“I have signed up eight hundred working men for a Y. M. C. A. membership in our mining town. After a thorough investigation, we feel that the Association will meet the needs of the men better than any other agency.”
“I am superintendent of schools here and am putting in evening classes for the first time in this city, and an using Roberts’ method of English for foreigners.”
“Have just been elected president of the Social Hygiene Society in this community.”
“I have been traveling all over the country and have noticed that the heart has almost been educated out of some of my friends with degrees. I am convinced that every undergraduate enlisted in this volunteer work will have the broad field of humanity opened before him. It’s great business.”
One of America’s greatest football captains, a few months after graduation, wrote from a construction camp in Colorado:
“Remembering what I learned in this movement at Yale, when I became foreman I treated my gang of Italians as men and not as dogs, and it was really pitiful to see the way they returned the little kindness I showed them. Each day I was met with cheery words of greeting. When the job was complete the men came to me in a bunch, thanked me for the fair way I had treated them, and said they would like to work for me always.”
What greater satisfaction could an engineer ask? And what may it not mean to the industrial world of tomorrow, as hundreds and hundreds of engineering and other students graduate from college with a new vision of their service opportunities, and a knowledge of how to help. In one college town through the entire winter, the son of a railway magnate, who has 25,000 men under him, taught a group of foreign laborers in one of the worst districts of the city. Who can judge of that man’s influence a few years hence?
This in brief is the story of the industrial service movement, which heads up in the Industrial Department of the Y. M. C. A. International Committee, in which state committees and nearly 300 student and city associations co-operate, and for which thousands of college men are conscientiously working. From the central office of the secretary a letter of news, suggestion and inspiration, and quantities of helpful literature go each month to the local secretaries who are co-operating.
Thus, quietly but rapidly, without undue advertising has been advancing a great movement, broad in scope, submerging creed and class in altruistic service; deep in influence, reaching to the very heart of many vital industrial problems of the day. At a conservative estimate 3,500 undergraduates are reaching over 60,000 working men and boys each week in definite constructive service, which will make for better understanding, the improvement of industrial and social conditions and the transforming of individual lives. No one can measure the helpful service of the 3,000 graduates who also are promoting the ideals of the movement. As hundreds of men continue to graduate with a new vision of their service opportunities and responsibilities, who can foresee their influence in maintaining industrial righteousness and industrial peace?