Graham Brooks, 
 the younger man, urged that a parish-house be 
 
 erected, and it was one of the first of these struc- 
 
 1
 
 tures attached to the churches of this neighbor- 
 hood. Dr. Putnam, in his sermon at the dedication 
 of this parish-house, said in his solemn and impres- 
 sive way, " Be sure that the path between the 
 parish-house and the church remains well trod- 
 den." Yes, one may ask, but trodden which way? 
 Are the footsteps of the time likely to lead more 
 and more away from the ancient meeting-house 
 toward the center of social activities, or is this 
 revival of social action in its time to fortify the in- 
 stincts of Christian worship? 
 
 Some timid defenders of the faith are seriously 
 anxious lest this new wave of humane sentiment 
 shall sweep away the old landmarks of religion, so 
 that after them shall come the deluge. They re- 
 treat from these expressions of social service lest 
 the sentiment of worship should be weakened 
 thereby. In the remarkable book which Professor 
 Rauschenbusch has published within a week, and 
 which seems to me even more noble than his singu- 
 larly able and forcible treatise of two years ago, 
 the author cites the case of a Lutheran synod in one 
 of the States of this Union, which resolved to stand 
 fast in the old ways. " It is not the mission of the 
 Christian church," said this resolution, " to abolish 
 misery or to help people to earthly happiness. The 
 mission of the church is to preach the gospel. Let 
 it remember the words of the Lord Jesus, * If any 
 man would come after me, let him take up his cross 
 and follow me.' ' This is as calm a piece of 
 Christian irony as I ever heard perpetrated. Con-
 
 fronting all the misery of the world, these excellent 
 brethren say, " Take up your cross and bear it ; we 
 on our part will preach the gospel ! " It may even 
 happen that the very beauty of social service may 
 create in the minds of those dedicated to religion a 
 new sense of alarm, as though the world in some 
 way were taking over the very fruits of the spirit 
 which had once been the property and monopoly of 
 the church. I stood once in a woman's settlement 
 house, perhaps the fairest flower of modern 
 philanthropy which one could name, and by my 
 side stood a Christian minister, bearing in his attire 
 the marks of his profession ; and looking about him 
 at the signs of social sacrifice and service which he 
 saw on every hand, he said, " This is very beauti- 
 ful, but I wish there were more of Christ in it." 
 How could there be, one might ask himself, more of 
 Christ than in the self-effacing ministration of 
 those devoted women? And might not the Master 
 himself have passed by many a temple bearing his 
 cross and coming into that quiet group of servants 
 of his have laid his hand upon them and said, " In- 
 asmuch as ye are doing it to these least, ye are 
 doing it unto me ? " The fact was that it was the 
 beauty of the spectacle which excited in the repre- 
 sentative of Christ a pang of regret. He could 
 hardly bear to see the flower of Christian service 
 blossoming so winsomely, because it did not bear 
 the tag of the Master's name. 
 
 That is one aspect of the case. And then, on 
 the other hand, this same issue is greeted by many
 
 4 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 
 
 persons to-day with expectant hope. They want 
 to free philanthropic and industrial service from 
 the taint of a religious tradition. The revolution- 
 ary creed of to-day, though by no means accepted 
 in its fullness by all who follow it, has encouraged 
 the dissociation of the economic and social trans- 
 formation believed to be at hand from the prin- 
 ciples and methods of religion. " Religion/' the 
 most distinguished representative of the German 
 Social Democracy has said, " will not be abolished 
 or God dethroned. No attack of any kind need be 
 made on religion. Of its own nature it will dis- 
 appear as the transcendent reflection of the exist- 
 ing social order." In other words, with the institu- 
 tion of capitalism will necessarily disappear all that 
 capitalism has brought forth, and together with 
 other such outcomes of the capitalistic system, the 
 prevailing teaching of religion itself will vanish. 
 And in this same volume of Professor Rauschen- 
 busch he quotes in a footnote a letter from such 
 a revolutionary spirit who writing to him says, 
 " We regard the so-called Christian churches as 
 our bitterest enemies, and when anyone comes into 
 our party he drops his religion." 
 
 Here seems to be a clear issue. Is it possible, 
 then, to meet in the name of religion and in the 
 cause of social service? What is the real relation 
 between these two? One's answer to that question 
 must depend upon what he holds religion itself to 
 be. What is religion, and what is its interior na- 
 ture and significance? If religion means an ec-
 
 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 5 
 
 clesiastical conformity, or a denominational creed, 
 or a scheme of doctrine, then one must unquestion- 
 ably leave the sphere of religion when he enters 
 the sphere of social service. He comes out 
 of the one as he goes into the other. I had 
 this situation illustrated some time ago by 
 a young correspondent, an unknown youth 
 writing from another college a letter which pre- 
 sumably was sent to many busy persons in many 
 colleges. I gathered that he was preparing some 
 college task, a debate, perhaps, or a thesis, or 
 what in college life with playful imagination is 
 sometimes called an "original research," in the 
 course of which he wrote to many busy people, 
 received replies from a certain proportion of them, 
 tabulated the result, and presented it under the 
 title of his own work, when it is really the work 
 of his victims. This young man propounded to 
 me, as he no doubt had to many other persons, this 
 question : " How many Christians in Harvard 
 University go into athletics? " Did he mean to 
 ask how many young men play their games loyally, 
 honorably, zealously, so that Jesus Christ, looking 
 on them as he once looked on one such luxuriously- 
 bred young man, would love them? Oh, no! The 
 further contents of his letter indicated that he was 
 thinking of a technical theological, ecclesiastical 
 test: how many young men, having gone into 
 that kind of religious confession, proceeded, as it 
 were, to come out of that and go into something 
 else, namely, athletics? It was as if the religious
 
 life lay in one compartment and athletic life in 
 another, and one came out of one and went into 
 the other, as though life were a compartment train 
 where one might sleep in one car and then step 
 across a somewhat unstable platform and eat in an- 
 other. This young man had forgotten that ac- 
 cording to the doctrine of the New Testament one 
 does not have to come out of his religion to go into 
 his athletics, but that on the contrary the Christian 
 life is athletic in its very nature and meaning, and 
 that when the apostle Paul tried to describe the 
 Christian life to his disciples, he used as most ap- 
 propriate the language of athletics : " I keep my 
 body under ; " " So fight I not as one that beateth 
 the air ; " " So run that ye may obtain ; " " All 
 run and one receiveth the prize." The Christian 
 life in itself is an athletic exercise, and the cause 
 of Christ demands of one his body with the heart, 
 the muscle as well as the mind. 
 
 Such is the technical definition of the religious 
 life, which has taken such a hold of the Christian 
 church that it is preached and taught throughout 
 the world as of the essence of faith. And, all the 
 while, what is religion? If religion be the con- 
 secration of the personal will to the living God, 
 if it be the dedication of one's whole life 
 body, mind and will to the eternal law, then 
 where and how does that consecration occur, and 
 in what atmosphere and environment can the soul 
 thus live? Not in a vacuum, not alone, not in the 
 salvation of one's own separate soul. In one of the
 
 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 7 
 
 greatest sayings of John Wesley, he made this af- 
 firmation : " There is no such thing as a solitary 
 Christian." There is no such thing as a soul saved 
 alone. When Mazzini was asked whether a man 
 was good, he said, " How can you call that man 
 good? Whom has he saved? " Religion becomes 
 thus a social fact. We are members one of an- 
 other, and no one can thus detach himself from the 
 social order and live or die to himself. That is the 
 doctrine of Paul about the Christian church, and 
 that great truth of membership one with another, 
 and of the one body in Christ, has had in our day 
 a vast expansion until it comprehends the whole 
 social order in which it is our privilege to live. 
 The religious life remains, as it always has re- 
 mained, an individual concern. The soul of the 
 person is the center of religion. But the center 
 of what? Can you have a center without a 
 circumference? Can you have, not only a 
 self-centered life, but a self -surrounded life? 
 Must not the individual redemption occur in 
 and through the service of the organic whole? 
 This is the great truth which the present gen- 
 seration is learning and is destined more and more 
 to learn, and which I have ventured to call " the 
 expansion of religion." The central facts of 
 the religious life remain the same, but the circle, 
 ithe environment, the atmosphere in which religion 
 is to fulfill itself, expands with the new world ; and 
 the problem of redemption becomes no longer that 
 of saving the individual out of a lost world, like
 
 8 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 
 
 a rat running from a sinking ship, but the more 
 heroic task of setting the individual to save the 
 world and to bring it with all its cargo of hopes 
 and fears safe at last to port. 
 
 That is the expansion of religion which meets 
 us here. And it confronts us with the alarming 
 possibility that those who have at their hands the 
 power of the religious life have not begun to 
 realize what that power implies or half used the 
 force which is committed to them. Years ago Dr. 
 Bartol heard someone say that the Christian 
 church was outgrown, to which the old saint re- 
 plied, " Outgrown ? It has not yet been fairly 
 tried." 
 
 The expansion of religion opens the way to a 
 real trial of it in the new form of social service. 
 In this relationship we have not to do with two 
 things but one, not with service as a by-product 
 or corollary of religious faith, but as an utterance, 
 an expression, a contemporaneous confession of 
 genuine religious life. 
 
 The moment you look at any aspect of present- 
 day religion you will see how this is working out. 
 Take, for instance, the problem of Christian mis- 
 sions. Generations ago we learned that no religion 
 could anticipate growing at home if it did not grow 
 away from home, that the missionary motive was 
 the very heart-blood of a vital religious life. But 
 how restricted, how technical, how shut-in, have 
 been the methods of missionary action ! To save 
 the heathen from his final doom, to preach the
 
 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 9 
 
 creed of a new faith, to multiply the number of 
 believers in a specific communion how limited the 
 purpose, and, it must be added in many cases 
 how meager the results ! And then a new time 
 comes for the expansion of religion, and a new 
 conception of Christian missions takes possession 
 of the world ; for the Christian missionary brings 
 not only a creed, a dogma, a ritual, but is the 
 apostle of education, of the healing art, the repre- 
 sentative of the hospital, of the kindergarten, of 
 all the instruments and agents of a Christian civil- 
 ization; and with that the missionary work itself 
 takes on new vitality and hope. 
 
 I was talking once at one of the most beautiful 
 centers of foreign missionary work with the de- 
 voted men and women there and observing their 
 many works of education, medical science and 
 philanthropic service, and I said to one of these 
 missionaries, " I am afraid that what you are doing 
 here is not precisely what you are paid to do by 
 the friends at home," and she answered : " No, we 
 probably could not get the money at home for 
 real missionary work." She had caught a glimpse 
 of the expansion of the mission field, and to-day, 
 in many parts of the globe, the missionaries, taught 
 by the very nature of their own task, are doing 
 larger things than their supporters at home pay 
 them to do, or, I had almost said, desire them 
 to do. 
 
 The same thing is true about the Christian 
 ministry. We hear very much in our day about
 
 10 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 
 
 the decline of the ministry, and the difficulty of 
 procuring men for the service of the churches. 
 But is the ministry declining? That will depend 
 a good deal on what a minister of Jesus Christ is. 
 Is the ministry of Christ wholly a talking pro- 
 fession? Shall the representative of Jesus Christ 
 in the modern world be known by what he says, 
 or does the modern ministry comprehend within 
 itself those humble servants of social need, who 
 go their way up and down without much speech or 
 language, doing the deeds of the Master? He 
 came not to be ministered unto, but to minister ; he 
 came to give his life a ransom for many, and 
 wherever that task is done there is the expansion 
 of the Christian ministry itself. I often have 
 young men come to me to ask whether I should 
 advise them to enter the Christian ministry or the 
 career of social service, and my answer must be 
 this : " There is no choice. These are not two 
 things, but one. The same motives are imperative ; 
 the same rewards are before you; the same spirit 
 guides your task. Some must speak the word of 
 prophets, and some must do the self-effacing serv- 
 ice of others' needs, but they are not two tasks; 
 they are one.'* Thus the Christian ministry to-day 
 is not understocked, but richly supplied. The ex- 
 pansion of religion gathers up into itself this great 
 company of witnesses, so that the profession of 
 those who want to do the will, though they may not 
 name the name, was never more adequately 
 supplied.
 
 THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION 11 
 
 Something has been said of the relation of Wil- 
 liam Ellery Channing to our theme. As I look at 
 his picture, and as we meet here in the hall that 
 bears his name, this is certainly a most happy 
 reminiscence. The work of Channing is his- 
 torically related to the progress of theology, but 
 his relation to the theological thought has some- 
 what obscured the extraordinary contribution of 
 Channing to the science of social service. No 
 words are more modern, more contemporaneous to- 
 day, than his concerning pauperism and poverty, 
 drink and crime, war and peace. But these two 
 things in him were one, and he would have looked 
 with a generous and sanctifying welcome upon a 
 gathering like this, in the name of religion and 
 in the cause of a wise social service. I congratu- 
 late you, friends, on this unity of the spirit. The 
 social servant, humbly doing the insignificant task 
 committed to his hands, may look up to the Master 
 of the religious life, and repeat his great words, 
 " Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least, ye 
 have done it unto me," and may quietly and pa- 
 tiently answer to the call of God, " Here am I ; 
 send me."
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH 
 MRS. ANNA GARLIN SPENCER 
 
 Associate Director, New York School of Philan- 
 thropy 
 
 The social function of the church in a gathering 
 like this means the social function of the churches. 
 We have no central, dominating, controlling church 
 influence that directs activities. In our church 
 life we are the closest, most intimate group next 
 to the family. The social function of the 
 churches, then, is an intimate relationship which 
 the members of a given church have to the social 
 problems and the social service to which they are 
 most closely related. 
 
 The social function of the church as a distinc- 
 tive institution seems to me to be a difficult one to 
 outline. Where does the church any church 
 connect with the regimented social movement? I 
 do not mean, where do the churches most catch on? 
 For they are doing it wherever their training and 
 their special interests lie. I mean where should the 
 church as an institution connect with this more and 
 more highly specialized, more and more expertly 
 directed, enginery of social change? Remember 
 that the center of gravity in philanthropic work 
 
 has changed from the old emphasis upon ameliora- 
 
 12
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 13 
 
 tive charitable relief through personal ministry to 
 the individual, to a great movement to abolish 
 poverty, to abolish preventable diseases, to change 
 the environment of human beings in order that they 
 may live nobler and wiser and happier lives. We 
 have entered upon the greatest spiritual adventure 
 in practical affairs that the world has ever wit- 
 nessed. We learned first that man was shaped by 
 his environment, and now we are learning that man 
 can reshape his environment in order that he may 
 reshape himself and his kind in lines and directions 
 that seem to him desirable. And we are now en- 
 gaged upon this tremendous task of changing the 
 conditions that surround the majority of human 
 beings. Let no one fail to understand that that 
 is what we are actually attempting. Whether we 
 see it or not, that is the great spiritual adventure 
 in practical affairs upon which the human race has 
 entered. 
 
 Now where can a church best join in this regi- 
 mented attack upon old injustices, upon outworn 
 conditions, upon needless and hurtful accidents 
 of life? Here I must repeat what I have often 
 said, that I have no use for a church which exists 
 only to do what is called social work. Deeply and 
 devoutly interested as I am in, and thankful as 
 we all should be for, this great movement towards 
 environmental change, yet if any church exists 
 chiefly even to furnish individuals for that par- 
 ticular form of endeavor, I believe it is hanging on 
 to an old organization to do a piece of work which
 
 U THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 
 
 it could do much more effectively by dividing up 
 its workers and apportioning them among the great 
 civic social movements. The church exists pri- 
 marily, as it always has existed, to make an appeal 
 to the individual life, to try to develop person- 
 alities that will be superior to their environment, 
 that will react as individuals upon the conditions 
 in which they find themselves without waiting for 
 the great social changes. Given that, where shall 
 the church which holds true to its main purpose, and 
 at the same time has become socialized in its desire 
 to be at one with the great forces which are chang- 
 ing things for the benefit of the whole, come in most 
 helpfully? 
 
 I like to give as an example of how a generation 
 has changed the emphasis of the church, my ex- 
 perience with my own little daughter in trying to 
 interest her in Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress." 
 When she was about eight or nine years old, I 
 thought it was time for her to be interested in that 
 book, as I had been at her age, and started to read 
 it aloud. I had only gone a very little way when 
 with a flash of her eye and a toss of her head she 
 said : " Mother, don't read any more about that 
 man Christian. I don't like him ; he was a selfish 
 pig to run away from the people that were burning 
 up ! Why didn't he stay and help them ? " And 
 I realized at once that within a generation the 
 whole center of gravity of religion as well as of 
 charity had changed ; that it is not concern about 
 your own soul but about saving the other people
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 15 
 
 who are in danger that to-day moves us all. The 
 churches, not the Unitarian churches alone but all 
 churches, are full of that spirit of staying in the 
 burning city till every soul is saved, rather than 
 of fleeing for their own advantage. Whatever 
 their creed may say, however inconsistent their 
 theories may be with their practice and their present 
 work, that is the temper of the Christian churches 
 to-day. That is the temper of all the progressive 
 churches of the world, whether Christian or not. 
 
 For twenty years and more I have been trying 
 with the best of my endeavor to see in what specific 
 and distinctive ways the social function of churches 
 may best develop. We are all agreed that the great 
 dynamo, the great power-house for social service, 
 still remains the church Christian, Jewish, what- 
 ever it may be. When we want to do a new thing 
 or do better an old thing for humanity we still 
 go to the church members, to those who have 
 gained an idea of the sacredness of life and the 
 spirit of consecration. Now, then, how shall we 
 introduce the social motive into the practical work 
 of churches so as to satisfy the young people who 
 are not very much concerned about either home 
 or foreign missions, but who are mightily in earnest 
 to do their part in this great work of changing the 
 conditions of the world? 
 
 In my judgment this practical expression of the 
 social spirit is very necessary, especially since I 
 believe that Protestantism, except among the 
 Friends and a few smaller sects, has never done its
 
 16 
 
 social duty by its own members. It ought to take 
 much better care of its own people, and of those 
 who might be its own people if the church were as 
 hospitable as it should be. A thousand things are 
 needed to socialize the world and to ease the awful 
 economic burden, not necessarily by going down to 
 the bottom of things, but by easing off the pressure 
 on the middle class, letting them rise a little and 
 so giving room for the people below to go up. 
 
 You know what happens when a model tenement 
 is built. It is not the people who lived in the old 
 rookeries that go into it, it is the people who have 
 been paying more rent than they could afford, and 
 who are glad enough to get a decent place to live 
 in at a reasonable cost. There are never enough 
 old people's homes of the right kind, nor enough 
 agencies for the care of those who have broken 
 down and are convalescent ; there are never enough 
 ways by which we can help talented boys and girls 
 to reach the careers for which they are fitted by 
 nature, never enough ways by which we can lighten 
 the burden of the people who are not affected in 
 large ways by what we call social work except to 
 have their lives made harder. For example, you 
 have to be well to do or very poor to have a trained 
 nurse. You have to be the kind of person who is 
 willing your child should be herded with strangers 
 and farmed out for a " country week " in a place 
 you have never seen, or else have money to pay for 
 his care in an expensive summer camp, or your 
 child must stay at home in the city. I know, for
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 17 
 
 . 
 
 I have seen, that the worst cases of anaemia and 
 lack of all things that go to make a child strong 
 and healthy and happy are among the people who 
 are not willing to send their children with a crowd, 
 to be interviewed by reporters as they start, and 
 yet who cannot afford either to go themselves to 
 the country or send their children under the right 
 chaperonage. 
 
 I believe the Quakers are unique among Christian 
 churches in the way in which they care for the 
 wayward child, the aged person and all the human 
 relationships where need calls for kindness. Since 
 the church is no longer responsible for public edu- 
 cation or public charity or any of those things that 
 Latin Christianity took care of, and as the church 
 breaks up into churches and the relationship be- 
 comes so close and intimate, why should not the 
 churches extend this family care to all their mem- 
 bers? I mean something even more radical than 
 this. I do not know any reason in nature why the 
 lodge, the benevolent orders, the fraternal insur- 
 ance bodies, should all have sprung up outside the 
 church. What more natural than that in the 
 Christian church which began with " all things in 
 common," there should have been an ingenious and 
 a constant and a growing use of the cooperative 
 side of life? For instance, we in this country are 
 struggling toward Lloyd George's England, and 
 there they have a great national insurance scheme. 
 You cannot earn more than $800 a year and be 
 eligible to its benefits ; but there are a great many
 
 18 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 
 
 people who earn just a little over $800 to whom 
 insurance of a different kind, such as that provided 
 by the fraternal benevolent insurance orders, would 
 be most helpful. 
 
 Another thing; we are all worried over the high 
 cost of living, and in every program of any church 
 that has a forum, I find much talk about it. Why 
 should not the women and the church get together 
 and form a housewives' league, purchase supplies 
 in bulk and use one of the vestry rooms that are 
 so painfully vacant all through the week for a 
 distributing place? 
 
 Then why not do something to save the babies? 
 We have learned at last that it is as pious an act 
 to give the baby its right food and keep it alive 
 as it is to hold service over its remains and to bury 
 it when it is dead. Now, why should we not put the 
 church at work to save the babies, and, too, not 
 merely the babies of the slums? A great many 
 babies die who should not, who do not die in the 
 slums, and a great many mothers are overworking 
 and need care and help who do not live in tene- 
 ments. I believe if the church would grow a little 
 more ingenious and would understand the full sig- 
 nificance of its theoretical adoption of religion as 
 a practical working-out of the conduct of life here 
 in this world instead of in the world to come, that 
 we should have any number of points of contact 
 within the church for the practical advantage of 
 human beings, and all of them baptized with the 
 fire and the glory of religious aspiration. If there
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 19 
 
 is anything on earth that is needed it is such a 
 baptism of social effort, which to-day is so satu- 
 rated with materialistic ideas and arguments that 
 it must be attached to the church or to something 
 that has wings to know that it also can fly. 
 
 Then again it seems to me that we have another 
 clear duty in churches, and that is to accept the 
 idea of the social expansion of religion ; to accept 
 it not merely as a beautiful theory, not merely as 
 binding us all together in sympathy in union meet- 
 ings and institutes, but as something to be trans- 
 lated into terms of personal pledge. I believe 
 membership in any Christian church or Jewish 
 synagogue in this day and age should mean that 
 every human being who joins should pledge him- 
 self to some sort of definite service. Indefinite 
 pledges do not amount to anything. What is a 
 church's duty? It is to find out what needs to 
 be done right at its own doors, in its own com- 
 munity, in its own neighborhood, and to learn that 
 not by hearsay but by actual investigation. Every 
 church should have some one employed by it, or 
 belonging to it, who will find out what conditions 
 are and will set them down in accurate statement. 
 If the church is so situated that it can have a 
 social exhibit and is strong enough to get it up, 
 that is a very good work ; and if the church only 
 would undertake it I think we could be saved 
 some horrible exhibits which are wholly patholog- 
 ical and which do not place the normal where it 
 belongs in the center of things. Some of us
 
 20 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 
 
 in New York worked and worked in vain before the 
 Child Welfare Exhibit to get even a few pictures 
 that showed the normal child. Everything was 
 pathological. The worst tenement, and the most 
 dreadful-looking infant, and the most horrible con- 
 ditions were hunted out and photographed. I my- 
 self saw some children from the tenements coming 
 and finding their pictures and pluming themselves 
 upon being in the worst and most awful picture 
 there was in the whole exhibit. 
 
 That is not what a church should do, least of 
 all a Unitarian church, but an exhibit that com- 
 bined some of the effusion of that faith in human 
 nature and that emphasis upon the divine in human 
 life that the Unitarian body could so well give, 
 would be a more normal showing of actual life. 
 
 Then, having found out what there is to be 
 done, I believe in the card catalogue system ap- 
 plied to the church as an indication of its working 
 force. Every member of a church and every per- 
 son who wishes to feel in alignment with the 
 church, whether he wants to join it or not, should 
 have the privilege presented and pressed upon 
 him of indicating on a card prepared for the 
 purpose the definite service which he is willing to 
 render. For example, " I, A. B., member of so 
 and so, enlist for next year as a friendly visitor ; " 
 " I, A. B., enlist for recreation work ; " "I will be 
 a solicitor ; " "I will take care of a neighbor ; " 
 " I will spend an hour with one of the women in 
 my own church who never has a chance to go to
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 21 
 
 service " and all the other things we now call 
 social service. I believe the only way we can prove 
 that the church is socialized is by every member 
 in it being pledged to service, PLEDGED TO 
 SERVICE. I mean every one of those words, with 
 three dark lines underneath them. We all go into 
 our various religious bodies with a desire to be of 
 service, of course, but the old service was going 
 to prayer-meeting, being sure to be there rain or 
 shine, contributing to home missions and foreign 
 missions and doing the small amount of charitable 
 work that then was demanded. Now, it is this 
 great congeries of social appeals and motives and 
 ideals and efforts that calls us and the question 
 is where shall we place our members? 
 
 Very few churches can say, " We select the fight 
 against tuberculosis for our work, and all of our 
 people will work against tuberculosis ! " or " We 
 select tenement-house reform, and all our people 
 will work for better housing," and so on. The 
 church, like the family, is composed of different 
 kinds of people with different interests, and each 
 church will help in many ways. Therefore, let 
 our card be kept up to date; don't let it fall 
 behind. Every year we must ask, " For what 
 specific cause will you enlist to give half an hour 
 a week or an hour a week or a day a week, or 
 whatever time you can give? " Some of the peo- 
 ple would give almost all their time because they 
 are free from other obligations, and altogether 
 the amount of service we should have to pass out
 
 22 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 
 
 directly and definitely from the church center to 
 various agencies in the community would be sur- 
 prising to any of us. There are a few churches 
 which are trying something along that line, and 
 I believe it is the most saving and helpful thing 
 that can be undertaken. 
 
 But this is what any church can do. Is there any- 
 thing that Unitarian churches might do that other 
 churches cannot? If brave enough and earnest 
 enough, the liberal bodies could start new things 
 without waiting for great endowments, without de- 
 pending upon philanthropic trusts. They could 
 think over the whole situation, could study it 
 carefully, and wherever they found a vacant place, 
 a missing link, or something more radical, more 
 advanced than others were doing, there they could 
 exert their influence. I believe there is no kind 
 of social work that is in any way uncongenial to 
 a religious body and not perfectly proper for a 
 religious body to undertake. But most social 
 services that the churches undertake, as, for in- 
 stance, the free kindergarten in the early days, 
 should be undertaken as object lessons and their 
 mission should be quite free. They should demon- 
 strate something that ought to be done and then 
 let go of it whenever the civic interests in the 
 community life are ready to take it up. That 
 would keep the freshness and the enthusiasm of the 
 people. 
 
 It seems to me that we have not yet accepted 
 clearly in our consciousness the bearing, meaning,
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 23 
 
 significance of this socializing of religion. We 
 have been too afraid of undertaking small prac- 
 tical efforts, as if they did not belong to the great 
 range of vision and the individual grasp of the 
 progressive faith. I think they do. I think that 
 the genius of the Unitarian body is preeminently 
 practical. The only thing is, we have not method- 
 ized our spirit. And I believe that while we should 
 never be slaves of method, we should never fail to 
 get that mechanism which best suits the need and 
 will best accomplish the work. Therefore, my ap- 
 peal would be that every church should set about 
 the study of what actually constitutes the work 
 needing to be done; secondly, take account of 
 stock, see how many people there are who will work ; 
 and then make it easy for every human being to 
 choose a congenial field in which he or she can be 
 more efficient, perhaps, than in any other. 
 
 Lastly, do not be afraid of doing new things. 
 To that end every liberal church should have what 
 almost every Orthodox church is beginning to have, 
 a free platform and an open forum ; a place where 
 people who are engaging in new enterprises may 
 come and tell what they are about. It does not 
 mean that you will always follow every lecturer, 
 if you did the church would be an attachment to 
 a moving van and it would be going from one 
 point to another all the time, but it does a great 
 deal of good to have the church considered as a 
 moral and social exposition. Every week, every 
 month at least, some new thought should be pre-
 
 24 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 
 
 sented, and no one should be afraid of hearing the 
 most radical thought. All that we should be 
 afraid of is making up our minds too hastily, 
 having insufficient bases for our decisions. An 
 open forum does not tend toward scatter-brained, 
 loose enthusiasm, but it simulates deep and radical 
 thinking on great questions, so that the people who 
 are pledged to special service in one field are lov- 
 ingly compelled to hear about every other field, 
 that they may not become narrow-minded. 
 
 Finally, many young people are coming into 
 our schools of philanthropy who thirty or twenty 
 years ago would have entered the Christian min- 
 istry, and it has been a choice to them of practical 
 alignment, even though the spirit may be the same. 
 A young man came to the School of Philanthropy 
 in New York two years ago, who seemed to be 
 eminently fitted to be a really great minister; he 
 had, so far as one could see and know, every promise 
 of exceptional power. He started, indeed, in the 
 theological school, and I said to him, as I have 
 said a hundred times and more to others, " Tell 
 me why you switched off and came here and are 
 going to take the secretaryship of a State board of 
 charities in the South instead of taking a church." 
 He said, " What the church does in social move- 
 ments seems so futile, so far away, so indefinite; 
 I want really to help to make this world a better 
 place for human beings to live in." But I said, 
 " My young friend, I understand how you feel ; 
 perhaps no member of the faculty here could un-
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION 25 
 
 derstand it better. But think many times before 
 you give up the old church, because that is what 
 3 r ou are doing if you say that the church can- 
 not take a commanding position in what is the 
 dominating motive and the dominating effort of 
 the age. Do you not shelve it, practically? Do 
 you not say, The things for which the church 
 stands, that no other institution can stand for, 
 are not worth while so much as the things it fails 
 to stand for? " 
 
 Therefore, it seems to me that those who have 
 remained within the church, and above all those 
 who are guiding the lines of church tendency in 
 this rapidly-changing era of ours, should consider 
 how definite and practical, as well as wise and im- 
 portant, they may make their offer of service to 
 every young and ardent soul.
 
 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS FOR SERVICE 
 
 FREDERIC ALMY 
 
 Secretary, Charity Organization Society, Buffalo, 
 N. Y. 
 
 In speaking here as a layman to ministers and 
 church workers, I think I ought to give my cre- 
 dentials. After I left Harvard I lived in Edward 
 Everett Hale's family for some time and helped 
 him in his visiting of the poor. Then I went to 
 the Harvard Law School, and practiced law for 
 seven years before I reformed. For the last nine- 
 teen years I have been secretary of the Charity 
 Organization Society in Buffalo, which is the oldest 
 in this country. The first thing we did there nine- 
 teen years ago was to form districts, one hundred 
 and fifty of them, and offer each one to a separate 
 church. One hundred and twenty-two churches, 
 Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, took these districts. 
 Each church agreed to care for the neglected poor 
 of any faith within its district, and I have seen 
 many Protestant churches caring for Catholics and 
 Catholic churches caring for Protestants. 
 
 Some of my friends in social work say they en- 
 joy seeing me squirm when people ask me about 
 those church districts. They are so much less 
 than they might be that they often seem like noth-
 
 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS 27 
 
 ing. And yet there is a great value to a church 
 in having a definitely bounded district for its work 
 among the poor, concentrated where results are 
 visible. There is an economy of time and force, 
 and I believe heartily in such districts if they are 
 organized with competent, paid service to guide 
 the volunteers, but not otherwise. Through these 
 districts we have a better church cooperation, I 
 think, in Buffalo than in most cities. Organized 
 charity never was really popular with the churches. 
 And yet the Roman Catholic bishop not long ago 
 gave us $1,000 and in another year $500 without 
 any limitations, and issued instructions to his 
 priests to cooperate with us. 
 
 It is not accident that twenty-seven of these 
 churches took districts in distant parts of the city 
 with which twenty of them had no previous con- 
 nection of any kind, and that there are in Buffalo 
 six well-equipped settlements maintained by 
 churches. It is interesting to note that the Epis- 
 copal settlement had a Universalist head worker, 
 the Unitarian settlement a Presbyterian head 
 ft-orkcr, and so on. These settlements take a great 
 leal of money, and I am not sure that the church- 
 supported settlement is the best. In a way it is 
 limited, with a less broad platform, but still the 
 continuing station with groups of people who are 
 icquainted is really worth a great deal. Any 
 church can rent a room for one afternoon and even- 
 ng a week, or in time for every afternoon and 
 evening, and it will have social work at an ex-
 
 28 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS 
 
 tremely small cost. Miss Elizabeth Williams, who 
 for many years has been the head of the College 
 Settlement in New York, started Neighborhood 
 House in Buffalo by renting one such room at $5 
 a month, and there with clubs and classes gradually 
 was built up what became a large settlement. I 
 am sure the penny savings banks, home libraries 
 and all the activities of such a building, are 
 familiar. 
 
 At one time I thought this was the only service 
 of the church ; I could not see the other side, and 
 in our annual report we listed our one hundred 
 and twenty churches and told what each one was 
 doing in institutional work. To-day I do not feel 
 so sure that the churches should do social work. 
 At the National Conference of Charities which 
 met in Boston there was a section on " The Church 
 and Social Service." Dr. Washington Gladden 
 was the chairman. We put this question: 
 " Should the individual church inspire, interpret, 
 guide or administer social work? " I believe it 
 should inspire, interpret, guide but not administer. 
 The administration is better done by lay agencies 
 where they exist; where they do not exist a com- 
 bination of churches representing more than one 
 denomination can handle a social need more ef- 
 fectively than a single church. I do not like to 
 see a church running tuberculosis work when there 
 is no organized charity. It would do better to 
 start a movement for a charity organization so- 
 ciety which could organize social work among all
 
 29 
 
 denominations. The Boston National Conference 
 of Charities printed a special pamphlet giving all 
 the addresses on " The Church and Social Service," 
 and there you will find many practical suggestions. 
 
 The one special practical suggestion to OUT church 
 districts was the friendly visiting, which is so well 
 developed in Boston. Our friendly visitors, like 
 our church districts, were a blessing and a torment. 
 There are four kinds of friendly visitors: Those 
 who neglect their families, those who patronize 
 their families, those who spoil their families and 
 those who help their families ; and at times I have 
 wanted to throw all the church districts and all the 
 volunteer visitors out of the window. 
 
 Two years ago I became interested in the " Men 
 and Religion Movement," although it does not 
 include Unitarians. We needed it in Buffalo to 
 enlist the churches still further in social service. 
 That movement was Protestant and did not include 
 the older Roman Catholic Church nor the still 
 older Jewish Church nor anything so young as 
 the Unitarian Church, but it is no small gain to the 
 world when the Protestant churches will cooperate 
 with themselves. If you want suggestions for 
 service I advise you to buy and read the seven small 
 volumes called " Men and Religion Messages," 
 which cost four dollars ; at all events, do not fail 
 to buy the second volume, on social service, which 
 costs one dollar. I had thought that a movement 
 representing all denominations, all parts of the 
 country, would be conservative and antiquated.
 
 30 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS 
 
 It is the opposite. It is a ringing appeal, not from 
 the social workers to the church, but from the 
 church to the church for social service, and the 
 various volumes are full of the most splendid sug- 
 gestions. One paragraph, I think by Dr. Gladden, 
 though it is not signed, I want to read: 
 
 " The one great thing which the Men and Religion 
 Forward Movement has done for the American 
 churches is to set blazing before them the truth and 
 the tasks which are suggested by this phrase ' social 
 service.' This truth they can never again deny, these 
 tasks they can never again evade, without the con- 
 sciousness of apostasy. . . . Religion will either 
 mean a great deal more in America in the next ten 
 years than it has ever meant before, or it will find 
 itself, before the end of that time, in the way of mean- 
 ing nothing at all. . . . There are still millions of 
 church members in America who need to be convinced 
 that the kind of work to which Jesus Christ devoted 
 a large part of his time is Christian work." 
 
 Dr. Coffin, the chairman, says: 
 
 " It is not the church's function, any more than it 
 was the Lord's, to give specific directions to its mem- 
 bers for the readjustment of civic or business 
 life. . . . Service, not leadership, is the church's 
 mission." 
 
 While the Catholic Church still holds on to its 
 schools and its hospitals, the Protestant churches 
 for the most part have handed theirs together 
 with the administration of general charity over to
 
 31 
 
 lay bodies. As Dr. Crothers has said, we want 
 every church to support and feed these movements, 
 but not itself to conduct them, because so the 
 pastor loses his spiritual life and has not time to 
 pray. 
 
 In the Men and Religion Movement I found 
 what it meant to make definite practical sugges- 
 tions when it is so much easier to generalize. I 
 was chairman of the Social Service Committee of 
 the Movement in Buffalo. Eighty-three churches 
 there appointed social service committees of their 
 own, and they came and asked what to do. It was 
 as if Niagara should come up and ask to be har- 
 nessed, and I didn't know how to find definite work 
 for all the people. I printed a little pamphlet 
 giving the names of the Common Council, the 
 recommendations of Raymond Robbins to the 
 social service committee respecting things needed 
 in Buffalo, the dates when the budget was passed 
 upon in the city government, and giving the names 
 of all these eighty-three committees, and here was 
 a definite chore for unskilled people. Almost any- 
 one can write letters or heckle an alderman, and 
 we got the aldermen so busy with the health items, 
 the educational items, and the playground items 
 of the budget that we succeeded to some extent in 
 assisting the city departments that had social work 
 in their charge. Next year this will be more ef- 
 fectual because the Men and Religion Movement 
 will continue with a competent paid secretary. 
 Also our Charity Organization Society has en-
 
 32 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS 
 
 gaged a special church secretary, and we have one 
 visitor who gives her whole time to securing volun- 
 teers from the churches. With these three people, 
 two from the Charity Organization Society and 
 one paid by the churches, and with the background 
 in Buffalo that the churches there feel some re- 
 sponsibility toward the Charity Organization So- 
 ciety, we hope we can get something definite and 
 make Buffalo a better city through a practical 
 expression of Christianity. 
 
 Let no one think that you can organize social 
 service without someone to do the organizing, and 
 it takes ability to organize. The modern social 
 worker must be trained. It is easy to make a 
 fetich of this special training, but it is dangerous 
 to neglect its importance. It takes ability and 
 knowledge as well as consecration to mend broken 
 lives and to change social conditions, and no com- 
 petent society will employ incompetent people to 
 help the incompetent poor. The social forces 
 which affect the lives of both individuals and com- 
 munities are dangerous in the extreme. They 
 must, therefore, be handled by people who are com- 
 petent for danger. It is, of course, absolutely 
 necessary to play with fire if the machinery of 
 the world is to move. If the fire does not burn the 
 wheels will not turn, but children should not be 
 allowed to play with fire. The social engineer 
 who stokes our dangerous social fires should have 
 a license. It is a new profession. The lawyer 
 who practices on your property has a license, the
 
 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS 33 
 
 doctor who practices on your body has a license, the 
 minister who deals with your soul has his license, 
 and social workers must have a license if they are 
 to handle the lives of our poor. 
 
 Social work calls for team play from all de- 
 nominations, Catholic, Jew, Protestant, from 
 Chambers of Commerce and labor unions, and all 
 are coming into it. Teachers and librarians are 
 coming into social work. Life is becoming so- 
 cialized, and you will find plenty of willing people 
 if you can find plenty of inspiring tasks. Don't 
 try to have the church administer these things, 
 but see that the people of your church are every- 
 where serving. The church as a church should let 
 go, unless there is a definite chore that the church 
 ought to undertake and which is not otherwise pos- 
 sible. Also, read " The Survey " ; everybody 
 should read it, the pastor and all his people, or 
 at least take it and look at it. I would advise 
 a weekly study class where those who do not read 
 but learn by ear can gather and talk over each 
 number and see what there is of suggestion for 
 their home town. Study classes are good, for so 
 many people want to do before they know, and 
 activity without intelligence is the bane of prac- 
 tical reformers. I have people come to me or 
 telephone me, and say, " I am to read a paper to- 
 morrow on Buffalo charities, can't you tell me over 
 the telephone what to say? " One man wanted 
 some books on Socialism. I chose a few and had 
 them ready for him. When he came in he said, " I
 
 34 
 
 believe my paper is to be on sociology, not 
 Socialism." 
 
 We had a successful Seminar in Buffalo which 
 ran three years. That is something that could 
 well be copied in many cities. A group came to- 
 gether; they had a carefully-prepared program, 
 and the workers, mostly volunteers, went out over 
 the city and saw housing conditions, labor con- 
 ditions, health conditions and various other things, 
 and came back with papers and discussions, but 
 if that were done by each denomination it would 
 mean so much surveying that the worm would turn. 
 In a box factory which was visited by one com- 
 mittee they were very glad to see them; when the 
 third committee came they were less glad. The 
 method of conducting such a Seminar is clearly 
 described by Mr. Boynton, the Unitarian minister 
 in Buffalo, in " The Survey " for August 1, 1910. 
 
 A survey of the cost of living is very valuable. 
 You can find from your laundress and from a num- 
 ber of poor people you know, what it costs a 
 thrifty, poor, intelligent family to live decently. 
 And when you compare that with the wages of 
 unskilled labor, you will soon learn that unskilled 
 labor can not afford the ordinary decencies of life. 
 Even if you work every day, with no idleness, no 
 bad habits, and no sickness, unskilled labor does 
 not afford the ordinary decencies of life. I like 
 to have that brought home to employers so that 
 they cannot possibly dispute it. Then I advise 
 everyone to get Miss Byington's pamphlet,
 
 35 
 
 " What a Social Worker should know about his 
 own Community ! " five cents each, and less in quan- 
 tity, published by the Russell Sage Foundation, 
 which will suggest more than any one church can 
 undertake in many years. 
 
 I do not want to go into the " catalogue of 
 ships " of the hundred and more forms of social 
 work tuberculosis work, child labor work, play- 
 grounds and all that. But the present newest 
 thing newest toy, I was going to say is the 
 survey. It is good, very good. But the survey 
 means anything from the $30,000 Pittsburgh sur- 
 vey to a 30-cent survey which I have seen more 
 than once undertaken. Thirty years ago every 
 city had to have a charity organization society; 
 twenty years ago every city had to have a uni- 
 versity settlement; ten years ago it had to have 
 playgrounds and juvenile courts; five years ago 
 it was tuberculosis, and now it is the survey. The 
 Sage Foundation has established a special survey 
 department which can advise any city that wants 
 a survey what the services of experts will cost, 
 and what volunteers can do. It can provide for 
 you any kind of a survey costing from $100 to 
 $10,000. Our Buffalo survey of the Polish 
 quarter cost us about $4,000 and was worth it 
 all. 
 
 When medicine became social as well as indi- 
 vidual, disease rapidly began to die. The death 
 rate has fallen off wonderfully since public hygiene 
 came in, so that we no longer have merely the
 
 36 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS 
 
 individual doctor curing his individual patient but 
 we have also the large social measures against 
 disease. Now, when to individual religion, where 
 one pastor saves individual souls, we add social 
 religion, where the churches work together for the 
 salvation of the community, we shall see a decrease 
 of sin and misery and poverty such as we have 
 seen in the case of disease. There are two com- 
 mandments in the New Testament : " Thou shalt 
 love the Lord thy God," and " Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself." The second is the social 
 commandment; it translates the first into action, 
 and without it the first is unavailing. 
 
 There is a school for defective children in a 
 town in West Virginia, where I am acquainted 
 with the superintendent. Someone asked the boys, 
 " Whom did George Washington marry ? " And 
 one answer was, " George Washington married a 
 daughter of Colonel Robert Lee, and fought her 
 bravely." That is not the conventional idea of 
 marriage, but too often the church stays unmar- 
 ried. Many of you have read the papers in the 
 Atlantic about " John Smith and the Church." I 
 want the church to marry John Smith, as in the 
 boy's answer. We want the church, not only to 
 inspire, not only to give us the prophet's vision, 
 but we want the church to harness itself to life 
 in accordance with the second of Christ's com- 
 mandments, and to see that its men and women get 
 into effective social service. And if that comes, 
 the little John Smiths will all go to church. I
 
 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS 37 
 
 have no fear of it if they find there a definite con- 
 nection between a better world and religion. The 
 only way I know to have a better city is to have 
 better citizens, and the only way to have better 
 citizens is to give them better opportunities for 
 morality, health and education. This the men in 
 the churches can do. 
 
 I have always believed that anything that makes 
 efficient citizens is good charity. Philanthropy is 
 citizenship, and both philanthropy and citizenship 
 are in a sense religion. There is no better way 
 of expressing religion than by fighting the great 
 enemies of the world disease, ignorance, sin and 
 poverty. It can be done without in the least en- 
 dangering the spirituality of the church ; indeed, I 
 believe that by it spirituality will be increased.
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL UNREST 
 
 SAMUEL, M. CROTHERS, D.D. 
 Minister of the First Parish Church, Cambridge 
 
 The subject which is given to me this morning 
 must be looked upon by one who considers the 
 general purpose of this conference as an inter- 
 ruption of the programme, and I want to treat 
 it in that way. The reason for bringing 
 it into such a programme this subject of what 
 we call the social unrest of our time is that it 
 is an interruption of our business of philanthropy 
 and religion that comes to us in the order of 
 human development. That is to say, our main 
 object and purpose in meeting here is to help our 
 fellow men, to help particularly those who are 
 in need, to share as wisely as we can all the 
 privileges, whether of education or of position, 
 which may have come to us. We come as mem- 
 bers of an existing order of things which we take 
 for granted, and we want to apply our minds here 
 and there to points where this existing order works 
 cruelly to classes or individuals. Our purpose 
 is a peaceful purpose, a purpose of orderly and 
 humane helpfulness, and that for which we have 
 
 come is to consult with experts who can show us 
 
 38
 
 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 39 
 
 the ways and means for doing our immediate 
 duty. 
 
 Now, what is the interruption? It is the same 
 kind of interruption which comes to a nation when 
 suddenly it is threatened by some foe from without 
 or from within that strikes, as it seems, at its 
 very life. 
 
 I believe, and I think you all believe, that we are 
 living in no ordinary time. It is an age of revo- 
 lution. Events everywhere are moving more rap- 
 idly, sometimes more violently, than in any of 
 the historic times we read of, more violently than 
 they were moving in the time of the great French 
 Revolution. There are divisions that run deeper 
 than any economic questions of the day, there are 
 questions which frighten when we hear them ad- 
 dressed to us by some new voice. We try to help 
 those who need help and recognize that they need 
 it, and we expect some kind of cooperation or at 
 least some kind of gratitude from them. Then 
 we go out into the world and the moment we get 
 beyond our little circle, whether it be in the church 
 or in the philanthropic society or among the people 
 that we meet every day, we find everything chal- 
 lenged. We find dissatisfaction, not at what we 
 call the evil things of the world, but at what we 
 have been accustomed to call the good things. We 
 try to help people and we are rudely challenged. 
 It is as if the Good Samaritan coming with the 
 very best intent in the world to lift up the man 
 among thieves should suddenly find that man grasp-
 
 40 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 
 
 ing him by the throat and saying, " Now I've got 
 you just where I want you, pay me what thou 
 owest me ! " and he found that that man hated 
 him and looked upon him as an enemy. 
 
 Last summer, going out one Sunday afternoon 
 from the quiet of Westminster Abbey, upon walk- 
 ing across Hyde Park, there came suddenly a 
 great army with banners marching as to war, forty 
 thousand disciplined men with leaders. In orderly 
 fashion they grouped themselves around several 
 platforms. The thing that struck me was the tre- 
 mendous power of it. Ben Tillett and the others 
 of whom the newspapers have spoken scornfully, 
 seemed to me to be leaders of men. This great 
 army, these men who had tramped from East Lon- 
 don, was listening to them. What were they 
 saying? I spent the afternoon trying to find out 
 what they were talking about, and they were 
 saying essentially the same things that we are 
 saying to a quiet little group of people in our 
 churches. They were uttering the same princi- 
 ples precisely which the General Unitarian Con- 
 ference in its last session adopted unanimously, 
 the same thing which the Federation of Churches 
 in America the other day adopted unanimously, 
 as something which we all believe and which the 
 newspapers call a " social creed " of the churches. 
 What was the difference? The difference was 
 that those men in Hyde Park thought that some- 
 body was objecting to that programme, to those 
 ideas in regard to child labor, the living wage,
 
 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 41 
 
 the employment of women, and their creed had 
 " damnatory articles " appended to it. They be- 
 lieve that we are going to perish everlastingly, and 
 not only everlastingly but pretty soon, because 
 they believe we are hypocrites. That is all that 
 I gathered from those meetings. There was noth- 
 ing there that shocked me except this, that they 
 believed that in order to bring about these things 
 which they felt to be necessary, a great uprising 
 of the disinherited peoples was necessary. They 
 believed that the very men and women I had been 
 preaching to, and to whom I had been saying the 
 same thing that very morning in our church at 
 Hampstead, were their enemies, that they had to 
 fight them, that they had to bring them down; 
 Ben Tillett pointed across to the people riding 
 in the carriages beyond the crowd and repeated 
 that saying continually quoted on such occasions, 
 " We are many, they are few." And the great 
 crowd seemed thrilled with the sense of something 
 coming, of something that is of the nature of 
 war, of conflict, bitter, unrelenting, that calls for 
 the ethics not of peace but of the sword. Those 
 people believed that elementary justice and Chris- 
 tian sympathy and the Sermon on the Mount are 
 not the laws which we really obey, and when they 
 read the creed of the churches they laugh bit- 
 terly : " Woe, woe, woe to you, hypocrites ! " 
 
 That is what I call the social unrest. It is 
 dissatisfaction, it is desire. Now how can that 
 social unrest be settled or satisfied?
 
 42 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 
 
 The first thing that I would say is that we must 
 rise to the height of the great argument of re- 
 ligion, and that is to say and to feel that never 
 while the world lasts can it be satisfied, because 
 the demands of the human heart once awakened 
 are infinite. We are all of us desiring the earth. 
 The captain of industry desires to expand his in- 
 dustries, and he is right. The scientific man is 
 not satisfied when you tell him certain elementary 
 truths, he wants something more. You and I are 
 not satisfied in our desire for righteousness ; we 
 want more righteousness, and unless our righteous- 
 ness exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and 
 Pharisees that is, exceeds the righteousness that 
 we have we have not begun to understand the 
 meaning of the kingdom of heaven. An unfilled de- 
 sire, an infinite hunger for good, that is what un- 
 rest means. It is not going to be satisfied by giving 
 alms, neither is it going to be satisfied by giving 
 laws. It is going to keep on hungering, and 
 blessed be they who hunger and thirst after right- 
 eousness. 
 
 When we talk of the unrest of our age we have 
 to distinguish a little. We imagine sometimes that 
 people are suddenly becoming dissatisfied with 
 their condition, but people always have been dissat- 
 isfied with their condition whenever they were alive. 
 What happens is that this dissatisfaction is re- 
 pressed, and it is repressed by the common sense of 
 the crowd. There is an inhibition upon our desires. 
 There are many things that we would like to have,
 
 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 43 
 
 all of us, but we do not express the wish. We 
 do not let our neighbors know it, because we know 
 we cannot have it. I suppose there is not a stu- 
 dent in Harvard College who inwardly does not 
 wish he were a genius, but he knows he is not 
 and he does not know any way by which he can 
 become one. So he goes along quite contented 
 to be an ordinary student and contented if he can 
 pass his examination, which is the minimum edu- 
 cational wage of an institution of learning. We 
 say he is contented. But you let that young man 
 get the idea that he can be something that he is 
 not, and he becomes discontented with himself. 
 We go into the United States mint or the United 
 States treasury and are shown the treasures there. 
 We are allowed to handle thousands of dollars 
 and to see all this wealth. We go perfectly un- 
 rnoved through it all. We are not conscious of 
 any avarice, we are not conscious of wanting to 
 grab something and take it home and pay our 
 mortgage. It does not enter our heads. We sim- 
 ply look at it; we go along perfectly unmoved. 
 It would be different if the inhibitions were re- 
 moved. Here is the gold on the floor. If you 
 put forth your hand you can take it and make it 
 your own. The most dignified person would be 
 excited. I should like to have him go through 
 that United States mint when he was perfectly 
 convinced that he could get away with all the gold 
 he could carry, and that no particular harm would 
 come from it. If all the moral inhibitions and the
 
 44 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 
 
 social inhibitions and the inhibition of the police 
 were removed we should all yield to the impulse to 
 acquire a competency. 
 
 Now, that is what has happened to mankind. 
 Nobody was ever in his heart satisfied with the 
 slums, satisfied with a life of drudgery and satis- 
 fied with the infinite waste that is going on. But 
 people said, " These things are necessary, they 
 are inevitable, they are part of the order of things, 
 and we must make the best of it." So we all do 
 make the best of it. Now, science has come into 
 the world, cold, clear science. It has applied the 
 methods of investigation to actual conditions un- 
 der which men live, and it is saying saying 
 through a thousand voices and publishing every- 
 where the fact that most of the evils of society, 
 all of the waste of society, are in the last analysis 
 unnecessary. It declares that a large number of 
 the most distressing diseases have their known 
 remedies, and if people would apply their minds 
 and their wills as intelligently and continuously as 
 they apply themselves to the pursuit of individual 
 wealth, the diseases would cease to exist. It is 
 science, the science of the physician, the science 
 of the social worker, the science that has to do 
 with all the affairs of life, that is saying this, with 
 its stimulus to all social activities. 
 
 The danger in it comes from this fact, that the 
 intellectual progress of mankind has outstripped 
 the moral progress of mankind. And it also comes 
 from this, that under the conditions of modern life
 
 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 45 
 
 with its instant diffusion of the results of science, 
 the mass of men have moved faster than what we 
 call the privileged class of society ; that they have 
 caught on, as we say, more quickly to the fact that 
 there is a possible remedy. 
 
 We are just in the condition that I am when I 
 come in from Cambridge on this new subway and 
 go up the moving stairway. I go up all right 
 and everybody is going on, but when I take the 
 next step individually and step off that moving 
 sidewalk, my head goes round and round. Some- 
 body ought to be there to lend a hand at that time. 
 It is at that point where our individual interests 
 conflict with what we know to be the public inter- 
 ests, when that which the few enjoy prevents them 
 from seeing what the many not only need but de- 
 mand, that the danger to peaceful evolution comes 
 and the danger of class war is imminent. 
 
 Now, what should be the attitude of the churches 
 and those who are given any leadership in the 
 churches in this crisis? Here I want to say one 
 thing by way of warning on the prudential side, 
 and another in the way of hope of that which 
 seems to me possible for us to do. First, the pru- 
 dential. We need more than we need anything 
 else, and particularly we need it in the theological 
 seminaries we need thought. We need medita- 
 tion that shall take in in a broad way the trend 
 of religion and of humanity and prevent us from 
 making the mistakes which otherwise we almost 
 inevitably make. I am going to say something
 
 46 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 
 
 which is simply my own opinion. I do not like 
 to say it, because it seems to be criticising what 
 is generally considered the next step. I spoke 
 of that social creed which the churches the other 
 day adopted, which we have adopted in fact as 
 a denomination. Now, a platform, if it is un- 
 derstood as a platform, is all right. It says, 
 " Here is something, some few things, perhaps, 
 that we can unite on and do " some time, this 
 year or next year. But I have been troubled 
 when I have seen the newspapers talk about a 
 social creed, because I fear creeds even when they 
 bring philanthropic gifts. And I fear that the 
 churches will do in regard to these social things 
 just exactly what they have done in the past 
 that is, unite and make a creed of the things which 
 ought to be done, and then sit back and think 
 they have done them. Then I am afraid of an- 
 other thing which the church has always done 
 when it has been left to itself in this fashion: 
 that is, when it has formed the creed or the 
 things it is commonly believed should be done, 
 that it will drive out the people who do not be- 
 lieve that creed, or make them exceedingly un- 
 comfortable. 
 
 I am not saying anything against that social 
 creed. I have read it over and compared it article 
 by article with the Progressive platform, and it 
 is almost word for word the same. But I think 
 there is a difference between a church and a po- 
 litical party, even the Progressive Party. The
 
 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 47 
 
 church is for all time and all souls, and a party 
 is for one time and for one kind of souls ; one is a 
 fighting proposition, the other is a message of 
 peace and good-will in larger view. 
 
 However earnestly we desire specific reforms, I 
 think we must beware of interfering with the spir- 
 itual liberty of the church. A church is not a 
 political party. The methods of a political party 
 are necessarily different from those of a church. 
 It is necessary for the party continually to restate 
 its opinions in controversial terms. To a church, 
 a broad unity of faith and feeling is a necessity. 
 Partisanship even on moral and social lines is to 
 be avoided. 
 
 I believe that it is possible to do effective work 
 without indulging in controversial spirit or in 
 dogmatism. The method of modern philanthropy 
 is tolerant of variety. There are all sorts of good 
 things to be done by all sorts of people in all 
 sorts of ways. The church is the natural meeting 
 place for these people. It must not seek to have 
 dominion over men's faith but to be the helper of 
 their joy. 
 
 Above all it must not be afraid of the social 
 unrest, it must interpret it. It is itself the ex- 
 pression of restless desire for greater good. 
 
 Mr. Deland, in a delightful article in the At- 
 lantic, quoted the story of the English traveler 
 on the railway who fell in with Karl Baedeker, 
 not knowing who he was. After a while he turned 
 to this unknown person and said, " My dear sir,
 
 48 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 
 
 do you have a Baedeker about you? " and he an- 
 swered, " Gott in Himmel ! I am it." 
 
 We belong to the church of the apostles, of 
 the prophets, of the martyrs, and whenever there 
 is a social crisis then we have our work set out 
 before us. No need to talk any more about the 
 infinitude of virtue or the infinite depths of evil. 
 All the workers in their quiet ways know that they 
 are dealing with infinite things, the very greatness 
 of it that comes out in spiritual life. We want 
 to have a religion that shall come to these men 
 and women, to ourselves in our work, with the 
 sense of hope, of love, of courage. 
 
 Let me close just with a word from one of the 
 greatest of the social workers and preachers of 
 the church, Chrysostom. He pleads for the man 
 in the midst of a social crisis who has a clear, dis- 
 interested love of truth : 
 
 " Truth stands forth unveiled for all that will be- 
 hold her beauty; she seeks no concealment, dreads no 
 danger, trembles at no plots, desires not glory from 
 the many, is accountable to no mortal thing, but stands 
 above them all, is the object of ten thousand secret 
 plots, yet remaineth unconquerable, and guards as in 
 a sure fortress those who fly to her by her own ex- 
 ceeding might, who avoids secret lurking places, and 
 setteth what is hers before all men. And this Christ 
 conversing with Pilate declared, when He said, ' I 
 ever taught openly, and in secret have I said nothing.' 
 As He spake then, so he acted now, for, ' After this,' 
 saith the Evangelist, ' He went forth and his disciples 
 into the land of Judea, and there he tarried with them
 
 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL UNREST 49 
 
 and baptized.' At the feasts He went up to the City 
 to set forth in the midst of them His doctrines, and 
 the help of His miracles ; but after the feasts were 
 over, He often went to Jordan, because many ran to- 
 gether there. For He ever chose the most crowded 
 places, not from any love of show or vain glory, but 
 because He desired to afford His help to the greatest 
 number of the people."
 
 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 
 
 ELMER S. FORBES 
 
 Secretary, Department of Social and Public Serv- 
 ice, American Unitarian Association 
 
 Nothing shows more clearly the changed atti- 
 tude of the church towards what are called social 
 questions than the presence of so many church peo- 
 ple at a conference like this. A century ago 
 scarcely any one would have dreamed of convening 
 the churches to consider their relation to the social 
 unrest or their concern in the moralizing of busi- 
 ness. Such topics were beyond the range of their 
 interest and outside the sphere of their direct in- 
 fluence. I do not mean to say that it is possible 
 to draw any hard and fast line for that day be- 
 tween the religious and the secular, and say that 
 everything on one side fell within the purview of 
 the church and that everything on the other side 
 was beyond it, for that would not be true. 
 
 The division between the religious and the sec- 
 ular was not so much a line as it was a neutral 
 zone, and within this zone there was room for much 
 difference of opinion and practice. What one 
 person regarded as entirely secular another looked 
 upon as so clearly religious in its implications as 
 
 to be properly a subject for the pulpit or the 
 
 50
 
 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 51 
 
 conference meeting. Nevertheless, when all is said 
 there was a pretty clear distinction between that 
 part of life which belonged to the church and 
 that which belonged to the world. We are re- 
 minded of the colloquy between the deacon who 
 was a grocer and his boy in the store. " John, 
 have you watered the milk? " " Yes, sir." "Have 
 you sanded the sugar?" "Yes, sir." "Have 
 you put the chalk in the flour? " " Yes, sir." 
 " Then come in to prayers." 
 
 Now, all this is changed. Life in all its aspects, 
 business, politics, society, international relations, 
 is seen to have its ethical side, and the church 
 is concerned with them all. This is due to two 
 causes. In the first place all the world has had 
 a quickening of conscience, and together with it 
 the conscience of the church has become more 
 sensitive. Note what a change there has been re- 
 specting practices which a few years ago no one 
 questioned at all. We have been amused to see 
 how earnestly the great political parties have been 
 trying to escape the charge that in 1904 their 
 treasuries had been filled largely by the generosity 
 of great corporations. To-day it is a reproach 
 to any party to have its sinews of war supplied 
 by the corporations, but eight years ago compar- 
 atively few people questioned the propriety of 
 such gifts. This is only one example of the way 
 in which a more sensitive ethical sense is raising 
 the common standards of honor. Plenty more 
 will occur to everyone.
 
 52 
 
 Then we see to-day the close relation between 
 all social problems as they were not seen in the 
 earlier time. Always the church has taken a 
 lively interest in such questions of direct personal 
 conduct as are defined by the Ten Commandments. 
 On the plain, unmistakable injunctions of the 
 moral law the church has spoken with no uncer- 
 tain voice. It has stood against theft, impurity 
 of life, slander of another's fair name, irreverence 
 and many such like sins all down through its his- 
 tory. Now it is extending the field of its activity 
 because it is coming to see that every great social 
 question is at bottom a moral question and subject 
 to the operation of the moral law. 
 
 Take the homes of the people, for instance. 
 It is of immense importance that they shall be 
 clean and sweet and pure for they are the corner 
 stone of the Republic. Here good habits are 
 formed and character is established, patriotism 
 is taught and boys and girls are trained to be good 
 men and women and good citizens. But if the 
 homes are dark, dirty, unsanitary and unhealthy 
 most unfavorable will be their influence. Out of 
 such dwellings the saloons and the brothels are re- 
 cruited, here vice and crime flourish, and they are 
 the cause of the great expenditure for our penal 
 system and for hospitals, refuges and charities 
 of every kind. In view of what the church is 
 trying to do for the upbuilding of humanity the 
 housing question becomes of the utmost concern. 
 It is learning that it cannot hope to deal success-
 
 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 53 
 
 fully with any of these problems of conduct and 
 character until the people whom it is trying to 
 reach are living in a healthy environment, and 
 with the coming of this knowledge the church has 
 been led into the very heart of the social ques- 
 tion. 
 
 This, then, is why the interests of the church 
 have so broadened and extended. It has felt the 
 quickening of the social conscience, and has 
 come to see that the ethical problems which have 
 been its age-long concern are inter-related with 
 every other kind of social question, so that to 
 deal effectively with what it has always considered 
 its own peculiar field of work it must take every- 
 thing else into account. The church now sees 
 that nothing human is foreign to it, and it feels 
 its larger responsibility as it has not done in the 
 past. 
 
 This involves a change in method, a change in 
 procedure, but in saying this I do not wish to be 
 understood as desiring in the least to abandon that 
 which it has been accustomed to regard as the 
 essential feature of church life and activity. I 
 wish to repeat here what I have said before, that 
 " as the churches always have, so they always must 
 devote much thought and effort to the upbuilding 
 of individuals in personal character. The services 
 of public worship must always be sustained ; the 
 Sunday School, which is the place where the major- 
 ity of children get their religious education and 
 training, must be strengthened and developed; the
 
 54 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 
 
 missionary spirit must be cultivated and intensified. 
 Let no one think that there is any disposition to 
 let these institutions or activities fall into decay, 
 for if this should happen the church would die. 
 The present duty is not to let go of these old and 
 well established and necessary forms of church 
 activity, but to take on new work which is equally 
 important and necessary, and which has a vital 
 connection with the older and more familiar func- 
 tions." 
 
 This new work includes an extension of the 
 social rescue work in which the church has always 
 been interested, constructive social work which 
 shall prevent or render impossible much of the 
 distress and misery which are now so common, the 
 consideration of whatever concerns the welfare 
 of the local community, and the moralizing of busi- 
 ness so that the relations between employers and 
 employed shall be harmonized and both be filled 
 with something of the spirit of self-sacrifice and 
 devotion which has made medicine and teaching 
 and the ministry such noble professions. 
 
 All this together is a pretty large undertaking, 
 and the question at once arises, Who is going to do 
 this work, who is going to lay it out and supervise 
 it, and when are all the many details connected 
 with it going to be discussed and settled? Well, 
 the only agents upon whom the church can call 
 for this service are the people who belong to it, 
 who compose it. It is upon us that the responsi- 
 bility rests for seeing that this work is done and
 
 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 55 
 
 done right. I do not wonder that we shrink from 
 some of it ; I do not wonder that we beg to be ex- 
 cused and say we have no time, or do not know 
 how, or anything else which enables us to get out 
 of it. 
 
 The trouble is it does not cost us anything to 
 be churchmen, and so we do not want to fulfill our 
 obligation as churchmen. In the early ages it 
 did, and a man did not leave his friends and 
 identify himself with the church unless he was 
 convinced that in it was the way of truth and life ; 
 in some heathen lands to-day one does not do this 
 unless he is ready to endure privation and hard- 
 ship and even the sword. Now that the profession 
 of Christianity seems likely once more to cost 
 something, even though it is only time and effort, 
 we may expect that the churches will lose some of 
 their half-hearted members, but their places will 
 be more than supplied by those to whom the call 
 to service will come with a solemn appeal which 
 cannot be resisted. 
 
 Prayer and service are to be the life of the twen- 
 tieth century Christian, prayer and service will be 
 the double function of the Christian Church. On 
 Sunday morning it will continue to meet for wor- 
 ship, as it has met for almost two thousand years, 
 to ponder the great themes of spiritual truth and 
 spiritual life, and woe will come to it if it ever 
 turns aside from this its appointed task, but I 
 believe the time will come when on some other day 
 in the week it will meet for work with equal reg-
 
 56 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 
 
 ularity and with an equal sense of high and holy 
 duty. 
 
 Then, for instance, the church will gather to 
 consider the needs of the community. It is within 
 the bounds of possibility that all the churches in 
 a town or city will meet for the same purpose at 
 the same time, as they have been accustomed to 
 do all over New England on prayer meeting night, 
 but to make such meetings effective there must be 
 some little machinery devised. The parish com- 
 mittee, or prudential committee, or whatever it is 
 called, looks after the finances of the parish ; the 
 guild or the union enlists the interest of the young 
 people; the missionary work is served by the alli- 
 ance or the women's auxiliary or some such society ; 
 so to handle the social work of the church and to see 
 that it is wisely directed there should be a social 
 service committee. 
 
 This should be a committee of the parish, chosen 
 at the annual parish meeting with as much care 
 as are the members of any other important com- 
 mittee. You put men and women of sound judg- 
 ment and high standing in the community at the 
 head of the business affairs of the church. The 
 social service committee demands a membership of 
 equally high standing. Sometimes it is formed 
 by taking the heads of the other organizations, 
 like the chairman of the parish committee, the pres- 
 ident of the alliance, etc., and calling them the 
 social service committee. This satisfies the re- 
 quirements of personal character and influence, but
 
 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 67 
 
 these are not enough in this case. There should 
 be in addition an enthusiasm for the common wel- 
 fare, a passion for service. If these qualities can 
 be found among the officials named all well and 
 good, but not all of them are likely to be socially 
 minded, and the presence of any such on the 
 committee will tend to destroy its usefulness. 
 
 In every church, however, there is usually to be 
 found a group of people who spend their lives in 
 doing good and out of this group the social serv- 
 ice committee can be selected. This committee 
 should plan and direct the social work of the 
 church, but it should be remembered that of itself 
 the committee can do little. The great agency by 
 which the work is to be done is the congregation 
 itself, the men and women and children who con- 
 stitute the membership of the church. The com- 
 mittee simply lays out the work so that it may 
 be done efficiently with the least expenditure of 
 time and labor. 
 
 It will consider the Church School, which is a 
 name that stands for much more than Sunday 
 School, and will, with the best information and 
 advice it can secure, devise a course of instruction 
 and training in service which will graduate the 
 child into the larger life of the church and the 
 world possessed of a keen sense of social obliga- 
 tion and with well-established habits of service. It 
 will observe the tides of moral earnestness and effort 
 which are setting through the world and will see 
 what the church as an organization can do to help
 
 58 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 
 
 them forward. It will study the closer needs of 
 its own community and will find a place where ev- 
 ery person can work according to his ability and 
 strength. Every member of a church should 
 pledge himself to give a certain definite amount 
 of time each week to some specific service. 
 
 The weekly meetings of the church will be the 
 occasion for reports and counsel and discussion ; 
 for reports from individuals concerning the work 
 which they are doing, for advice as to the meet- 
 ing of difficulties, for discussion of new enterprises 
 for the common good. 
 
 I have said that it is possible that all the 
 churches in a given town may be assembled at the 
 same time for the same purpose. When such a 
 thing has come to pass the time is ripe for a church 
 federation for social service. Each church will 
 have its own committee to stimulate and guide its 
 own people, but over all should be a general com- 
 mittee of social welfare, formed perhaps from the 
 officers of the committees of the different churches. 
 Its function will be to plan the work of the town 
 as a whole, giving due attention to the lines of 
 effort upon which it seems likely that the churches 
 will act: social rescue work, constructive social 
 work, the common good of the commuity and the 
 humanizing of business relations. It will appor- 
 tion the work to be done to the respective churches, 
 will hold public meetings and will endeavor to 
 shape and mold public sentiment to the attain- 
 ment of the highest ends.
 
 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 59 
 
 What all this new Christian work may mean to 
 those who throw themselves into it with enthusi- 
 asm has been vividly set forth by Charles R. 
 Brown in, " The Social Message of the Modern 
 Pulpit," where he details an interesting conver- 
 sation he once had on the subject. " I shall al- 
 ways remember," he writes, " a serious talk with 
 an intelligent Christian layman in an eastern city. 
 His father and his grandfather had been Congre- 
 gational ministers, and he was himself an active 
 member of one of the churches there. He enjoyed 
 regularly and gratefully the ministrations of one 
 of the most spiritually minded pastors in that 
 city. 
 
 " He was telling of the Christian work in which 
 he had been engaged the winter before. He had 
 been working with a group of men to compel cer- 
 tain landlords to make the tenement houses they 
 owned sanitary. Together these men had also 
 been securing the enforcement of the law against 
 certain infamous dens of vice which were a con- 
 stant menace to the morals of the poor boys and 
 girls who lived in the vicinity. They had been 
 accomplishing something in securing employment 
 for men out of work, for it was during the era 
 of hard times. They had succeeded in securing, 
 through a free market, a cheaper and more whole- 
 some food supply for the poor. He had been co- 
 operating in the work of a certain social settle- 
 ment which supervised a number of boys' clubs 
 and sewing schools and workingmen's resorts,
 
 60 SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCIES 
 
 bringing cheer and hope to hundreds of neglected 
 lives. 
 
 " He had found a deep satisfaction in the part 
 he had taken in it all, and as he concluded his nar- 
 rative, he leaned across the table and said with the 
 utmost earnestness : ' You know I get nearer my 
 God in working with those struggling people 
 down there than I ever do in our church prayer- 
 meeting.' He was a man who could and did take 
 an effective hand in the church prayer meeting, 
 too, but he had found his way into a deeper real- 
 ization of the divine Spirit in his unselfish service 
 to the needs of that section of the city, than in 
 the usual conventional efforts after spirituality." 
 
 What this new life of service will mean to the 
 church as an organization will be registered not 
 perhaps in larger numbers, but certainly in a 
 closer union of hearts, in a deeper harmony of 
 spirit, in a larger and ever increasing influence in 
 the world outside, for it is just as true of a church 
 as it is of a man that if it lives for itself it will 
 lose its life; but if it forgets itself, sinks its life 
 in the larger service of humanity, it will find its 
 own life again, stronger, nobler, more powerful 
 than before.
 
 THE SOCIAL SERVICE COMMITTEE 
 IN ACTION 
 
 MRS. ANNIE M. CHESLEY 
 
 Secretary, Social Service Committee, First Parish 
 Church, Cambridge 
 
 A church is an assemblage of people united to- 
 gether for the worship of God and the service of 
 Man. We are told in John's gospel that God is 
 spirit and they that worship him must worship 
 him in spirit and in truth. Do we not also believe 
 that man is essential spirit and that to serve him 
 we must needs render that service in the right 
 spirit and with a knowledge of the truth? In 
 other words, is it not as necessary to have as high 
 a standard for the service of man as the gospel 
 tells us we need to have for the love and worship 
 of God? The spirit and the truth, or sympathy 
 and knowledge, therefore, are what is required for 
 both departments of the Christian life. 
 
 For centuries, indeed up to within a compara- 
 tively few years, the churches were not only the 
 centers for religious teaching and inspiration, but 
 they also carried on whatever charitable and phil- 
 anthropic work was done in the community. Al- 
 most all the secular institutions for charitable work 
 
 have been organized within the last forty or fifty 
 
 61
 
 62 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 years. This is said to be a humanitarian age. It 
 is impossible to keep track of all the movements, 
 local and national, that are now being organized 
 for the prevention and relief of distress. Indeed, 
 it is difficult to keep in touch with all that is de- 
 veloping or beginning anew in one's own commu- 
 nity. 
 
 There seems to be a reaction in two directions. 
 On the one hand, social workers are looking more 
 and more to the churches for sympathetic co- 
 operation, personal service, and funds to help carry 
 on the work of their various departments. On the 
 other hand, the church is awakening to the fact 
 that if it desires to enter more fully the arena of 
 material helpfulness to the community, it must 
 adopt the same standards of efficiency as those 
 maintained by the best secular agencies. The de- 
 sire for effective helpfulness on the side of the 
 churches is manifesting itself in various ways. 
 First, there is the institutional church, which con- 
 ducts almost every form of social activity rtntlun 
 itself. Another form of church activity is that 
 illustrated by the Third Presbyterian Church of 
 Rochester, New York, which is trying to do most 
 enthusiastically and effectively regular charity 
 organization work, in order that its members may 
 understand from the study and solution of indi- 
 vidual problems the larger needs of the community. 
 We have read with great interest about the unique 
 and vital work done by Unity Church of Mont- 
 clair, New Jersey; and then there are churches,
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 63 
 
 like the First Parish Church in Cambridge, which 
 are trying to work out a form of mutual helpful- 
 ness through what is known as " Social Service 
 Committees." 
 
 It is the story of the work of the Social Service 
 Committee of this church that I am asked to tell 
 you to-day. The committee was organized eleven 
 years ago in Dr. Crothers' home on Oxford Street. 
 It first consisted of twenty members. The mem- 
 bership has since been increased to twenty-five per- 
 sons, all members of the congregation. Each of 
 these members represents at least one undenom- 
 inational organization for social betterment. 
 
 It is difficult to realize the Cambridge of 1902. 
 With no medical inspection of schools no school 
 nurses no vacation schools no supervised 
 playgrounds no Visiting Nursing Association 
 no Anti-Tuberculosis Association no Dental 
 Clinic no Hospital Social Service and no 
 Housing Association. It is a mystery how any 
 of us born previous to that date ever lived to grow 
 up ! It was in this dark age of our social evolu- 
 tion that the Social Service Committee of the 
 First Parish in Cambridge was born. I have read 
 the records of the meetings of that early period. 
 They show that the policy of the committee has 
 changed very little during these ten years. Then, 
 as now, the predominant desire was one of help- 
 fulness. 
 
 The committee has kept in touch with other 
 organizations through reports from its members,
 
 64 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 two or more members reporting at each meeting. 
 The congregation has been kept informed of many 
 important local and national movements through 
 representatives of organizations who have been in- 
 vited to speak after the Sunday morning service. 
 There are few subjects relating to social welfare 
 that have claimed the attention of the public within 
 the last ten years, that have not been discussed 
 more or less in detail by the committee. Even a 
 list of these subjects would prove wearisome. It 
 has therefore seemed best to give a few illustrations 
 that are typical of our work as a whole, hoping 
 that they will reveal somewhat the purpose and 
 methods of the committee. 
 
 One of the first acts of the committee was an 
 effort made to ascertain to what extent the congre- 
 gation was already interested in social and charita- 
 ble work ; also how many were willing to be called 
 upon for further service. As a result of this can- 
 vass, it was found that about one hundred and fifty 
 were already identified with about forty-six local, 
 Boston, State and National associations. About 
 fifteen stated that they might be called upon to 
 render some form of volunteer service. 
 
 As a committee, we do not undertake to carry 
 out any social programme. Members of the com- 
 mittee as citizens do what they can individually, 
 and through other organizations, to help promote 
 wise efforts for social betterment. There has been 
 one exception, however, to this policy. The com- 
 mittee has continued to assume direct personal
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 65 
 
 and financial responsibility for the Saturday morn- 
 ing Sewing Class at the East End Christian Union. 
 This class was begun when the committee was but 
 two months old, at the request of the late Dean 
 Wright, then the President of the Union. Owing 
 to certain peculiar local conditions, it has seemed 
 wise to continue this work as at first started. 
 
 My third illustration shows how the committee 
 was of service at a time of special emergency. In 
 1903, at the time of the coal famine, reports came 
 to the committee that the office force of the Asso- 
 ciated Charities was not equal to meeting all the 
 extra work required of it. After securing a knowl- 
 edge of the real conditions, the whole situation was 
 reported to the congregation. They were told of 
 the sufferings of those who were not financially 
 able to pay the high prices for the fuel that could 
 be obtained; the plans of the newly-appointed 
 Citizens' Committee to work through the Associ- 
 ated Charities ; and the necessity, therefore, of 
 extra help at the office to meet the emergency. 
 Sufficient money was raised by a special collection 
 to purchase a typewriter and to pay the salary of 
 a stenographer. It can readily be seen that the 
 desire of the Social Service Committee to help, 
 carried out in this way, brought about a two-fold 
 result. First, it proved that the services of a 
 stenographer were a permanent necessity to the 
 regular work of the Associated Charities office. 
 The second, and by far the most important, result 
 was that it demonstrated to at least one congre-
 
 66 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 gation in the city the value and importance of the 
 Associated Charities, not only as an organization 
 to study and plan for individual and community 
 needs week by week, but as the organization best 
 fitted in the community to help meet special emer- 
 gencies. 
 
 The following illustrates another form of com- 
 munity service. A member of the committee who 
 was also a collector for the Home Savings Society 
 reported at one of our regular meetings that on 
 visiting a school in East Cambridge, she had seen 
 many feeble-minded children, some over fourteen 
 years of age, really moral imbeciles, who were in 
 closest association with the younger and normal 
 children, and that there was great need of more 
 effective inspection of school children. The 
 Chairman of the Social Service Committee was 
 asked to confer with the Mayor, who was found to 
 be most favorably inclined to the appointment of 
 a school nurse. After a careful canvass of the 
 situation, the Cambridge Visiting Nursing Asso- 
 ciation was authorized to make a formal offer to 
 the Board of Health to pay for the services of a 
 school nurse for a trial period, the services of said 
 nurse to be at the disposal of the Board of Health. 
 In cooperation with the Visiting Nursing Associa- 
 tion, the Social Service Committee met the expenses 
 until, a year later, the Board of Health, which had 
 come to realize the value and necessity of her work, 
 assumed the entire responsibility. There arc now 
 two nurses, and more will be provided as soon as
 
 the finances of the city will allow. In this instance 
 we see that although the committee took the ini- 
 tiative, it worked through the organization in the 
 community best fitted to meet the need. 
 
 The committee has made one direct contribu- 
 tion that has proved of service to all social workers 
 and Cambridge citizens generally. For some years 
 previous to 1907, the need of a small Directory 
 of Charities had been realized by the Associated 
 Charities and others, but time and special funds 
 to undertake the work seemed always lacking. In 
 1907, Mrs. Cannon and Miss Jackson, two mem- 
 bers of our Social Service Committee, after an 
 infinite amount of work and study, published, under 
 the auspices and at the expense of the committee, 
 a little book, entitled " Social Welfare in Cam- 
 bridge: A Handbook for Citizens." The Table 
 of Contents reads as follows : " The City and the 
 Citizen ; Public Health ; Education ; Industrial 
 Welfare ; the Law and the Courts ; Social and Re- 
 ligious Institutions ; Clubs and Civic Associations ; 
 Temperance ; Provident Institutions ; Public Re- 
 lief; Private Relief; and Homes." It was also 
 indexed. At first a few copies were sold, but later 
 they were distributed freely to anyone who wished 
 them. 
 
 A little over a year ago, at the suggestion of 
 Dr. Crothers, the committee decided to make some 
 effort to reach the young people of the congrega- 
 tion, and possibly some of the new members, and 
 to help create a larger interest in the work of the
 
 68 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 community. It was arranged that the Secretary 
 of the committee be at the Parish House every 
 Thursday afternoon to meet those who might wish 
 to volunteer for some form of social service. We 
 then began to realize that in order to make intelli- 
 gent suggestions, we must needs have a more ade- 
 quate comprehension of the work that was being 
 done throughout the city. This desire led to the 
 preparation of a Social Exhibit, which aimed to 
 give in graphic form the purposes and the needs 
 of twenty-six institutions and centers for social 
 welfare in Cambridge. 
 
 Gathering the facts for this Exhibit was a most 
 interesting and stimulating bit of work. Each 
 organization cooperated most cordially. A few 
 prepared their own. The majority sent a care- 
 fully-prepared statement to the Parish House, and 
 we had the lettering done. When completed, the 
 Exhibit was first used at a reception given to the 
 congregation, when representatives in the church 
 of each organization stood ready to answer ques- 
 tions and give additional information. During 
 the month that the Exhibit hung in the Parish 
 House parlors all the various committees of the 
 church met, and the Cambridge Union of Social 
 Workers were invited to view what they themselves 
 had so materially helped to prepare. The Ex- 
 hibit looks now rather battered and worn, as it 
 has traveled from church to church in Cambridge. 
 
 Although it was in no sense intended to serve 
 as an investigation of Cambridge conditions, nev-
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 69 
 
 ertheless, the numerous consultations with people 
 who were trying to do constructive and preventive 
 work along different lines, did actually reveal a 
 great many facts concerning general conditions. 
 It was prepared to show what were the funda- 
 mental aims of each organization and what each 
 conceived to be its greatest needs. 
 
 We know of about thirty-five volunteers who 
 have been secured since then. Some have become 
 directors, some committee members, some club and 
 class leaders, some Home Savings collectors, etc. 
 Interest has also been stimulated in the various ac- 
 tivities of the church the Sunday School, the 
 Women's Alliance, and the Sewing Society. It 
 may be necessary to state, for the information of 
 those who are not familiar with the work of the 
 First Parish Church, that although it is not in any 
 sense an institutional church, the Parish House is 
 open every day from nine to five, principally for 
 the work of the Paine Fund, administered by the 
 Standing Committee of the church. The Agent 
 for the Standing Committee in connection with the 
 Paine Fund has also been for a short time the Sec- 
 retary of the Social Service Committee, and thus 
 becomes a connecting link helping to unify all the 
 social activities of the church. 
 
 I have selected as my seventh and last illustra- 
 tion of the methods of the committee the way in 
 which a special appeal was met. We are not in 
 any way a " Charity Endorsement Committee," as 
 both the Cambridge and Boston Associated Char-
 
 70 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 ities have committees that perform that service for 
 the community. But about four weeks ago, a 
 respectable colored woman came to the Parish 
 House asking for financial assistance to help pay 
 the interest and taxes on a house that had been 
 purchased for a home for colored men and women 
 and a temporary home for colored working girls. 
 It had been incorporated under the name of " The 
 Pentecostal Home Association." The Trustees, a 
 small group of colored women, had not been able 
 to use the house for the avowed purposes, since 
 they had to realize what income they could from 
 renting rooms in order to keep the interest on the 
 mortgage and the taxes paid. These honest and 
 well-meaning women were heart-broken at the 
 thought that if the interest on the mortgage were 
 not paid and they were much in arrears all 
 the sacrifices of years would be lost. 
 
 The committee thought that there was probably 
 little need of such an institution, but it also real- 
 ized that it did not have the necessary facts con- 
 cerning the needs of our colored people in Cam- 
 bridge on which to base a decision. A committee 
 of three was appointed to study the situation and 
 report at the next meeting, December 15th. The 
 results of this study, whatever they may be, will be 
 passed on to the Trustees of " The Pentecostal 
 Home Association," and they will be given intelli- 
 gent and sympathetic advice as to the wisdom or 
 unwisdom of continuing their efforts. 
 
 I hope I have succeeded through these illustra-
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 71 
 
 tions in exemplifying not only the methods of the 
 committee but its threefold purpose. These pur- 
 poses are: 
 
 First, To learn from each other of the progress 
 of all the social interests represented by members 
 of the committee. 
 
 Second, To keep the congregation informed of 
 community needs and the best ways of meeting 
 them. 
 
 Third, To stimulate and strengthen the secular 
 organizations of the community, so that they and 
 we may have a growing realization of the relation 
 of the work of each to all, and all to the commu- 
 nity.
 
 THE SOCIAL SERVICE COMMITTEE IN 
 ACTION 
 
 REV. EDGAR S. WIERS 
 Minister, Unity Church, Montclair, N. J. 
 
 The Christian Register told us a few years ago 
 about the small boy dressed in some costume of the 
 olden time, who in the midst of one of the historic 
 pageants in an English town was found astray 
 and tearfully complaining, " I've lost my epoch." 
 I have lost my epoch in coming in here under 
 the head of " The Social Service Committee in 
 Action," inasmuch as I am to speak rather of what 
 one church is doing. But increasingly in the work 
 that that one church is doing, the need of a Social 
 Service Committee to give it direction, to give it 
 guidance, to give it unity, to give it continuance 
 and stability, becomes apparent, though how to 
 constitute that committee is a problem we have not 
 solved as has been done in the First Parish of 
 Cambridge. We like to emphasize right along to 
 those of our own people who are not yet very sym- 
 pathetic and certainly not wildly enthusiastic over 
 the social endeavors of the church, that we are a 
 church like every other, first of all, as devotional, 
 as worshipful, as spiritual, at least in endeavor; 
 
 73
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 73 
 
 that we have the Sunday School, we have the morn- 
 ing service, we have the Alliance, the young peo- 
 ple's organizations like every other church. But 
 we like to have those things plus the old-line 
 church plus. 
 
 Everything that has been wrought out has come 
 through a vague feeling towards the realization of 
 certain desires. The first of those desires was to 
 have, not a closed church but an open church. We 
 felt the ordinary condemnation of a tax-free or- 
 ganization permitted to be open two or three 
 hours on Sabbath mornings only during the entire 
 week, and its plant useless and closed and idle all 
 the rest of the time. So we felt our way toward 
 a solution of that problem, a meeting of that diffi- 
 culty. And slowly we have added work after work, 
 until now we are usually open, I think, something 
 like twenty-five days a month and frequently have 
 two and occasionally three activities going on in 
 the church at the same time. 
 
 The second desire was to emphasize a catholic 
 hospitality to all good and needy causes ; to give 
 them a place where they might meet, to manifest 
 sympathy towards them, to have the open door. 
 And while we had to fight the battle at first with 
 those who felt that a church should be entirely 
 not primarily but wholly devoted to worship, 
 and to worship alone, when we got the vote through 
 our annual meeting and began opening our doors 
 broadly, we went on and on, until now we are really 
 embarrassed by the numbers of requests that come
 
 74 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 to us financially embarrassed to provide heat 
 and light and janitor's service. 
 
 I think this week represents about what we like 
 to have going on. Sunday night we had one of 
 the American Institute of Social Service lectures, 
 written by Mr. Bliss, on " What to do in Social 
 Service," and I gave it with stereopticon slides, 
 on "The Battle for Health." Tuesday night 
 our Men's Club had a meeting, with a largely- 
 attended dinner, on " Shall New Jersey amend its 
 Constitution? " with an address by Herbert Bige- 
 low, that leader of Ohio democracy, who was 
 chairman of the Ohio Constitutional Convention. 
 Last night the Montclair Cooperative Society held 
 a meeting there, addressed by Mr. McCann of the 
 Pure Food League of New York City. To-night 
 the ladies will hear an address by Mrs. Florence 
 Kelley and Mr. Starr Murphy, one of the Rocke- 
 feller endowment trustees, speaking on the work 
 which the Consumers' League is undertaking. 
 Last spring two anti-Suffrage meetings were held 
 in the church, though it is the Suffrage headquar- 
 ters of the city. The prominent citizen who pre- 
 sided at one expressed what to us was commenda- 
 tion of this policy of catholic hospitality when 
 he said in opening the meeting, " This institution of 
 Unity Church has come to be regarded as a place 
 where both sides of every question can be heard 
 and will be presented." And the chairman of the 
 second meeting referred to it as " the Fancuil Hall 
 of Montclair."
 
 The third desire that we had was to have a 
 direct and an immediate influence on the solution 
 of social, particularly local, problems. Ordina- 
 rily we have been content as churches with the in- 
 direct influence that we exert through the indi- 
 viduals who comprise the churches. We had come 
 to a point where we were not satisfied with simply 
 being content with what our members might do as 
 individuals, and so we set forth to have some influ- 
 ence as a church in the solution of problems. 
 
 I regard my church, as I look over the group 
 of splendid men and women such as every minister 
 looks over on Sunday mornings, as a tremendous 
 power, an engine, a weapon. Over here there are 
 needs. Why not put them together? Why not 
 apply the power to the immediate need? And we 
 have gone to work to do it. We have adopted as 
 a motto the motto of the battle of the Boyne 
 " When you see a head, hit it." When there is a 
 problem try to meet it in some way. 
 
 There are three lines on which we have gone to 
 work on the problems. First, on problems of the 
 neighborhood ; secondly, on the local problems ; and 
 thirdly, on the larger problems of state, nation and 
 society. 
 
 For a long time when we began feeling our way 
 we strangely overlooked our own neighborhood. 
 The epoch in our church history was the discovery 
 of our own neighborhood. Montclair is a town of 
 23,000 people, very like Brookline or Newton in 
 being cultured and wealthy and perhaps grundyish.
 
 76 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 One quarter of our population is of Italians and 
 negroes, and segregated as they are and less for- 
 tunate their needs are very apparent. So we held 
 conferences with groups of workers there and with 
 the teachers and nurses and principals in the 
 schools, and we thought of starting a model flat 
 or cooking classes, but were always balked by the 
 fact they were so far away from our homes that 
 our ladies could not go through the dark streets 
 at night, and then the initial cost was prohibitive. 
 While we were seeking afar we happened to notice 
 some little children who came over the back fence 
 of the church yard to play, and so we started one 
 year ago last summer a playground, very simply, 
 unostentatiously. It was just the problem of 
 Booker Washington's story over again, " Dip 
 down right where you are ! " We were signaling 
 frantically for fresh water, not knowing we were 
 off the mouth of the Amazon. We thought we 
 were a long way from the section that needed help, 
 not knowing that we were on the edge of another 
 section. 
 
 We started a playground and hired a supervisor. 
 We had to limit the age to ten because we had only 
 a backyard, hardly as large as this room. We had 
 something like one hundred and fifty children. 
 This year we extended our playground, hired three 
 supervisors and some four hundred children have 
 attended it ; and we proved the need of playground 
 activity right at that point. We found that 
 though there is a playground in the poor section
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 77 
 
 and a school playground in another section, when 
 it came to the playground athletic meet we could 
 score more points than the two of them put to- 
 gether. It literally did me good as a minister to 
 find gamins on the street cars boasting about 
 Unity. We put Unity Church, which they never 
 noticed before as they went by, into the lives of 
 four or five hundred children. 
 
 Then, we found out that we ought to continue 
 that work. We did not want them simply in the 
 summer, we wanted them all the time. To my 
 knowledge, only two children who go to that play- 
 ground have any connection with the church what- 
 ever. They are mostly Catholics, which makes the 
 problem at times one of skating on thin ice. Some 
 of them are Jews; the others come from homes 
 whose parents go to other churches or to no 
 church at all. So we followed up the playground 
 with a sewing school, which seems the popular en- 
 deavor. That sewing school, now starting its 
 second year, is as large as the Sunday School. 
 Yesterday it had seventy-eight children there, and 
 has not room for over a hundred. It requires 
 twelve or fifteen of our workers. The first hour 
 is given to sewing in the different classes, and the 
 second hour to folk dancing. 
 
 Next, we had to reach the boys in some way and 
 so we established a boys' club. We are reaching 
 twenty-five and expect to reach about fifty of the 
 boys in the same way, taking the first hour for 
 basketry and raffia work and handiwork of some
 
 78 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 sort, and the second hour for games. And then, 
 realizing the particular need, we reached out for 
 a " gang." We adopted a gang of the older boys, 
 and that gives the third aspect of our neighbor- 
 hood work. The problem was how to support 
 these activities ; but that worked out well, for the 
 Women's Alliance adopted the girls, the young 
 people adopted the boys and the Men's Club 
 adopted the young men. Thus the necessary 
 financing and supervision and guidance came about 
 very naturally, and those organizations have some- 
 thing to do now that is as well worth while as the 
 things they were doing before, and the nearer they 
 get to the work the more enthusiastic they are 
 about it. 
 
 We are working out towards other things. We 
 want to hold neighborhood socials. For instance, 
 we observed Hallowe'en in the sewing school, and 
 we are probably going to set aside New Year's and 
 Valentine's Day and have the parents of the chil- 
 dren come in. Then I hope this winter we can 
 throw open our social rooms a couple of nights 
 a week for dancing for the domestic servants and 
 for the working people who have no other chance 
 under good auspices to hold dances. These are 
 the ways in which we are trying to meet the neigh- 
 borhood problem. 
 
 In the second place, we felt that we had a duty 
 to help meet the local community problems. In 
 at least three cases we have felt that we have been 
 able to make a definite contribution to the solu-
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 79 
 
 tion of those problems. Our playground is with- 
 out doubt a direct and irrefutable demonstration 
 of the need of a playground in that section of the 
 town. Our particular problem, however, was that 
 of recreation generally. With twenty-three thou- 
 sand people we literally had no place where people 
 could go at night. Those who could afford it went 
 to Grand Opera in New York. We are a suburb, 
 and in our better homes the need of recreation was 
 not at all great. But our poor people were forced 
 to go to wide-open Newark, only seven miles and 
 five cents away, into its unspeakable dance halls, 
 into its unguarded picture places. There was 
 nothing at home for them. When requests for a 
 license for a moving picture show came to our Town 
 Council, the very strong Woman's Club protested 
 almost unanimously, and though the ministers' or- 
 ganization (from which as a Unitarian minister I 
 am excluded) fought for it, the Council voted al- 
 most unanimously to keep out any moving picture 
 show. Now, the problem usually is to see that the 
 moving picture show keeps good. Our particular 
 problem was to get a moving picture show into 
 town, that cheap and good form of amusement to 
 which whole families can go because it is so cheap 
 and where they can have romance and travel and 
 all for slight expense. The matter seemed to 
 have died when we became interested in it, and in- 
 viting the educational secretary of the General Film 
 Company one Sunday night, we had a meeting to 
 demonstrate that there were good, fine educational
 
 80 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 and uplifting films. Then we obtained permission 
 from the Council to have a moving picture show, 
 and we packed the church Saturday after Satur- 
 day, afternoon and evening, and secured all the 
 publicity we could. We had carefully selected 
 films, we had the best kind of music, we talked 
 around the films. When we applied for a renewal 
 of our license and the Council refused it, that also 
 became generally known and the feeling slowly 
 changed. We were in touch all the time with the 
 police committee of the Council, and knew that 
 they stood three to two against any license. Fol- 
 lowing the advice of the chairman, we simply 
 brought every bit of pressure to bear we possibly 
 could so that those three members had their tele- 
 phone bells ringing all the time, and when the 
 question came up again, the Council voted unani- 
 mously for a moving picture license for the right 
 kind of a theater. The highest license required 
 for such a theater anywhere else in this country is 
 $400, but the price in Montclair is $1,000. It is 
 carefully censored. The building they are put- 
 ting up, with its fixtures, is costing $120,000. 
 And so at last we have got the right kind of recre- 
 ation in there for the poor people. 
 
 Now, the very hard problem that we are all 
 protesting against is the high cost of living. 
 Angels might well fear to rush in there, but John 
 Graham Brooks had spoken to us once on coopera- 
 tion, and our little council of twenty, the lower 
 house of our church, which has only advisory
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 81 
 
 power but which has literally become so important 
 as an initiatory body that the trustees always pass 
 everything that it asks for, appointed a com- 
 mittee on cooperation. The committee went to 
 sleep and woke up periodically for about a year 
 but finally got interested, because its report was 
 always called for and it was rather embarrassing 
 to report only progress, which literally meant sleep. 
 One of the members going to Europe investigated 
 the cooperative enterprises there and came back 
 enthusiastic. Last year that committee and our 
 Men's Club got together, called a meeting that 
 crowded the church and had all the experts they 
 could find on cooperation, with rapid-fire speak- 
 ing, every man held at eight minutes and called 
 down strictly with the bell. The entire subject 
 of cooperation and its possibility in meeting the 
 problem was discussed. Everyone who was inter- 
 ested in forming a cooperative society was asked 
 to stay, and everyone stayed. I think of it as an 
 old-fashioned revival meeting afterwards, the peo- 
 ple speaking, questioning, and then, instead of 
 " Amens " and " Glories " and so on, they were 
 saying " Ten shares," " Five shares," " One share," 
 and we had over $4,000 raised toward a co- 
 operative store before we parted. That has grown 
 to about $8,500 since. After going through its 
 period of incubation the store came to be last 
 May, handling groceries then and adding meats 
 this fall. Last night it was reported at our meet- 
 ing that we were doing a business of $80,000 a
 
 82 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 year and will be doing $100,000 by January. 
 Now, cooperation to most of us is the next step. 
 Socialists and capitalists and woman suffragists 
 and penologists and everybody, whatever we may 
 think will be the ultimate lead, are agreed on that. 
 I was interested at the meeting of our Fellowship 
 for Social Justice in Arlington Street Church when 
 Mayor Lund and Professor Scudder spoke. After 
 them John Graham Brooks spoke on " Coopera- 
 tion, the next step to Socialism," and they were 
 so interested that during the last hymn, the pulpit 
 being high, the discussion went on, and both of the 
 Socialists said to Mr. Brooks, " You are right, 
 that has to come first, and if we can buy our 
 groceries and provisions together as citizens, we 
 can learn to run our municipalities together." 
 
 Now, the difficulty was getting out from under. 
 It was a church store at first, but that phase has 
 passed, and while the society holds its meetings in 
 our church, because there is no other church in 
 town that will let that kind of meeting come into 
 it, it is not a church store any longer. 
 
 Another problem which we attacked last summer 
 was a wider use of the school plant. We felt that 
 the time had come for a wider use of the school 
 plant; the sentiment was ripe. We are fortunate 
 in using advertising space in our local paper. 
 Right at the head of the church notices, straddling 
 both columns, is the space we control. No one 
 can read about what is going to happen in any 
 church without having to read first what is going
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 83 
 
 to happen in our church, and what " Unitarian- 
 ism " is, and what we think a church ought to be, 
 and so on. During the summer while we were 
 having only the playground advertised, the church 
 being closed, we turned to some of the local prob- 
 lems. We did it rather naively. It occurred to 
 us that that might be a good way to use the space, 
 and it seems to have been a lead which was unique. 
 So we used our space for several advertisements. 
 One of them dealt with the recreation problem, 
 setting out just what we thought of the recre- 
 ation needs of Montclair. The second dealt with the 
 housing problem, headed " Montclair's Housing 
 Problem is a Problem of Rents," for it is a problem 
 of land values and speculative greed. A week 
 later the editor of the paper told me the real estate 
 people had come to him and secured three pages of 
 his space, and devoted the first page to setting 
 forth the value of Montclair real estate and the 
 low price of rents. I couldn't get the editor to 
 see that we deserved half the advertising payments 
 that came in on account of what we had published. 
 We put in a third advertisement on the wider use 
 of the school plant. That seemed obvious to us, 
 and yet to our surprise the " Outlook " picked up 
 the ad., published it, and we have had letters 
 from all over the country, and from Canada and 
 other places, on that particular ad. The New 
 York Sun became interested in it, sent over a 
 special reporter and gave us almost a page in the 
 Sunday Sun on this particular thing, the use of
 
 84 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 paid advertising space by churches to help in the 
 solution of local problems. 
 
 As a result of that, for we happened to hit just 
 at the psychological moment, we organized a tri- 
 umvirate for the wider use of the school plant. 
 There is a committee of the Federated Clubs of 
 Montclair on music and art and recreation, an 
 Evening Schools Committee of the Board of Edu- 
 cation, and a committee from Unity Church on 
 the Wider Use of the School Plant. These three 
 are working together now, and every Monday 
 night our largest auditorium, seating nine hundred 
 people, is open for the people. The Women's Club 
 provides concerts on alternate occasions ; on the 
 other occasions the Board of Education is supply- 
 ing free lectures until Christmas, and afterwards 
 Unity Church supplies the free lectures until the 
 end of the school year. It so happened that we 
 had made a contract for one of the very greatest of 
 the moving picture films, Homer's " Odyssey." 
 The manufacturers claim that they spent some- 
 thing like $200,000 in making it, and two years' 
 time. It seemed to us as we got near our date that 
 it was a little too large for us to swing, that more 
 people than we could get into our church would 
 want to see it, so in a conference with the Superin- 
 tendent of Schools we agreed that if the Board of 
 Education would pay half the expense we would 
 pay half and we would put it into the free public 
 lecture course at the school. It cost each of us 
 $62.50, but it was thoroughly justified in the
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 85 
 
 event. In fact, we were swamped by people. We 
 gave it two weeks ago and instead of having an 
 afternoon and evening performance, we found we 
 had to give two afternoon and two evening per- 
 formances. Between twenty-eight hundred and 
 three thousand people came to see it without cost- 
 ing them a cent. All the school children above a 
 certain grade were sent there, including the high 
 school classes, and that little contribution was 
 made to their education. 
 
 So, on these local problems we have been able 
 by injecting ourselves to have some influence. 
 There are other problems before us. We simply 
 outline problems. We have little notebooks on 
 which we put the subject the short ballot, mu- 
 nicipal water supply and the rest. Our big prob- 
 lem now is the sewage problem. There is a great 
 trunk sewer running down from Paterson to New-' 
 ark and into New York Harbor. Montclair felt 
 itself over-assessed for its part, and revolted and 
 drew up plans for a local sewage plant. But we 
 had to put the tank between three other communi- 
 ties, which naturally rose up in wrath, and a bill 
 was passed by the legislature forbidding it. Gov- 
 ernor Wilson refused to sign the bill. They 
 fought it before the State Board of Health and 
 lost again. It is a very difficult problem, and de- 
 siring to throw light on it our Men's Club held a 
 meeting two weeks ago at which we had two 
 mayors, four great sanitary engineers, one or two 
 of them among the best of international reputa-
 
 86 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 tion, and the Town Council. We had all the coun- 
 cil of one of the next towns there, and several prom- 
 inent New York lawyers, most of whom had been 
 retained on one side or the other in this fight, 
 and had a regular debate on it. One side was 
 presented and then the other side, and perhaps the 
 best contribution toward the enlightenment of the 
 citizens on this question which they soon must 
 settle was that particular meeting. 
 
 As I have said, the pressing problem in New 
 Jersey is coming to be, we hope, the amendment of 
 its constitution. Two of our parties are pledged 
 to constitutional amendment. So last Tuesday 
 night we had the man who is responsible more than 
 any other for leading the fight for the amendment 
 of the Ohio constitution, which resulted in what 
 Frederic C. Howe calls the most democratic 
 charter of any government in the world, come on 
 from Ohio and, in connection with other engage- 
 ments, address our Men's Club and a number of 
 prominent citizens. 
 
 Our particular policy is to meet local problems 
 in all their phases. Of course we keep in touch 
 with local philanthropies. We have special col- 
 lections on special Sundays. We give our Sunday 
 School a largely philanthropic bent, aside from all 
 the rest. Each month, except the broken months 
 of September and June, the collections go by 
 months to specific local philanthropies and some 
 representative explains to the children what the 
 money is used for. This year we are having two
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 87 
 
 of the children explain on the first Sunday of each 
 month exactly what the money goes for that 
 month, and in that way we keep in touch with the 
 local philanthropy. 
 
 Our endeavor is a more difficult one, naturally, 
 when we reach the larger problems of state and 
 nation, of industry, of society. The only way, 
 we believe, in which those can be touched is through 
 experts. One thing we have done is to take out 
 membership as a church in some of the great or- 
 ganizations. The church is a member of the 
 American Peace Society, the National Conference 
 of Charities and Correction, the National Com- 
 mittee for the Study and Prevention of Tubercu- 
 losis, the National Association for Labor Legisla- 
 tion, and a number of organizations like them. 
 Each year we try to take out one or more mem- 
 berships of that sort, and so the list grows. 
 
 We try to keep in touch with legislation, both 
 state and national, publishing in our bulletin the 
 state and national legislation affecting labor, 
 women's labor, night labor, children's bureau, and 
 so on. 
 
 Once when our important child labor bill came 
 up and the legislature had no intention of doing 
 anything about it, simply pigeon-holing it as it 
 had done before, there came a great awakening 
 in the state and we succeeded in doing this as our 
 contribution to that movement. We all agreed 
 that we would write to the committee of the Legis- 
 lature ; and one of the members of the church who
 
 88 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 was on the Civic Federation, a very influential 
 organization, secured the passage of a ringing 
 resolution from that body. One of the girls in the 
 high school drew up a petition and secured almost 
 a thousand names, many of us started chain letters 
 for petitions in the remote parts of the state, and 
 in that way did what little we could. But we 
 feel that the most and the best we can do toward 
 the solution of these larger problems is the giving 
 of facts and opinions from experts ; so we set aside 
 the Sunday evenings of the first three months of 
 the year for what we call " Unity Course in the 
 Problems of To-day," securing the very best pos- 
 sible experts on the great problems. That course 
 is now entering its fifth year. Just as our neigh- 
 borhood work has made us a neighborhood center, 
 a recreation center, a social center, this is making 
 us a civic center. More than any civic agency in 
 the community we are interjecting, forcing these 
 great problems on the thought of the people, be- 
 cause they are widely reported. It very frequently 
 happens they are reported even in the New York 
 papers, which are so sparing of their space. Last 
 winter, for example, we had among our speakers 
 Mrs. Spencer, Reginald Campbell, David Starr 
 Jordan, Booker Washington, Mayor Lund, Pro- 
 fessor Hyslop, John Mitchell, Woods Hutchinson, 
 Abdul Baha and men and women like them. The 
 platform is absolutely free. The speaker can take 
 any side that he or she chooses. We go even into 
 the doubtful questions of the social evil. As I
 
 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 89 
 
 say, they are reported widely in the papers, and 
 so the thought of people and the resolution of 
 people and the consecration of people are slowly 
 but surely affected. 
 
 That in brief is the work that we are trying to 
 do in what we believe is a real renaissance of the 
 church. A great many feel that the old-line 
 church, as it is, cannot long serve the world. The 
 best comment that we get is the attention that work 
 like this receives. I was interested the other night, 
 sitting by Mr. Ingersoll, the maker of " the watch 
 that made the dollar famous," to hear him say that 
 several years ago he dropped the church abso- 
 lutely and had taken his family entirely out of it; 
 he thought the church was an absolute failure. 
 " But," said he, " I think if I could be anywhere 
 near a proposition like this I should be tempted." 
 Again and again some such comment comes ; and 
 when I think that where we tried so hard to reach 
 people two years ago and were not reaching so 
 very many by the ordinary methods of morning 
 services, now we are getting in groups of all kinds 
 of people, I realize that the way to reach the 
 masses is by means like this. When Booker Wash- 
 ington speaks or Professor DuBois, one-fifth of 
 our audience is negroes. When Mayor Lund or 
 John Mitchell speaks, a great many people come 
 without neckties and without collars. When we 
 have moving pictures in the afternoon, I have seen 
 the church filled with three or four hundred little 
 girls; and when the playground closes I find the
 
 90 THE COMMITTEE IN ACTION 
 
 social room crowded with Catholic mothers. So 
 in all these different ways we draw different groups. 
 The one virtue that we emphasize is the virtue 
 of initiative. We are not afraid of starting 
 things, in fact we want to start them. Initiative 
 is the thing that so many of our churches lack, 
 and it is the sine qua non of the approach to the 
 social question, I believe, by the church. It 
 reaches the people and attracts them to a new be- 
 lief in the church. And we are not neglecting the 
 old. We are keeping the church just as worship- 
 ful and reverent and spiritual as we can, but are 
 taking unto ourselves these new activities. We do 
 not know where it leads, we do not know what the 
 end of it all will be, but we believe we are moving 
 in the right direction.
 
 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 
 
 (With Special Reference to the Operation of 
 Railroads) 
 
 JAMES O. FAGAN 
 
 The world to-day is determined to put more 
 character into its business men, into its business 
 methods, and into its laws and institutions. The 
 manner of conducting business as regards right 
 and wrong is the moral aspect of the situation. 
 In this sense, to moralize means to correct or to 
 improve the business morals of people. The 
 peddler selling berries on the street corner, the 
 mill agent in his office adjusting his payroll and 
 the merchant prince who invests his millions in 
 " commodities," have all been notified, very em- 
 phatically, by public opinion, to this effect. Con- 
 sequently, to-day business no longer follows a flag. 
 Increasingly in the future it is going to follow the 
 quality of the goods and the character of the serv- 
 ice. Of course a nation-wide scheme or policy of 
 this description is of the greatest benefit to the 
 workingman. The moralizing of business men, 
 and of business methods signifies to him a fairer 
 adjustment of work and wages; it also means, or 
 
 should mean, promotion by the merit route, more 
 
 91
 
 character in the industrial output, and more 
 sympathy and comradeship between man and 
 man. 
 
 But now coming down to a class or classes of 
 business to which this moralizing effort may fairly 
 be applied, the railroad business appears to me to 
 offer an interesting field for observation and re- 
 search. The popular side of the humanizing and 
 moralizing of the railroad business has now been 
 before the public for a number of years, and bet- 
 terment of a varied description in all branches of 
 the service has resulted. But through it all, and 
 in spite of it all, the railroad itself remains to-day 
 the most baffling of our political and industrial 
 problems. In some respects it is the most satis- 
 factory, and in others, the most unsatisfactory in- 
 dustrial phenomenon of the times. I have kept 
 a scrapbook of notes on the subject and I read 
 in this file that for a number of years the American 
 railroad has been looked upon by public opinion 
 as a sort of fallen angel, deputed by his Satanic 
 Majesty to preach and practice the doctrines of 
 extortion, graft, low wages, high rates, and the 
 morality of the preventable railroad accident. 
 How is it possible then, to find an ethical center 
 or a standard for good workmanship or loyalty 
 in such a national atmosphere? No wonder that 
 at the present day, under the influence of these 
 doctrines, there seems to be a sort of consensus of 
 public opinion that in order to get some decent 
 measure of public service from corporations of
 
 this nature they must be mercilessly fined, fleeced 
 and fumigated. 
 
 This kind of national attitude toward the rail- 
 roads, which has a moralizing foundation, we must 
 remember, has been blindly assumed by individuals, 
 by juries, by some professional people, by sections 
 of the press, and to some extent, by railroad com- 
 missions or commissioners, with the tacit or open 
 encouragement of thousands, who are still pos- 
 sessed with the ingrained idea that the railroad is 
 a public enemy. 
 
 Now for the present I have nothing to say about 
 railroad monopolies or financial policies. In the 
 past the railroad business has probably been on the 
 same moral level with the political and commercial 
 habits of the people. The point I want to arrive 
 at is simply this, that, according to popular notion 
 on the subject, being a public enemy, the railroad 
 should be subjected to the most up-to-date and 
 moral treatment for its reform. If there is any- 
 thing coming to the ordinary convict on account 
 of his heredity and environment it should also be 
 borne in mind in judging a railroad, but chiefly 
 be it remembered that all social or legislative meas- 
 ures for the reform of your criminal, regardless 
 of his station, must be conducted by public opinion 
 along moral lines, that is to say, in a moralizing 
 and not in a persecuting spirit. 
 
 Now whether we know it or not, the great prob- 
 lem of the day is to improve the personal and 
 business relationship between the worker and the
 
 94 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 
 
 employer on railroads, as elsewhere, and in order 
 to do this it will first be necessary for all concerned 
 to agree upon common camping ground, or some 
 final court of appeal. On the railroad to-day at- 
 tempts are being made to improve relationship and 
 service in the name of organized labor, in the name 
 of financial or business interests, in the name of 
 scientific management, in the name of humanity 
 even, and while the results of the disjointed efforts 
 of these groups have kept the wheels moving, the 
 situation as a whole must be looked upon as om- 
 inous of trouble and perhaps of failure. The dif- 
 ficulty is we have no ethical center whatever as a 
 basis of agreement. 
 
 Now this tribunal of simple right and simple 
 wrong, from the moral point of view of the Ameri- 
 can people, is a court to which, to begin with, all 
 the conflicting interests I have mentioned can be 
 persuaded, sooner or later, to appeal. At any 
 rate, I say if you cannot moralize the railroad and 
 every other business along this line of work and 
 thought, the cases are hopeless. Wrapt up in 
 this story of right and wrong, regardless of 
 politics, industrial affiliations, and financial inter- 
 ests, is the great human side of industrial relations 
 at the present day. But when I say that public 
 opinion to-day is called upon to enforce the recog- 
 nition of this moral judgment seat, I, of course, 
 enter the arena of practical affairs. So, to begin 
 with, let me say that managers of railroad cor- 
 porations and of large business interests in this
 
 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 95 
 
 country are now being compelled by law and the 
 stress of public opinion, to recognize this moral, 
 this human tribunal, but, on the other hand, there 
 is not another single interest connected with the 
 railroads, from a labor organization all the way 
 down to a trespasser on the tracks, which is being 
 persuaded or compelled to do anything of this 
 kind. To make this clear it will be necessary to 
 illustrate my argument quite freely. My purpose, 
 however, is not to defend railroads or railroad 
 management, but briefly to demonstrate what 
 moralizing the railroad business in America really 
 means, and how impossible it will be to improve in- 
 dustrial relationship between employe and em- 
 ployer along any other lines. 
 
 Now when I say that to-day the railroads are 
 being moralized from the top and demoralized from 
 the bottom, I give you the industrial, the political 
 and the economic situation in a nutshell. While 
 a wonderful and far-reaching reform movement is 
 under way at the top, strange things indeed are 
 current and are growing apace at the bottom. 
 The moralizing process should go forward at the 
 bottom as well as at the top. For example, the 
 moralizing of the railroads at the bottom should 
 begin with the trespassers. Trespassing on rail- 
 road property is a national affair of tremendous 
 importance. A disaster like that to the steamship 
 Titanic very naturally gives rise to widespread 
 sorrow and indignation, and yet this is just what 
 is happening on the railroads, in the aggregate of
 
 96 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 
 
 fatalities, every three or four months, year in and 
 year out by reason of trespassing. In the fiscal 
 year ending June 30, 1911, the number of tres- 
 passers killed on American railroads was 5,284, 
 and the number injured was 5,614, not tramps, 
 mind you, but seventy-five per cent, otherwise law- 
 abiding and respectable citizens. 
 
 The Pennsylvania Railroad recently issued a 
 statement to the effect that the number of tres- 
 passers killed on the company's lines during the past 
 year was 527 ; and the expenditures of the police 
 department in its war against trespassing amounted 
 to $100,000. The company again calls on the 
 public the magistrates, civil authorities, and all 
 public spirited citizens to aid in the suppression 
 of this widespread evil. A considerable percentage 
 of the trespassers are mischief-makers. They de- 
 stroy signal lamps, put obstructions on the tracks 
 and commit other acts endangering the safety of 
 trains. 
 
 Now then, after dealing with the trespassing 
 situation, that is to say, after moralizing those 
 who look upon the railroad tracks as a sort of 
 national sidewalk, I would next try to moralize a 
 few legions of those who look upon the railroad 
 exchequer as they do upon the town pump. As for 
 instance : 
 
 The Marblehead Draft, 
 Baker's Bridge Accident, 
 The Photographer,
 
 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 07 
 
 Claim Agent's story for the Youth's Companion, 
 The Claim Agent and the Magnifier. 
 
 Then, after I had moralized this feature of the 
 business, I would next pay a little attention to the 
 attitude of juries. The town pump idea has a 
 pretty good hold on many of them. In all sin- 
 cerity, I think the railroads have a moral right 
 to complain about the unreasonable nature of some 
 of the verdicts, reasonable enough if a railroad is 
 a public enemy, but not otherwise. Some of these 
 verdicts are serious financially, others are of the 
 ridiculous variety. 
 
 Illustrations : 
 
 Damages for Hay Fever, 
 
 A " Breach of promise " case. 
 
 Again, many lawyers, doctors and real estate 
 agents have had this town pump idea in their 
 anatomies from way back in the stone age for 
 railroad ties. While we are moralizing the rail- 
 road service we must bear these features in mind. 
 We must remember that we are asking railroad 
 managers, whom society now has by the neck, to 
 draw up to and sit at the same table with all sorts 
 and conditions of workers and outsiders, and to ar- 
 range and promote good service and human feeling 
 on a moral basis from a common ethical center. 
 Prejudice may blind us to its significance, but the 
 moral question mark is over it all. 
 
 And while I am about it, I may as well say that
 
 98 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 
 
 even the press, specifically the yellow press, in its 
 attitude towards the railroads needs a pretty severe 
 dose of moralizing. With some of these news- 
 papers any sensational yarn will do, and if you 
 wish to refute it you can by means of a paid " ad.," 
 and in no other way. Publicity and regulation 
 for railroads are all right; applied to newspapers 
 to compel a public disclosure of their ownership 
 and profits and of the influences which dictate 
 their policies, we are told, are all wrong. 
 
 But allow me to continue my moralizing a little 
 longer. As I look at it, in their attitude towards 
 the railroads the politicians and legislators are 
 also in line for a few moral reminders. Some 
 time ago in Faneuil Hall, I think it was, a state- 
 ment was made that a railroad manager would lap 
 up anything placed before him by a brotherhood 
 or an organization of employes. I am not so sure 
 about that point, but I will say that the manager 
 will have to be pretty lively to get in his lap ahead 
 of the average politician. 
 
 And talking about legislation reminds me of 
 what is called " the full crew bill." Some time ago 
 when this legislation was getting under way, a 
 conference was held in a well-known manager's 
 office. This manager said to the representatives 
 of railroad labor, " Look here, you need not go to 
 the legislature for these extra men. Just tell me 
 on what trains in this state, or on this system, these 
 men are necessary and I will put them on. I will 
 simply take your word for it, and we can stop the
 
 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 99 
 
 legislation right here and now." " Thank you," 
 replied the labor men, " but you don't understand 
 what we are driving at; it may not be necessary 
 on your system, but it is in Virginia and we pro- 
 pose to standardize legislation just as we have 
 standardized the payroll and the qualifications of 
 the men." Here also, I think, there is room for 
 a little business moralizing. 
 
 Again, take the following act relative to the 
 employment of locomotive engineers and conduc- 
 tors by railroad corporations: 
 
 SECTION 1. No person shall act as a locomotive 
 engineer unless he shall have been employed two 
 years as a locomotive fireman or as an engineer's 
 helper, or, prior to the passage of this act, shall have 
 been employed as a locomotive engineer. 
 
 SECTION 2. No person shall act as a conductor on 
 a railroad train unless he shall have been employed 
 as a brakeman for two years, or, prior to the passage 
 of this act, shall have been employed as a conductor 
 on a railroad train. 
 
 The other day I came across a copy of the 
 argument in support of this bill, or a similar one, 
 as it applied to New Hampshire. It was drawn 
 up and presented by the attorney for the 
 Order of Railway Conductors 
 Order of Railway Trainmen 
 Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers 
 Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and En- 
 gineers. 
 
 Hear, then, one or two of the principal items
 
 100 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 
 
 in this argument of the attorney: Incompetent 
 lawyers, physicians, dentists and druggists are, of 
 course, capable of doing great injury. But the 
 incompetence of the lawyer and the dentist seldom, 
 if ever, affect the safety of human life. And the 
 druggist and physician, while their opportunities 
 for doing harm are considerable, seldom bring down 
 more than one victim at a killing. 
 
 In railroading, however, we are confronted by 
 an entirely different situation. We have no choice 
 as between the competent and the incompetent con- 
 ductor or engineer. When we take a train, we do 
 not even know who is in charge of it, whether 
 experienced or inexperienced, competent or incom- 
 petent, prudent or rash. We have to take such 
 service as the railroad gives us. 
 
 It is these trainmen, hundreds of thousands in 
 number, the wage-earners for millions of depend- 
 ents, who appear before you and ask for this 
 small measure of protection, as they are asking it 
 of the legislatures of every state in the Union. No 
 class of the community is more deserving or more 
 in need of every protection that ingenuity and 
 forethought can devise. And none is better quali- 
 fied intelligently to estimate its own needs. And 
 its needs are our needs, the needs of us all, who 
 are obliged again and again, in perfect helpless- 
 ness, to entrust our lives to whomsoever the rail- 
 roads may place in control of their locomotives and 
 trains. 
 
 Now taking it at its face value this argument is
 
 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 101 
 
 unassailable. But unfortunately there is a joker 
 in it. As a matter of fact the railroad manager 
 does not of his own power or initiative, place en- 
 ginemen and conductors in control of their loco- 
 motives and trains. In a very real and practical 
 sense the qualifications of the men have been stand- 
 ardized. They now grow into their jobs or are 
 bumped into them, and it takes a mighty strong 
 minded manager to interfere in any way with the 
 bumping system. True, the manager is responsible 
 for the actions of the men, but he has been deprived 
 of the power of selection or of changing the posi- 
 tions of the men according to his judgment of 
 the requirements of the service. Standardizing 
 such matters and stripping the superintendent of 
 his natural prerogative as in the legislation I have 
 referred to is a notification to him that his human 
 side is not recognized either by the state or by 
 employer. Now in regard to this human side of 
 business life ! When I was invited to write on the 
 subject, " The moralizing of business," my cor- 
 respondent said: 
 
 " In selecting the topic we had something like this 
 in mind. The sentiment behind a great deal of the 
 rapidly developing enterprise of the last thirty years 
 has been ' Business is business/ without much re- 
 gard for the human element involved. This has re- 
 sulted in much hardship and injustice and ill feeling. 
 We are beginning now to learn that business cannot 
 be conducted with the greatest success unless the 
 human side is recognized. Here and there masters
 
 and men are drawing together again in the personal 
 relations which existed in earlier years." 
 
 By all means, then, let us push the good work 
 along; and it seems to me, so far as many of our 
 railroad critics are concerned, that the most urgent 
 and necessary thing at the present day is to 
 moralize a few of our railroad moralizers. The 
 job of the railroad manager to-day, to develop 
 some kind of human relationship and interest out 
 of such a condition of antagonism and without 
 the assistance of public opinion, is almost hope- 
 less. 
 
 Many a long year has passed, twenty at least, 
 since first I became interested in railroad matters 
 outside my own job and my own pay envelope. 
 For me the railroad has always possessed a strange 
 fascination. My first impressions of the charm 
 of its work and life have been lasting. To me 
 it has a stupendous reality, a breadth of moral and 
 industrial interest that defies analysis. From the 
 beginning I have loved every sound, every feature 
 connected with it, and to a very great extent I 
 have studied the history of American progress in 
 the light as it were, of the enterprise and achieve- 
 ment of railroad men. I have all kinds of criti- 
 cisms to apply to some features of labor unionism, 
 but I have all sorts of good things to say about 
 railroad men. Every once in a while the question 
 is put to me, " What does organized labor say to 
 you anyway? " I will answer that question right 
 here and now. Two or three days ago going home
 
 THE MORALIZING OF BUSINESS 103 
 
 on the train, I met the treasurer of the Brother- 
 hood of R. R. Signalmen. He said to me, " We 
 all understand you can no longer throw sixty 
 levers, or thirty for that matter, so at a meeting 
 the other day it was voted to send you your mem- 
 bership ticket for the year with a full receipt of 
 all dues and assessments. We differ at times, but 
 we wish you well." 
 
 And so it goes on in storm and stress and sun- 
 shine, as it should go on towards an ever unfolding 
 interminable destiny. The other evening I was 
 present at the banquet of the Economic Club at the 
 American House. I came away from the meeting 
 very much impressed by the sincerity and honest 
 attitude of a number of speakers on this topic of 
 industrial unrest. One after another the eternal 
 arguments and ideas in regard to solution or bet- 
 terment were again submitted and thrown once 
 more into the caldron of discussion. Good work, 
 I say, and good men, but you could no more see any 
 practical or specific outcome of the discussion than 
 you can watch from minute to minute the growth 
 of a tree. But after the meeting I went out into 
 the country. The storm of the evening had passed 
 away and in its place were all the cheer and wonder 
 of the star light. I thought of the order, the 
 majesty, the mystery of it all and of the faith that 
 is and must be behind those whirling circles of 
 twinkling stars and I said to myself, " We who 
 retain our courage and our grip on the universe 
 we at least, can understand."
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 
 
 CHARLES F. DOLE, D.D. 
 
 President, Twentieth Century Club, Boston 
 
 It is really a very wonderful thing that we 
 should be talking about a social program. It is a 
 testimony to our faith in the possibility of human 
 progress. It means a sort of high idealism. It 
 is a bold task, considering the complexity of this 
 vast universe, that we should venture to think that 
 we, not even a united nation, not all men but only 
 those who are specially interested, can somehow 
 by putting our thoughts and our efforts together, 
 effectively steer the motion of human society in 
 the way in which we think it ought to go. 
 
 We often talk about this social problem very 
 much as we talk about a patient who lies on his sick 
 bed. The doctors and the experts come in to 
 diagnose his case, and try to make out what ought 
 to be done for him. In this instance everybody is 
 a doctor who has any interest whatever in the sub- 
 ject, and everybody is ready with remedies, and 
 some are saying that it is a very sick man, and 
 that he will never get well on the diet and regimen 
 which he is now having, that you have absolutely 
 got to change the whole arrangement, or he will 
 
 die on your hands. I heard a man the other night, 
 104
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 105 
 
 a very well-fed gentleman I do not think he 
 lives on an income of less than $6,000 a year 
 speaking fluently of " the utter misery " of the 
 society with which we are surrounded, as if the 
 only thing that we could hope for was through 
 some radical and complete change. 
 
 It is always open to us to take one theory or 
 its opposite in almost every human issue that arises, 
 to translate the problem into the miwis term down- 
 ward, or the plus term upward. It is possible for 
 us to take an evolutionary philosophy, or a revolu- 
 tionary philosophy of human society. Thus, you 
 know that nearly all of us older people were 
 brought up years ago to suppose that the period 
 in which Jesus came into the world was the worst 
 period in human life that had ever been; that 
 things had got so bad that God had to intervene 
 to save the world. So all through the early period 
 of Christian history everybody was expecting im- 
 mediate and radical intervention. The world, they 
 said, was so bad that nothing could be hoped for 
 it. And yet, as we look back to-day, we know that 
 this judgment was wrong; it was probably the best 
 period of human history that ever had been. 
 Great spiritual movements, great humanitarian 
 movements were going on in that age. Jesus' 
 life and teachings grew out of the period in 
 which he appeared, and belonged to it. We 
 know now that so far from a revolution taking 
 place as they expected, it was only a succession 
 and series of changes and movements of evolution.
 
 106 . A SOCIAL PROGRAM 
 
 If then we believe that there has been any human 
 progress, such progress has come about by the 
 gradual bettering of humanity. Sometimes it has 
 seemed very slow. Perhaps some of you do not 
 believe that there has been any change for the 
 better. If so, I say God help you, or whatever 
 you believe in, under the name of God. For unless 
 there has been improvement, unless there has been 
 some guiding power carrying us upwards, I suspect 
 that those are right who say that iron determinism 
 rules life, that there is nothing for our little human 
 race except to float on the raft, and let the raft 
 go where it may. People hardly realize how this 
 whole idea of progress and reform and improve- 
 ment, even by means of radical revolution, is 
 related to spiritual idealism and would absolutely 
 go to pieces, unless it is rooted in spiritual idealism. 
 The spiritual universe to which we belong is the 
 thought underlying our faith in progress. 
 
 If I may dare, after what I have said of the 
 foolishness of the doctors, to say anything about 
 my thought of society, I wish boldly to say that 
 I do not think society is an invalid. I do not 
 think that the figure of a patient lying ill and re- 
 quiring the treatment of the sick, fits the case. 
 Not that I am unwilling to face the evil things in 
 society. I do not think there is anything so cheap 
 and easy as to abuse society on its seamy side. 
 One could reel off the preachment of it by the hour. 
 B\it I think that we are dealing fairly by all this 
 side, when we begin by saying that we recognize
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 107 
 
 in it a barbarous world, and then by going on to 
 say that our faith is that this barbarous world is 
 on its way upward toward the light. It is like a 
 child growing, and so far as we have ideals by 
 which to judge the conduct of the child, so far as 
 it is given to any of us to see streaks of light com- 
 ing into the world by which we can measure the 
 value of things, we are properly pained and stag- 
 gered at times by the amount and wretchedness 
 of the barbarism. And yet the barbarism, bad 
 as it is, belongs, does it not? to a childish world. 
 We could each make the same kind of abuse of his 
 own self and his own career. Any one of us can 
 talk his own career down into negative terms and 
 with self-pity make himself utterly miserable. 
 Have you never tried it ? You had better try it, if 
 you never have, and see how easy it is, and you will 
 find all sorts of things which, as you look back upon 
 them, would seem to you simply dreadful to re- 
 turn to for instance the primary grade with all 
 the aches and pains of childhood. Yet when we 
 were there we did not know how miserable we were. 
 On the whole, we were not really miserable. So 
 society to-day does not generally know that it is 
 miserable until someone has told it so. 
 
 A man on the coast of Maine, who was earning 
 his living by the day, picked up the book written 
 some years ago by one of the sophisticated, en- 
 titled, " Is Life Worth Living? " and he said, 
 " What kind of a man is it who wants to know, 
 Is life worth living? " It was abundantly worth
 
 108 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 
 
 living to that man ; I suspect it is abundantly worth 
 living to the barbarian. If now we can say that 
 progress is upward, if we can say that the child is 
 growing (and unless we can say that the child is 
 growing it is not much use to talk about him) 
 then we can try to help develop his growth and 
 save repeating the mistakes and errors and pains 
 and aches of young childhood. We may hope to 
 guide society, as it passes on its way on the great 
 spiral circle upwards, so that it shall be able by 
 and by through all its members to see the majesty 
 of the curve on which it rises, so that all souls shall 
 be able to share in this wonderful social self- 
 consciousness which is already coming to many, al- 
 most a new thing in the world! There has been 
 self-consciousness, there has been tribal conscious- 
 ness, there has been class consciousness, these are 
 all terms up toward the great social consciousness 
 of the whole of mankind. 
 
 Now let us try to see for a moment what we 
 mean by poverty, because our problem is largely 
 called the problem of poverty. Poverty, of 
 course, is a purely relative term. If we were to 
 visit an Eskimo tribe, I suppose We should say 
 that there was as wretched poverty in every way 
 as we could imagine, or if we could see some of 
 the primitive tribes such as are still existing in 
 their native haunts. And yet the fact is that 
 they are not conscious of its being poverty. They 
 do not know it until you set something up against 
 it and above it, until you show them people who
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 109 
 
 have what they have not; then they begin to be 
 dissatisfied. To a certain extent this is a very 
 excellent kind of dissatisfaction, serving as a spur 
 and excitement, if a man does not make it the 
 keynote of his life. Is poverty merely the neces- 
 sity of living upon a very small amount of money ? 
 Why, there are many people who are living on a 
 pittance with a very great degree of comfort. 
 There is nothing so perplexing as to be able to 
 state what the minimum wage should be in this 
 country. The minimum wage for a New Yorker 
 is an entirely different thing from the minimum 
 wage down in Alabama. The minimum wage is all 
 the time changing. One woman with a certain 
 minimum wage will do twice as much effective 
 service for her household as another with twice the 
 amount. Is it poverty to be obliged to work? 
 That is simply a continuation of the old false 
 theory of the original curse on labor. We think 
 that there is nothing so precious as to be able to 
 do intelligent work. 
 
 Poverty is essentially, and so far as we are con- 
 cerned with it, whatever takes away or diminishes 
 the power of the man to live the life of a man. 
 If the wages are low, but the man is living the life 
 of a self-determining, aspiring and happy man so 
 far, he is not the victim of poverty. Has a man 
 twice or three times what is usually thought neces- 
 sary for a living, and is he sour and bitter and dis- 
 satisfied? Is he losing the tone of his life? Is 
 he a bad companion, poisoning everyone with his
 
 110 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 
 
 bitterness? Then that man is poor. There is no 
 poverty like want of the manly qualities. There 
 is no poverty that is quite so dreadful as that of 
 the man who has no faith in his life and no hope, 
 who has never met anyone, of whom he was not 
 tempted to say, " What is he after? " The man 
 who has never seen a true friend, the man who has 
 never learned how to be lovable, but is now grow- 
 ing less lovable he suffers poverty. So far as 
 a man is under the influence of such material and 
 outward conditions as bring degradation, sop his 
 manliness, and prevent him from living the full life 
 of a man, he is poor. 
 
 The problem which we have before us is, how 
 to enrich life, and as incidental to this, how to 
 bring about the material conditions, whatever they 
 may be, favorable to a man's full life. I am will- 
 ing to take any theory, socialist or anarchist or 
 whatever you please, if you can show me that by 
 using that theory we shall enrich human life in 
 manhood or womanhood, that we shall give people 
 faith, hope, love, the joy of work, the joy in 
 beauty, the joy of honorable companionship. 
 
 Let us now try to see what necessary conditions 
 there are which we all might agree in wishing to 
 bring about. On this point we have to preach to 
 some of our friends pure opportunism. There are 
 those who say that society is sick and they want 
 to see it grow from bad to worse, until it is simply 
 obliged to take their cure. This is hardly a rea- 
 sonable proposition, even from their point of view.
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 111 
 
 If you run your patient down so low that he has 
 not much vitality left, even your brand new pan- 
 acea may not succeed in curing him. It seems to 
 me that everyone, no matter what his theory is, 
 might agree in such measures as I am going to 
 set forth before you; inasmuch as the kind of 
 radical remedy which certain people assume as the 
 only one is not possible this year anyway, and is 
 not possible probably even with " Boston 1915," 
 or perhaps before 1920! In the meantime do you 
 not want to do something besides talk? Do you 
 not want to help a little to improve conditions so 
 that your patient may be able to stand the opera- 
 tion when it comes? 
 
 Let us begin now with the subject of alcoholic 
 drinks. There is a good subject for all kinds of 
 kindly people who have the interests of humanity 
 at heart enough to be willing to act together. 
 Everybody agrees, even those who like the drink, 
 that a billion and a half a year or more I have 
 seen estimates higher than this is rather exces- 
 sive for that particular kind of dubious expense. 
 This is pretty nearly, I suppose, ten per cent, of 
 all the income of the American people which goes 
 to the degradation of life. You may say that the 
 craving for the alcoholic drinks arise from the 
 peculiar conditions of poverty. Yes, there is ac- 
 tion and reaction from drink to poverty and from 
 poverty to drink, but I suspect that the use of the 
 alcoholic drink comes largely because we are bar- 
 barians. It is the barbarous way of getting ex-
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 
 
 citement and titillation. I suspect if you raised 
 people's wages twice and three times, as long as 
 they were the same people they are now, they would 
 spend a good deal more for drink than they do 
 now. I do not see any reason why they should not. 
 Here is one way in which we need a great deal more 
 of efficient cooperative service of all who love their 
 kind. 
 
 Do not let anyone say, that, if we gave up the 
 alcoholic drinks, the wages of the workingmen 
 would be measurably cut down. I do not believe 
 there is the slightest evidence in favor of that. 
 I think you will find in those communities where 
 they have practically got rid of the alcoholic 
 drinks among large bodies of workmen, that they 
 are better paid than in those communities where 
 the saloons are open. We are delighted that the 
 labor unions and the organizations of the working 
 men generally are so disposed as they are to-day 
 to put the ban upon alcoholic drinks, and I wish 
 that their efforts were matched by the efforts of 
 those who make public opinion through their in- 
 fluence and their education. 
 
 Another way in which we waste the life blood 
 of the nation is through war and preparation for 
 war. Let us stop that. Why should we not? I 
 wish I had time to talk about this and nothing else. 
 I should like to have anyone show me where there 
 is any danger coming to the American nation, even 
 if we should do so radical a thing as to sink every 
 battleship in the sea. I believe it could be easily
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 113 
 
 demonstrated that we should thus be positively 
 safer than we are now. Our danger now is that 
 we may be drawn into war through hasty insolence 
 on the part of some naval officer or diplomat, or 
 through some arrogant message of a President, or 
 through the " cockiness," of newspapers relying 
 on the number of our battleships. There is 
 enough money going to waste under the Army and 
 Navy Departments to double the efficiency of our 
 education all through the United States, if we were 
 able to turn it into the form of education. Most 
 people say, " Oh, war always has been in the world ; 
 of course sometime we will get rid of it." But 
 why should we not say, " We in the United States 
 propose to lead the world in getting rid of it "? 
 
 I want to say something about our own personal 
 way of life. We who are living on salaries have 
 to speak modestly here. Suppose we go out like 
 knight-errants trying to better conditions in the 
 world, and at home our own fields are left untilled 
 and the people who are nearest to us are left unfed. 
 This is like what we do if we go out to preach 
 the Golden Rule in the corners and byways of the 
 next town, while we do not trust the Golden Rule 
 in our own profession or occupation. It is funda- 
 mental to this whole business of civilization, if 
 we believe in God and human progress, that we 
 try the remedy of all the idealists I mean the 
 Golden Rule wherever we are working. It is 
 curious how much apathy and indifference and 
 skepticism we meet among people who, we would
 
 114? A SOCIAL PROGRAM 
 
 suppose, of course would say, " We will do this." 
 One of the dangers of those who are trying to get 
 progress by majority votes is that they say, 
 " When all the rest do right, we will do right,"- 
 as if any progress had ever come in this world, 
 except by those who have said, " We will do right 
 whether any others do so or not." I do not know 
 what profession or occupation there is which is 
 worth a man's engaging in, that is not capable of 
 being managed on the principles of the Golden 
 Rule. Is there any decent occupation that is not 
 a department of social service? Every kind of 
 business is social service. And why should we not 
 trust the great, deep laws of social service? I 
 believe the world is finding this out. I believe there 
 were never so many men who were really trying 
 honestly to do all kinds of business by the Golden 
 Rule. 
 
 Of course, when we leave " business " in the nar- 
 row sense, and talk about the practice of medicine 
 and the higher professions, about art, about teach- 
 ing, about all those numerous occupations in which 
 we are directly servants of others, nothing else 
 works except the Golden Rule. You do not want 
 any teacher in your school who is not following 
 his profession as a part of the law of social service. 
 You certainly cannot then except commercial busi- 
 ness from that great human law that covers 
 all things. Let us believe in this, let us at least 
 vow that we will die in these tracks if we must. 
 I think Tolstoi is right, that if anybody has any-
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 115 
 
 thing useful to do, that man will not be allowed to 
 starve; the world wants him. So I say, let us be 
 very careful at the start that we try hard to earn 
 our living, especially we who are working on sal- 
 aries, so that people who are living on wages shall 
 not be allowed to say, " These men on salaries do 
 not earn their salt." There is nothing that has 
 been such a terror to me all my life as the fear 
 that people might honestly say that. 
 
 Moreover, we have a deal to do about education 
 and in lifting the standard of education. In one 
 respect there is a danger that threatens our age, 
 something like that which threatened the age in 
 which the Roman Empire was running down. 
 I mean the large number of people whom we 
 have in America who have been trained to no 
 efficiency, whose principal idea is to get all they 
 can and to give as little as they can, and whose 
 ideal of public service is to be on the payroll. 
 Our schools so far are not doing very much, with 
 all our civic education, to train up a generation 
 who see what civic life and civic service really are. 
 It is painful to see how many people, who ought to 
 know better, among the intelligent business men 
 who ought to be responsible for the good govern- 
 ment of their town, are not willing to spend one 
 whole day in a year for pure public service. 
 
 Now, our education must be directed toward 
 the training of efficient wills. The Roman Em- 
 pire was doing many things, at least for the people 
 of Rome, which people think society ought to take
 
 116 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 
 
 charge of to-day. It was feeding people, it was 
 giving them games and shows, and as a material 
 civilization it was thought to be a great success. 
 But there were crowds of people filling the city 
 who never had been accustomed to think of doing 
 the slightest thing in return for Rome. There 
 likewise is our danger to-day the want of effi- 
 cient will. In many cases we are pauperizing the 
 wills of our children in both school and the home 
 by doing so much for them and asking so little in 
 return. The mother will hardly let her child help 
 her wash the dishes. 
 
 Moreover, there is an enormous amount of pov- 
 erty, as the Massachusetts commission found in 
 their report on " the high cost of living," in the 
 form of the ill health of the people. It is related, 
 of course, to bad housing conditions, bad hygienic 
 conditions, and also to bad moral conditions. The 
 waste by disease goes high and low; there is no 
 stratum of society which is exempt from it, as no 
 stratum of society, as far as I can see, has any more 
 happiness than any other stratum. I do not 
 know but the highest and lowest classes of all are 
 the nearest together in having the least real satis- 
 faction out of life. Perhaps they are the nearest 
 together also from the danger of suffering from 
 very bad physical conditions, one from not having 
 enough and the other from having more than is 
 good for them, absolutely handicapping their 
 children and making it very doubtful whether 
 their children ever amount to anything. Do not
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 117 
 
 let anybody envy them. The fact is, there is an 
 enormous amount to learn, before we know how 
 to cure the bad physical conditions which pauper- 
 ize life. 
 
 There are a number of other things that I should 
 like to speak about. For instance, the conserva- 
 tion of our natural resources. Everyone ought 
 to be interested in this. Then the conservation 
 of the workers. We are learning new thoughts 
 about what we owe to the men who are always 
 risking their lives on the great system of railways, 
 or in the mines, and are often brought to death 
 for our sakes. We are learning that we are all 
 one body in these men's sufferings, and that we 
 must do what we can to minimize them. 
 
 Again, there is the question of our treatment of 
 the so-called criminal class. I am glad there is 
 a little awakening here in Massachusetts on that 
 subject. It seems to me that in a large way we 
 are doing almost everything that we ought not to 
 do and omitting to do largely those things that we 
 ought to do. Here is a subject in which anyone, 
 especially if he lives near a county jail or State 
 Prison or court house, might easily interest himself 
 to see what society can do next to help build up 
 the sense of responsibility, for instance, on the 
 part of the judges. If the judges knew that they 
 were expected to do their very best for this class, 
 they would readily respond. Now, the judges are 
 pretty much left to themselves, and I hear often 
 of careless, inconsistent and inequitable judgments
 
 118 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 
 
 made, all for want of more public spirit on the 
 part of men and women just like us here. 
 
 Then, to hurry on, I think that one of the most 
 important things, without which we shall never 
 get the great cities where they ought to be, is 
 some general comprehensive measure by which we 
 shall help to place every family, especially every 
 family of children, on a garden spot. I do not 
 believe that you can ever have life right in these 
 cities where the larger part of the people are 
 tenants, and living without any touch of their 
 children with the soil. I believe we must almost 
 rebuild our cities. We must rebuild them with 
 fireproof structures one of these days. We are 
 spending now for loss by fire enough to do it and 
 save money. We are most careless in this matter. 
 
 What I want to speak of especially is the need 
 of that kind of housing which will give each family 
 some sense of independence and some sense of 
 having a stake in the life of the town. You who 
 are interested in the churches know that the people 
 who are mere tenants, moving hither and thither 
 at will, have very little interest in the churches, 
 and are generally very poor citizens. Now, at the 
 very time when we have the most tremendous needs 
 for civic expense and are going into debt at 
 such a rate that the city of Boston this year spends 
 something like $7,000,000 for its interest money 
 and its sinking fund enough, if it had not gone 
 into debt, to pay as it goes and to get everything 
 beautiful and necessary that it wants without ever
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 119 
 
 going into debt again with this tremendous 
 pressure upon us of debt and expense, we have at 
 our hands a means of determining and of providing 
 all the expense through the growing wealth that 
 comes unearned by anyone, but earned by all the 
 community in the increasing value of land. They 
 say that every immigrant and every baby born in 
 the city of New York adds by the mere increment 
 of the mass as much as $750 to the land values 
 of that city. We are doing the same thing every- 
 where, increasing the land values, and simply let- 
 ting this great sum which ought to go for every 
 kind of civic improvement, go into the hands of 
 the landlords. Of course we recognize the fact 
 that the landlords in many cases may have hon- 
 estly earned their money which they have invested 
 in city land for further rise. But that has noth- 
 ing to do with the great question of equity in- 
 volved, that this increase of the value ought ob- 
 viously to belong everyone who looks into it 
 must recognize that to the whole body of so- 
 ciety which makes the increment, and which needs 
 the value that comes from the increment. And 
 somehow, even if we have to carry our process of 
 adjusting this thing through a number of years, 
 sooner or later we must contrive to bring it about ; 
 and then we can do all kinds of beautiful things. 
 We can do what Mayor Tom Johnson of Cleve- 
 land said ought to be done in every city make 
 the transportation system as free as the elevators 
 are in a great building, so that the people who live
 
 120 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 
 
 ten miles out of town can have free rides back 
 and forth to their work. We can do such things 
 as are called for, if they prove to be for the 
 common good, when first we do the one thing that 
 is just and right about the city lands. 
 
 Here is a pretty programme for you. But what 
 is the good of the programme, however pretty, 
 if we simply look upon it, as we so often do, as a 
 fine scheme, and that is all? I think very few 
 of us have any idea of the difference between the 
 theory, the scheme, the ideal, and the labor cost 
 of bringing the thing to pass. And yet we all 
 know it is no good whatever, except as a genial 
 recommendation, unless we try to bring it to pass. 
 This takes us back again to the solid need of what 
 we who believe in religion think religion is good 
 for. What is, deep down, the real use of a man? 
 To put it in another form, what is the highest form 
 of the life of a human being? Is it not this, that 
 the man shall be able with all his senses, and his 
 skill, and his intelligence and his moral faculties 
 and his integrity, to be a sort of channel through 
 which the good-will of the universe may be made 
 to show itself and prevail? Was there ever a 
 happy human life that was not in some sense a 
 medium through which the divine goodness was 
 operative? Was there ever a human life which 
 was a failure in genuine happiness, no matter how 
 full of suffering that life was, so long as it was in 
 some degree a channel through which devoted kind- 
 liness ran?
 
 A SOCIAL PROGRAM 
 
 I believe that we must preach this everywhere. 
 We must preach it first to ourselves we must see 
 that man's life is not worth living unless it is 
 made a medium for devoted kindliness. And then 
 we must go out and seek to do all kinds of things 
 in this world, whereby these conditions shall be 
 made to prevail through which every human life 
 everywhere shall be made a channel for the devoted 
 goodness of the universe, the good-will of God, to 
 run and rule. I believe the world needs nothing 
 so much as that we shall proclaim through the 
 land, that we live in a divine universe, that there 
 is a living God, and that the whole enterprise of 
 life is simply to live like the sons and daughters 
 of God.
 
 WHAT SOME CHURCHES ARE DOING 
 
 REV. P. R. FROTHINGHAM 
 Minister, Arlington Street Church, Boston, Mass. 
 
 Whatever I have to say will be interesting only 
 as the specific is of value in contrast with the 
 merely speculative, and as the thing that is being 
 done becomes significant when set over against the 
 thing that is being talked about. I am not here to 
 tell all that our church is doing, that would be a 
 rather large contract. I simply want to describe 
 one thing, viz., the work of our tuberculosis class. 
 
 About eight years ago when the determined 
 attack against tuberculosis first began, some of the 
 churches came forward and enquired what they 
 could do to help in the fight. It was a Boston 
 physician, I think, a specialist in the work, who 
 indicated this line of action as one that they 
 might successfully undertake. It was in response 
 to this suggestion that .about seven years ago we 
 in the Arlington Street church organized our tu- 
 berculosis class. Let me explain just what such 
 a class stands for and what it ought to accom- 
 plish. 
 
 A great many people in our communities are 
 attacked by this terrible disease who cannot afford 
 to go away to get the clear, cold air and the out-
 
 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 
 
 of-door treatment that is afforded by life in the 
 Adirondacks or further out, as in Colorado. The 
 suggestion therefore was made that the poorer tu- 
 berculosis patients, by being brought together and 
 organized into little groups, might be instructed 
 in the modern methods of treating this trouble, 
 and by meeting together and comparing notes 
 would be encouraged to follow out the regime and 
 to submit themselves to the discipline ordered by 
 the physician. 
 
 The first thing, of course, is to get a good phy- 
 sician, and that nowadays is not a difficult thing 
 to do. I am always impressed by the amount of 
 service that our doctors, and especially our young 
 doctors, are willing to render. They are intensely 
 eager in many instances to be of social use. It is 
 comparatively easy, therefore, to find a young 
 physician who has made somewhat of a specialty 
 of tuberculosis who is willing to help. With him 
 there must be a trained nurse, or district visitor. 
 
 The ideal class consists, I think, of something 
 like twenty-five to thirty patients. When our 
 class was first organized, I remember a curious 
 objection that was made to it. One of the older 
 members of the church came to me in some distress 
 and remarked that she was afraid she would never 
 be able to go into the vestry again. I said, " What 
 is the matter with the vestry ? " " Why," she said, 
 " all those people who are sick with consumption 
 coming in there I don't see what you are think- 
 ing of." And it was only with difficulty that I
 
 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 
 
 allayed her fears by assuring her that the tuber- 
 culosis class did not come to the vestry but that 
 it met in a room connected with one of our dis- 
 pensaries. 
 
 The benefit of getting people together who are 
 suffering from a trouble of that sort lies, I think, 
 in the fact that they encourage one another. That 
 is to say, a good patient and by that I mean 
 one who obeys the rules, does as he or she is told 
 sets a good example to the others and is apt to 
 be held up as an example. Another thing also is 
 if the good patient has been in the class two or 
 three months and makes continual progress, it 
 being part of the system that every time the class 
 meets, once a week, each patient is examined and 
 weighed and the record of weight compared with 
 the record of the weight of the week before, it 
 is a tremendous stimulus to the others who are 
 pretty sick to see this individual going steadily 
 ahead. Therefore by getting this group together 
 and by encouraging them to see and study one 
 another's cases, there is inevitably an element of 
 competition that comes in to stimulate them. In 
 the case of patients who are distinctly poor, as so 
 often happens, or who become suddenly poor be- 
 ing obliged to give up their work, it is necessary 
 to give assistance ; and the money is used chiefly 
 to supply them with tents and blankets and gen- 
 eral outdoor equipment, with thermometers by 
 which they can make a record of their own temper- 
 ature, and in certain cases with nourishing food.
 
 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 125 
 
 Now, to indicate what has been accomplished, I 
 wish to give you the records of the past six years 
 of this class in the Arlington Street church. We 
 have had one hundred and three patients. Of 
 these one hundred and three we had last spring 
 direct knowledge of ninety -nine; and of these 
 ninety-nine patients, many of whom were desper- 
 ately ill when they came to us, only twenty-four 
 have died. Seventy-five, or seventy-five per cent, 
 are living; sixteen are absolutely cured, twenty- 
 four have had the disease arrested, thirty-one are 
 improved, and only four out of all those who have 
 lived can be set down as not having been improved. 
 Fifty-nine, or fifty-nine per cent., are working at 
 the present time, engaged in such ordinary 
 pursuits as dressmaking, plumbing, teaming, night 
 watchman and work of that kind. Of course it is 
 very desirable, and we try in every way, to get the 
 discharged patient an out-of-door position. The 
 Elevated Railway has been very helpful in that it 
 has been willing to take our men patients and put 
 them on to out-of-door work. You see that in 
 connection with the class a great deal of the ordi- 
 nary work of the Associated Charities is absolutely 
 necessary, and our committee of the church, con- 
 sisting of eight or ten members, is oftentimes 
 kept busy trying to get positions for these people 
 who have been restored to health and are ready to 
 begin again the great struggle for self-support. 
 
 In regard to expense, our class, ranging from 
 twenty to thirty members last year it was the
 
 126 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 
 
 largest that it had been at all and numbered thirty- 
 seven has cost on an average about $1,100 a 
 year, which means a cost per patient of $66 per 
 year, or a cost per month of about $5.50. I 
 think you will agree, taking into account the fig- 
 ures I have read, that the cost of setting a person 
 on his or her feet again after an attack of this 
 dread disease, a cost of only $66 a year, is a very 
 moderate expense in this day of high cost of liv- 
 ing. I believe, therefore, that the work is one of 
 the most beneficent and fruitful that can be un- 
 dertaken. We are proving to these patients that 
 it is not necessary to go to the Adirondacks nor 
 to Colorado, but if they are willing to live and 
 sleep in the open air and obey our rules, that we 
 can in the great majority of cases send them out 
 healthy and self-supporting people.
 
 WHAT SOME CHURCHES ARE DOING 
 REV. EDWIN ALFRED RUMBALL 
 
 Minister, First Unitarian Congregational Society, 
 Rochester, N. Y. 
 
 When I was asked to give this address, I 
 replied that I would like to add a word about 
 some of the things we want to do as well as of 
 what we are doing; but as I thought about the 
 topic it seemed to me that I ought to add some- 
 thing concerning what was done before I went to 
 Rochester, which has made the work since accom- 
 plished so much easier. I doubt whether the 
 Rochester Church would be doing much Social 
 Service work to-day had it not been for the splen- 
 did service which Dr. and Mrs. Gannett put in 
 there during the twenty years previous. 
 
 I should be well within the bounds of extreme 
 statement if I said that when Dr. and Mrs. Gannett 
 came to the city in 1889 a new social era began. 
 The good works did not all begin as Unitarian 
 works, for they had the quiet modest way of going 
 behind the scenes of action to help, sometimes with 
 little gifts of money, but most often and best of 
 all by putting into them character and strength. 
 
 When I came to Rochester some five years ago 
 
 I found a church which had fed on the fruit of 
 127
 
 128 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 
 
 one of the richest of spiritual experiences, and 
 not only was this finding expression in many ways 
 in the community, but there was plenty of instru- 
 mentality for wider and larger work. I would 
 like at the outset to indicate a few of the big 
 things which began during the twenty years of 
 their ministry. 
 
 It is part of the record of Dr. Gannett's first 
 year in the city that the Rochester Boys' Evening 
 Home was founded. With the cooperation of 
 many citizens whom he had interested in the pro- 
 ject, this work was started. To-day it is the oldest 
 Boys' Club in the city and recently I made a 
 calculation which showed that over twenty-five 
 hundred different boys had come directly under its 
 influence. I should like to take time to read some 
 of the letters of old boys which I have testifying 
 to the good which they had received from the 
 Home. We hear from time to time of how this 
 boy and that boy is making good. Two or three 
 of them are Rabbis, some few are teaching in col- 
 leges and schools, and most are going the everyday 
 paths nobler men for having during four or five 
 years of their boyhood met some of the noblest. 
 Of course they heard good stories there, and there 
 learned carpentry, basketry, and how to wrestle 
 and play games with fairness, but they came, too, 
 into close contact with helpers and teachers whose 
 lives still give concreteness to their ideals of un- 
 selfish service and brotherhood. 
 
 During this same previous period there was
 
 started what we have come to call the Neighbor- 
 hood Friendly. This was first of all a Saturday 
 morning school for girls to learn domestic science. 
 Here the children of the poorer homes and the 
 tenements near the church have learned to make 
 their own clothes and the clothes of their younger 
 sisters, and also some of the secrets of cooking, 
 with relaxations in folk-dancing and story-telling. 
 The interesting feature about our constituency 
 is that while most of our boys come from Jewish 
 homes, most of our girls come from Catholic 
 homes. If any question of religion ever arises, 
 and it seldom if ever does, we follow the policy 
 of advising loyalty to their own traditions. There 
 are other good things which might be told 
 of the twenty years preceding our coming 
 to Rochester which might be learned from 
 and proudly told by our workers who have served 
 under both " administrations." Not the least 
 of such stories would be of the beginnings of 
 Rochester's two social settlements, one in the Jew- 
 ish quarter and one in the Italian quarter, both 
 of which more or less directly were fanned into a 
 flame of life by Unitarian hands within that really 
 wonderful twenty years. Dr. and Mrs. Gannett 
 not only regenerated human lives but wherever 
 these regenerated human lives went they brought 
 about still further social regeneration. I do not 
 think that I can ever come to the dogmatic opin- 
 ion that a changed environment is the only thing 
 needful for the regeneration of society, because
 
 130 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 
 
 that doctrine is contradicted all the time in my 
 city by the men and women, poor and rich, who are 
 serving the highest ideals, whose consecration first 
 began in the church or home of this faithful min- 
 ister and his wife. 
 
 How as to the present activities of the church 
 and the Social Service plant from which we work. 
 The Boys' Evening Home is still busy and as large 
 or larger than ever. Last year we had three hun- 
 dred and thirty-six different boys in the club. 
 They are still largely Jewish boys, which has led 
 some to feel there is danger of the home becoming 
 less efficient for the needs of our community. For 
 it is not the Jewish boy to-day, as it was years ago, 
 who most needs us; it is the Italian, Greek and 
 Polish boy who needs us most, and one of the great 
 things we have before us is to obtain this larger 
 efficiency. Last winter we had a number of Italian 
 and Irish boys and it was very interesting to see 
 the race differences and the harder task which non- 
 Jewish boys may have in store for us. The 
 Neighborhood Friendly is also doing well and each 
 year scores of garments are made by the girls. 
 
 The new thing about our work, if it can be said 
 to have anything really new, is our deeper sense 
 of a neighborhood task. We are coming to look 
 at our work, whether for boys or girls or mothers 
 or fathers as a unit and not as a number of sep- 
 arate philanthropies. This began about three 
 years ago when we added a new building to our 
 well-used parish house and made its capacity
 
 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 131 
 
 about three times that of the old one. This Gan- 
 nett House, as we call it, gives us a fine plant for 
 all our social activities. The auditorium will seat 
 about three hundred people and its floor is praised 
 by the neighborhood young men and women as ex- 
 cellent for dancing. Numerous class-rooms up- 
 stairs and downstairs take care of the clay-model- 
 ing, basketry, carpentry and other lessons which 
 we teach. Our gymnasium is not as large as the 
 auditorium but is well used, and while the church 
 may not be open throughout the week, we could 
 say that Gannett House is hardly ever closed. 
 
 This neighborhood task became more conscious 
 with us about two years ago when we made a small 
 social survey of the ward in the middle of which 
 our church stands. We had a rough idea of the 
 needs of the community but none had ever tried 
 to find out the full problem which faced us, and 
 just how many-sided it was. We did not know 
 what other agencies were there to meet the need 
 besides ourselves. So two years ago, I gave up 
 half of my vacation and made a survey of the social 
 needs of the ward, especially in reference to the 
 children and the question of housing. After hav- 
 ing personally made about a thousand calls and 
 obtaining reports from three others who made 
 some five hundred calls between them, we found 
 that our ward was most dense in population of 
 all the down-town wards of Rochester, having in 
 one place a population of sixty-three to the acre, 
 which holds the rank of third in the most dense
 
 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 
 
 sections of the entire city. We found forty sa- 
 loons to seven churches. We found there were 
 five hundred and fifty children in the ward of whom 
 two hundred were under five years of age. We 
 found that half of those over five had lost during 
 the previous school session over two thousand days 
 in sickness, and when we came to look for the rea- 
 son we found that over two hundred of the children 
 lived in tenements and yardless flats with nowhere 
 but the street for play. We found one hundred 
 and four homes wholly supported by women, and 
 fifty regular recipients of charity in this really 
 small area. We found that nearly all the homes 
 were rented and but very few owned by the occu- 
 pants. Three hundred families were living in 
 tenements and apartments, fifteen hundred in 
 rooms and some score or more in little houses or 
 shacks built in the gardens of other homes. We 
 found that we could not blame the incoming im- 
 migrant, for with the exception of some eight per 
 cent., all were poor Americans, and most of the 
 eight per cent, had been here long enough to be 
 classed with the same. Our own church had only 
 four families in the entire ward, so you will see 
 that our work for the ward cannot be classed as 
 pastoral so much as outside social work.* 
 
 In making the investigation we found all kinds 
 
 * The Survey was printed in an illustrated thirty-two 
 page pamphlet, which can be obtained from the Depart- 
 ment of Social and Public Service, 25 Beacon Street, Bos- 
 ton, Mass.
 
 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 133 
 
 of evil conditions and among other things houses of 
 ill-fame. These we reported and had the pleasure 
 three days after of seeing the places cleaned up by 
 the police. Our two hundred children without a 
 playground were the next for whom we worked. 
 After obtaining signatures to a petition, we had 
 a number of the children carry the petition, twenty 
 feet long, to the Mayor, and the playground was 
 granted and there is hope that a larger one will 
 some day be added. Having found that such a 
 large number of the children in the ward were 
 sick so frequently, and feeling that the reason for 
 it all might be met by a school nurse, we have be- 
 gun work to secure such help and by the time I 
 get home I expect to find that that nurse has been 
 appointed by the city. 
 
 Then there were larger and harder problems. 
 Nearby were two of the most popular dancing 
 halls in the city, and both of them were upstairs 
 over saloons. We felt that it was a church duty 
 to open a dance hall to compete with these places, 
 so to-day I hold a city license to conduct a dance 
 hall in the city of Rochester, probably the only 
 Unitarian minister who is also a licensed dance 
 hall keeper. The young men and women who come 
 pay a little below the regular prices at the other 
 places and we have our hall under the supervision 
 of one of the very best dancing teachers in the 
 city. So far, the expense of teachers and pianists 
 has been met from the income from entrance fees. 
 The girls are mostly from factories and stores
 
 134 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 
 
 and in great need of such opportunities for their 
 leisure time. They have very little in their homes 
 to attract them at night, so by opening our doors 
 and making them welcome they have their recre- 
 ation under very much better auspices than they 
 could have at the commercialized amusements. 
 
 In the summer time when the church is closed 
 and most of the social activities are suspended, we 
 do something else. Last year for the first time 
 one of our workers was able to take some of the 
 working girls most needing it to the Thousand 
 Islands for a few weeks. Such a treat may not 
 happen again and yet it may. We had found that 
 in the tenements surrounding the church many 
 of the mothers had no bathroom where they could 
 bathe their smaller children, so we offered our 
 tub at Gannett House and the help of a worker, 
 and all through the summer once every week the 
 water was kept hot, and at the rate of twenty-three 
 a day the little babies were washed either by the 
 worker or the mother. We used to have this 
 washing on Saturday until we found that it was a 
 sin for some of our little Jewish girls to do such 
 a thing. " Why, mother would not wash her face 
 on Saturday," said one little one and so we changed 
 the day to Friday. 
 
 But, as all in this kind of work know too well, 
 neighborhood problems are also city and social 
 problems and cannot be met by dealing only with 
 the neighborhood. To make one ward what it 
 ought to be, we must lift all wards. Just what
 
 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 135 
 
 part the Rochester Church is playing in this 
 larger work, we will indicate in closing. Some of 
 the great social problems most to the front at this 
 time in Rochester gather about the housing, milk 
 and recreation questions. We have no Men's Club 
 in the church, but the minister and a number of the 
 men of the congregation are prominent in the life 
 of the City Club, which is one of the most vital 
 public opinionrmaking forces in the city. The 
 great needs of the city are very frankly discussed 
 by the men of this club which usually averages 
 a membership of four hundred and more, and has an 
 average attendance of nearly half the membership 
 each week. Most of the well-known speakers 
 whom Mr. Wiers says he has had in Montclair, 
 we have enjoyed listening to at the City Club. 
 We feel there is a certain advantage in sharing 
 these good things with Baptist and Presbyterian, 
 Episcopalian and Methodist men, instead of try- 
 ing to enjoy them only as Unitarians. If the men 
 of Rochester have any interest in housing reform, 
 milk purity or any other vital question of the day, 
 and they have such an interest, it is largely 
 because of the City Club discussions. The Fourth 
 of July Welcome-Feast to our Immigrant Citizens 
 which has now been heard of all over the country 
 was started by the City Club, and the Unitarian 
 minister has always been a member of or chairman 
 of the Committee of Welcome. 
 
 In addition to the quota which as individual 
 church members we have been able to give to the
 
 136 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 
 
 city social progress, I have been asked to say a 
 word about the magazine which I edit in the city 
 which has for its object the civic and social wel- 
 fare of the people of Rochester. I should prefer 
 speaking of this in an impersonal way if I could, 
 but for the last few years the work has largely 
 come upon me. Associated with me is a physician 
 who is an elder in one of the large Presbyterian 
 churches and an advertising man, who acts as 
 Secretary and Treasurer of the Common Good 
 Publishing Company of which I am now the Pres- 
 ident. The charter of our incorporation will per- 
 mit us to do any kind of publishing and book 
 business work, but apart from the publishing of 
 the " Fourth Ward Survey," we have done only 
 the work attached to the monthly appearance of 
 our little magazine, called The Common Good. 
 It costs about $100 a month to run it, which we 
 obtain from advertisements and subscriptions and 
 a little outside help. Our circulation is one thou- 
 sand copies a month. In this magazine which is 
 about the size of " The Survey," having regularly 
 thirty-two pages, well illustrated, we print articles 
 on local, social and civic conditions. What " The 
 Survey " is to the country, we try to be to our own 
 city. We find that there is often material which 
 the press of the city cannot print, or are unwilling 
 for a multitude of reasons to print, which makes 
 a good " scoop " for The Common Good. With- 
 out fear or favor, but with care to have the facts, 
 we report on investigations made and blaze the
 
 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 137 
 
 way for most of the at present unrealized civic 
 ideals of community life. Last summer our 
 magazine led the fight against the erection of a 
 huge tenement in the city and with the cooperation 
 of many others and the opposition of all the daily 
 papers, we saw our efforts rewarded, and the 
 tenement is not to be built. At the present time 
 we are in a campaign for pure milk and the 
 magazine took all the dealers by surprise one 
 month by printing their bacteria records for the 
 public to read. This was a daring thing and some 
 dealers lost customers because of our daring, but 
 by turning publicity on their work we have already 
 seen an improvement in the milk. We shall con- 
 tinue to print these records, unless we can get the 
 city to enforce their publicity, until we can insure 
 a better milk supply for the children. Even the 
 press of the city has recognized our work in this 
 direction and one of the evening papers began to 
 make the dealers more fearful by saying, " If 
 you want to find out about your milkman, read 
 The Common Good" With such an organ of 
 publicity in our hands we can afford to be less 
 dependent on the local press and bring to public 
 attention many things that otherwise might be 
 hidden. Its circulation is almost wholly in the 
 best and most influential homes in the city. 
 
 Finally, let me say a word about the principles 
 which are guiding us in all the social service work 
 of the church. From beginning to end our work 
 is undenominational. We keep the Unitarian
 
 name out of it. I think that I am right in saying 
 that in all the twenty years work with our boys, 
 never one has joined our church, and, contrary to 
 some churches, we are rather proud of the fact. 
 By it we have increased confidence in all our work 
 among all classes of people in the city. They 
 have come to believe in our honesty of purpose 
 and in the sincerity of our social aim. If there 
 is any glory to reap we would rather not reap it 
 as a church, for so many others have worked and 
 helped with us that we would rather leave alone 
 what is so hard to apportion justly. I would like 
 to emphasize this, because I have heard even among 
 Unitarians the emphasis on the opposite policy. 
 Are we primarily doing this social work to make 
 our churches stronger or to serve the humanity 
 of our communities? Is it to be unselfish service 
 or bait for church membership? We are trying 
 in Rochester to take what we conceive to be the 
 higher of these alternatives. For example, I 
 hope that in a few years, we shall not have a 
 dancing hall at Gannett House. If there has been 
 any real success in our work in the city for the 
 common good, we ought to have by that time trans- 
 ferred such activities to the school house. It must 
 be community, not church work eventually, and all 
 our efforts should have that end in mind. I hope 
 that one of these days, it will not be within five 
 years, we can shut Gannett House entirely so 
 far as the kind of social activities are concerned 
 that we have there now, and go on to other pioneer
 
 WHAT CHURCHES ARE DOING 139 
 
 work which will be waiting as vision for new 
 toilers in that day. These reforms, these charities, 
 if they are worth while and to be permanent, must 
 be the organized friendliness of the community. 
 The church must live for the future and other 
 institutions. It must die to live. That principle 
 remains always true for the church ; it was true in 
 the beginning, it will be true in the fiftieth century 
 just as much as in the first: dying to live is the 
 highest service of God.
 
 HH 
 
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