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 31 ~ University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. UCLA LAW LIBRARY RECEIVED FEB 1 1997 S.TI.-S 9482 LIBRARY FACILITY A 000 864 066 6