Obrázky stránek
PDF
ePub

years this corporation has been erecting branch houses at the rate of one every six days. All told, it owns 725 buildings. Its real estate is worth $70,000,000 and it has maintenance funds of $14,000,000 more, giving it a total capital of $84,000,000. The name of this organization is the Young Men's Christian Association. Its business is the conservation of America's manhood.

And it is because it is a business that this enormous fund has come to the Y. M. C. A. This great sum has been given by philanthropic investors who were looking for a "guaranteed investment." The assurance of returns that they sought they have found in the fact that the Y. M. C. A. is run on a business basis. Its directors are men of exceptional ability. Its plants are operated under scientific management. Its officers and workers are experts. First, last, and all the time, the Y. M. C. A. is run, not as a charity, but as a business.

Conducted thus it gets results. In 1902 the men led to profess Christianity through the Y. M. C. A. numbered 12,581. In 1912 the number had increased to 17,181. In the same decade its educational classes grew from 29,132 men to 67,417 - a growth of 131 per cent. The weekly attendance at religious services increased from 64,000 to 112,000. The number of men attending gymnasium classes jumped from 89,960 to 175,433, an increase of 95 per cent. The average daily attendance at Y. M. C. A. rooms increased 127 per cent., being 98,103 in 1902 and in 1912 reaching 223,000. During the same ten years the membership increased from 323,224 to 566,101. Throughout the United States one person of every 181 persons, on the average, is a member of the Y. M. C. A.

The Y. M. C. A. has chosen for its own the motto of Terence: "Nothing that concerns a man do I deem of indifference to me." That is the reason the Y. M. C. A. is gaining such a tremendous hold on the men of America. That is the reason men are flocking to its standard so continuously that buildings cannot be put up fast enough to accommodate them. Go to any great city, and there

you will find a Y. M. C. A. building, rising like a lighthouse to keep the feet from stumbling. For understand that the Y. M. C. A. is in no sense a rescue mission to salvage stranded hulks of men. Its purpose is to help men avoid shipwreck. In port after port American sailors are flocking to the Y. M. C. A. In Brooklyn Mrs. Finley J. Shepard (formerly Miss Helen Gould) erected a navy Y. M. C. A. building that cost $1,000,000. The building was hardly opened before it was overcrowded. Mrs. Russell Sage doubled its size with the same result.

Before this Y. M. C. A. plant was erected, many men from the battleships headed for the dives and the saloons the minute they got ashore. Nowadays 95 per cent. of a battleship's crew make a bee-line for the Y. M. C. A. the minute they set foot on shore in Brooklyn. And they are leaving in the savings fund there $1,000 a day $1,000 a day that formerly went to dive keepers and saloon men. Altogether the sailors of the navy deposited $815,000 in the Y. M. C. A. savings department during 1912. On 229,000 occasions sailors with shore leave slept in the beds of various Y. M. C. A. buildings. And aboard the battleships plowing the seas are Y. M. C. A. secretaries to continue the work begun on land.

Among the men of the army the work of the Y. M. C. A., which now reaches two thirds of the enlisted men, began, like the work in the navy, at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Under governmental authorization 133 large tents were fitted out as Y. M. C. A. stations in the United States, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. The cost of this work for 1898 was $135,225. So helpful did it prove that at the close of the war officers and soldiers united in urging its continuance. Three army Three army Association. buildings were soon erected at a cost of $60,000, and others have followed. Recognizing the Y. M. C. A. as an aid to efficiency in the army, the Secretary of War provided for the housing of army Associations in the post exchange buildings, and for these buildings Congress appropriated $1,500,000.

At Fort Slocum, N. Y., there is an excel

lent Y. M. C. A. building and a live secretary. "The question has not been how to reach the men," writes Post Secretary Edward Slusser, "but how to care for them as they come. On one Sunday in March the attendance was 3,764. A A "large number of men have joined this department, but they were mostly transferred to other posts. During the winter 150 men took a stand in the Christian life. During the year, 1,064 have been enlisted in the Soldiers' Bible and Prayer League."

Secretary Slusser said that most of his recruits went out to other posts. Many of them kept in touch with the Y. M. C. A. wherever they went. Here is a letter that came back from one of them who got away up in Alaska:

There is a little log church down the street where we have services every Sunday evening. The attendance is small, as this part of the country is not thickly settled except by Indians and Malamutes (a kind of wolfish dog). The latter disturb our meetings by howling sometimes. I brought a lot of Christian books with me and still stick to the Christian life. Forty-nine men at this post have been enrolled in the Bible and Prayer League and presented with New Testaments.

Jump from the frigid wastes of Alaska to the mild forests of Louisiana and you will find the Y. M. C. A. men showing the same sort of devotion for their fellows. Here are some notes from one of these Southern lumber camps: "I was drunk every day before I had this building to go to," writes one man. "Since then I have not been drunk a day." "The emergency hospital saves men and has given men a new interest in life." "The home atmosphere awakened home memories, and a man who had not written home for seven years, and another who had not written for eleven years, renewed home ties."

Just what these sobering, elevating influences mean in the field of labor, you will find explained in this statement by a lumber company official: "Machinery is 25 per cent. of the cost; we have perfected that. Labor is 75 per cent.; the Association is making that more efficient."

A trial investment in an Association equipment made by a great Southern

lumber company enabled it to maintain a full gang of men, and to produce lumber more cheaply. To quote the superintendent of the camp: "The building paid for itself in six months. for itself in six months. A second is now going up.' going up." There you have a business association's commentary upon the relation between morality and business efficiency.

When the United States Government started the construction of the Panama Canal, a task in which another nation had already failed, health experts were sent to the Canal Zone to fight mosquitoes, to do away with pest spots, to look after drainage, and in general to make the conditions of life physically wholesome. But President Roosevelt knew that it was just

necessary to make things morally wholesome there as it was to look after bodily welfare. His Canal Commission asked the Y. M. C. A. to take charge of this job of moral sanitation. The Association gladly responded, and at seven points along the twenty-eight mile line of operations, the Government erected and supports Y. M. C. A. buildings. Mr. A. B. Dickson is the general secretary in charge. One official in the Zone has even declared that without the Y. M. C. A. the Canal could never have been dug.

Among the colleges, where there are nearly 800 Associations, among the immigrants, among the Indians, among the colored people, out in the agricultural districts where the population is so sparse that Association work has to be carried on in county organizations, among the railroad men, in the mines, among the cotton mills, and everywhere that men are toiling to earn their daily bread, you will find the same story of moral improvement and increased efficiency.

Read the unsolicited testimony of two workers in a Southern cotton mill. "I did not know one letter from another when I started in night school a year ago." says one. "I smoked twenty cigarettes a day and 'boozed' hard. In a month I decided to quit smoking, then chewing and drinking. My wife and I had never saved a cent. Now we have $200 in the bank. I can now read in the papers what is going on in the world, and I am making a try for the basket-ball team.

[graphic][merged small][merged small]

A FIRESIDE GATHERING OF YOUNG MEN IN AN ASSOCIATION BUILDING WHERE GOOD FELLOWSHIP AND CLEAN
ENTERTAINMENT ARE FREE TO ALL WHO WILL COME

If I had not joined the Association, I would still be loafing around drug stores wasting my time."

And this: "For 14 years I had worked in cotton mills without interest or purpose. The Y. M. C. A. night school got me started. New purposes were awakened, and training given in the night classes. Now I have been promoted three successive times and I am a designer."

In his progress upward this man exemplified a principle that underlies the whole Y. M. C. A. movement. "It is not enough that a man be good," said Thoreau. "He must be good for something." The Y. M. C. A. tries first to make a man good, and then good for something. And almost inevitably the one thing follows the other "as the night the day."

Hence one of the great departments of the Y. M. C. A. is its physical department, where skilled physicians and trained instructors plan out the work and lead men in the exercises that shall make them fit physically for their climb upward.

The educational department is under the general supervision of the international educational secretary, Mr. George B.

[blocks in formation]

Hodge, who has under him more than 2,500 specialists who give courses on almost every conceivable subject. In the Y. M. C. A. schools of America almost 70,000 boys and men are fitting themselves to step up a little higher, and they are learning everything from spelling to the operation of a motor car, and from arithmetic to public speaking. They are studying voluntarily to fit themselves for a better grade of work. And most of

[graphic]
[graphic]

CLASS WORK IN A Y. M. C. A. GYMNASIUM

UNDER THE DIRECTION OF EXPERT TEACHERS WHO ARE TRAINED FOR A LIFE-WORK IN THE PHYSICAL UPBUILDING OF MEN

them, following Longfellow's rule for greatness, are "toiling upward in the night." The Y. M. C. A. furnishes the ladder for their advancement.

Particularly are, these efforts at helpfulness made in the cities. As typical of the sort of organization the Y. M. C. A. aims to be, let us examine the West Side Branch in New York City, the largest Association in America. Its membership is more than 6,000 and is growing so fast that the organization, though it has three huge buildings valued at valued at more than more than $1,000,000, finds difficulty in providing accommodations. The secretary of this The secretary of this branch is Mr. Walter T. Diack.

Among the activities of this organization is a gymnasium where more than 3.000 men take regular exercise, under the direction of Dr. Louis R. Welzmiller. The educational department, under the direction of Mr. Edward L. Wertheim, provides instruction for more than 2,600 men and boys. Forty-one instructors are employed for this department. Fifty different courses are given, including in

struction in such branches as advertising, automobile operation, business efficiency, business psychology, finance, interior decorating, investments, memory training, motor boat operation, real estate, salesmanship, structural engineering, typewriting, and so on. Some of these courses are remarkable.

An employment department, under the management of Mr. E. G. Denison, finds work for 2,000 men a year. A boys' department, headed by Mr. Philip D. Fagans, gets hold of the youngsters in the grammar schools and interests them in healthful sports and innocent amusements. Mr. Wallace M. Ross, as high school secretary, follows up this work and is rapidly extending the influence of the Association among the high school boys of New York. Mr. E. Graham Wilson, as director of religious work, planned the 997 sessions of the Bible classes that were held in 1912, and arranged for the 2,200 religious services which were attended by a total of more than 130,000 men. A social secretary, Mr. A. E. Gillett, greets

the stranger as he enters the door of this Association, and makes him glad that he has come in.

Typical of the work of the social secretary is this little incident in the life of an old Swiss who in his younger days had been secretary to a Union General in the Civil War, but who now was an inmate of an Old Men's Home. He came into the West Side Branch and asked Mr. Gillett for a piece of paper. Noticing the still beautiful hand that he wrote, Mr. Gillett began to question him. It appeared that at the Old Men's Home he was compelled to earn his board by carting out the furnace ashes, a task for which he no longer had strength. On the sheet of paper he was petitioning the governors of the Home for an easier task. "If they will not give it to me," he said, "I shall have to go to the poorhouse. And that I can never, never do." His petition was refused, but Mr. Gillett, through the em

ployment department, got the old man a position as nurse and comrade for another aged man, with board and lodging and $30 a month in cash as compensation, thus saving him from what he regarded as deep disgrace.

Altogether, thirty secretaries are necessary to carry on the work of this Association. One hundred and twenty men are employed in the regular work. The annual budget exceeds $300,000. In 1912 the attendance at the gymnasium was 128,000. The attendance at religious services was more than 130,000. The religious meetings in shops and factories, conducted by men from this branch, were attended by more than 86,000 men. More than 76,000 books were drawn from the library. And the total attendance at the building during the year was 562,964. To many the Y. M. C. A. shines, "a lamp unto the feet and a light unto the path." Perhaps nothing better illustrates the

[graphic][merged small]

THE LOUNGING ROOM OF THE Y. M. C. A. AT CLEVELAND, O., ONE OF THE HUNDREDS OF SUCH PLEASANT PLACES

IN WHICH MEN MAY SPEND THEIR LEISURE HOURS UNDER WHOLESOME CONDITIONS

« PředchozíPokračovat »