The foreigners who stand perhaps in greatest need of the understanding sympathy and the harmonizing influence of the church are those isolated in the great mining regions, where the conditions of living are so hazardous and where maladjustments of every sort contribute to an atmosphere which breathes of hatred and discontent. It is estimated that our present industrial system, through criminal negligence, takes the huge toll of 45,000 workers killed every year.
One miner of every hundred dies because his employer cares less for the lives of his men than for the few extra dollars, the cost of proper safety arrangements.
"In the course of the Pittsburgh survey it was discovered that by industrial accidents Allegheny County alone loses more than five hundred workmen every year, sixty per cent of whom are young men who have not yet reached the prime of life. This loss falls not upon the people who determine the degree of protection from injury and decide about the introduction of safety devices, but upon the widows, the orphans and the aged parents."
Here the resourceful Home Missionary is an inestimable help. She is often a Slavish or Bohemian girl, knowing from actual experience all the sordidness, the monotony, the tragedy that envelop the mine and its workers, for in many cases she herself has been a part of it, herself Christianized, educated and trained by Home Missions. She speaks the language of the mines, she knows its innermost life. When the frequent accidents, throw their desolation and fearful economic burdens upon the homes, she comforts and sustains. She helps the stricken wife and children to keep to decency and right. She teaches night classes in English, and mothers' classes, sustains reading and club rooms with games and wholesome amusements to hold the boy miner from the lure of the saloon. She conducts the Sunday-school and is herself a peripatetic Christian settlement, with all that it implies of sacrifice, service and the salvation of soul and body.
A commentary on the need of Home Missions in the mining sections is forcibly presented in the following testimony.
Before the Commission of Industrial Relations (February, 1915) Mrs. Dominiki from the Colorado mines, speaking of the general labor conditions in the district in which she lived, said:
"I never saw a church in any of the coal camps except Trinidad. There were no halls where people might meet but there were always plenty of saloons.
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"Hotels, boarding houses of many descriptions, stores, saloons and gambling dens, are visible on every street. Everything suggested money-making and money-spending." [Footnote: The Outlook—February 17, 1915.]
This typical mining town does not pretend to have any sacred days or sacred hours. Business, money-making and sporting are the great aim of life. The mines work seven days each week and twenty-four hours each day. The great concentrators know no pause; the cables are ever busy transporting the mineral from the tunnels to the mills.