It is well to place a record here of the average annual salary of various classes of wage-earners in Montreal at present:
A central executive entitled “The Trades and Labour Council” has done very effective work in harmonizing difficulties and in promoting useful legislation for the working classes.
THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION
[3] The development of the modern moral and intellectual assistance for the worker may now be instanced. The work of the Y.M.C.A., now so largely developed on the American continent, owes its origin to Montreal. Its history is briefly thus. It was in the Baptist Church on St. Helen’s Street, in the ’50s, that the beginnings of the association took form. The official date given on a tablet placed on the Gault Building on St. Helen Street places the date as November, 1851.
Among those present were Messrs. F.E. Grafton, T. James Claxton, W.H. Milne, F.H. Marling, and John Holland. Mr. Marling, who was a student in the Congregational College, was chairman of the meeting. A canvass was made of the churches and encouragement obtained for the project. One of the planks in the constitution was that the association would never admit any intermeddling with those matters of faith and polity on which the Protestant church may differ.
There was a general committee appointed and this body rented the Odd Fellows’ Hall on St. James Street. In 1851, the Rev. Donald Fraser, the pastor of Coté Street Presbyterian Church, delivered the inaugural lecture.
The young association had much difficulty to realize growth, but a city missionary was appointed to give his whole time to the work of obtaining support, and of familiarizing the churches and the people generally with the objects of the work.
Mr. John Holland, one of the original members, moved to Toronto in 1853, and was instrumental in forming the first association in that city.
There was a confederation of all the associations on this continent in 1855, and to this the local association gave its adhesion. All the European associations met this same year at Paris, and reached what was known as the “Paris basis,” to which the local association also gave its adhesion.