The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center. The city has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant. Here is heaped the social dynamite; here the dangerous elements are multiplied and concentered.—Josiah Strong.
VI
THE FOREIGN PERIL OF THE CITY
The city is the most difficult and perplexing problem of modern times.—Francis Lieber.
We must save the city if we would save the nation. Municipal government and city evangelization together constitute the distinctive problem of the city, for this generation at least.—Josiah Strong.
Talk of Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture chamber of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and bleeding heart through the shambles of our civilization needs no such fantastic images of the poet to teach him horror.—General Booth.
With the influx of a large foreign population into the great cities, there have come also foreign customs and institutions, laxity and license—those phases of evil which are the most insidious foes of the purity and strength of a people. The slums of our large cities are but the stagnant pools of illiteracy, vice, pauperism, and crime, annually fed by this floodtide of immigration.—R. M. Atchison.