A bill is now pending (February, 1915) before Congress to bar from interstate commerce the products of mills, mines, quarries, factories and workshops employing child labor.
Home Missions must also face to-day the infinitely complex and rapidly increasing problem involved in the adjustment of our population to cities and away from rural districts. Thus cities are becoming dominant factors to be reckoned with in all the elements that enter into the question of religious and moral uplift, as well as the ideals and the welfare of our nation.
Here the aggregation of immigrants focuses acutely the complex problems peculiar to them.
Here is the child laborer in factories and on the streets.
Here women and girls struggle under fearful economic pressure.
Here is the political boss—and what ex-President Roosevelt terms "organized alliance between the criminal rich and the criminal poor."
Here is the class consciousness and hatred—the cry of anarchy and socialism.
"To-day seventy-six per cent of the population of Massachusetts live in cities; of New York, eighty-five and one-half per cent; New Jersey, sixty-one and two-tenths; Connecticut, fifty-three and two-tenths; Illinois is one-half urban, and forty per cent of California's people live under city conditions." [Footnote: Frederic C. Howe—The City, the Hope of Democracy.]
Contrasted with this peculiar burden of the city, there is the country church and the adaptation needed to maintain it in any degree of effectiveness, when its very life blood has been drained for the city. It has made untold contributions of ministers, missionaries, church officers and members to the cities and distant fields, leaving the mother church childless and weak in its advancing years.
Changes that leave almost none of its former constituency confront the country church.