At this period Mr. Cahan found time to write a novel, "The Imported Bridegroom," and to write short stories for the Century, Scribner's, Atlantic Monthly, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines.

But after five years as a reporter, Mr. Cahan's opportunity came to make a newspaper after his own ideals. He had made a reputation among Socialists as a speaker and writer. The Jewish Daily Forward, an organ of the Jewish Socialists, was in a bad financial condition. The managers asked him to edit and manage it, and he accepted their offer of a free hand and a small salary.

The Forward was then made up after the old-fashioned ideas of foreign newspapers. Its "news" was mostly a record. of European and American politics. Its editorials were scholarly "leading articles" on Marxian Socialism. The whole paper was written in highly Germanized Yiddish.

Mr. Cahan changed all this. He told his reporters to look for the human interest in the news, and to write it in the Yiddish dialect of the homes of the Ghetto. "Say it as mamma would," he told them when he came across a stilted account of an event. And the reporters understood, for, nine chances in ten, "mamma” was a shrewd, wrinkled, clear-seeing daughter of Israel whose words had the stinging directness and the homely simplicity that everywhere makes the people's language vivid and plain. Mr. Cahan himself brought the editorial page within the limits of his own definition. One of his first editorials was on "Pocket Handkerchiefs," why his readers should teach their children to carry them, and their relation to health. The old-fashioned Socialists were shocked. They demanded to know of Mr. Cahan what relation he saw between pocket handkerchiefs and "the common ownership of the means of production and distribution," which is Socialism. "Just this," Mr. Cahan replied: "Pocket handkerchiefs are an essential of people who wish to be happy in a modern, civilized community. Our people need to know it. Socialism is not an end, but a means advocated by enlightened people like ourselves to make ourselves and our neighbors happy. Therefore, by preach

ing the use of pocket handkerchiefs, even to those relatively few people that do not know the advantages of using them, I am preaching practical Socialism." Mr. Cahan struck upon the homely things that were close to the needs of his readers in their oftentimes tragic efforts to adapt themselves to the strange new life in which they found themselves in America. For example:

After he had edited the Forward for several years, he received a letter from a Jewish boy who was a student in the University of the City of New York. His association with boys in better circumstances and of longer residence in America had taught him new standards of living. He had learned to know and appreciate the use of separate dishes at the table for each person to eat from. But his father was an old-country man, from a remote village in Roumania, content with the customs of his poor, untrained parents and averse to change. So at home the big bowl of stew sat in the middle of the table and every member of the family dipped his spoon into the common vessel and ate. The boy loved his old father, for the father had made many sacrifices to give him his education. But he was humiliated by this barbaric custom, and could not bring his friends home because of it. of it. Wouldn't Mr. Cahan write an editorial about dishes? The father believed in the Forward only less than in his Bible, and would surely be convinced if he read there that dishes were practically a necessity in America.

So Mr. Cahan wrote a kindly editorial in which he pictured such a case as the boy had described, argued gently the hygienic reasons for separate vessels for food, and concluded by suggesting that the proper thing for a father to do in such circumstances would be to send the wife out to buy a set of dishes. A few days later he got another letter from the boy, full of thanks, for the father had read the editorial and followed its advice. In this family, as in many others, Mr. Cahan was the means of preventing the oftrepeated tragedy that wrecks many immigrant families' happiness - the gap that opens and widens between parents and

children as the young people learn the new language and new customs and drift away from the old folk because they cannot follow in the new path.

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But Mr. Cahan made his most striking and original contribution to journalism by beginning a department that he called "A Bunch of Letters." A believer in realism as the true philosophy of literature, he applied it to the romance of real life. He published an appeal to his readers that they send him the record of the biggest thing in their own experiences. "Every one of you," he said, "has one story to tell from your own life a humorous incident, a dramatic event, a tragedy, a great experience with love or passion - a story with every quality of great fiction, but better than fiction because it is true." At first the replies were disappointing, but at length one letter came that proved to be the first of hundreds that have been published in the Forward. Men and women began to make the department almost a confessional, and opened their hearts to tell the story that they had been burning to tell to sympathetic ears. Naturally, most of the more serious writers asked that their names be withheld. These letters are the most eagerly read part of the paper. At least thirty of them are received daily, and from one column to three columns full of them are published.

One letter, for example, was from a woman who faced this problem: She had divorced her husband in the Old Country. After she came to America, she had married again, but had not told her second husband that she had ever been married. One day she saw the first man on the street in New York. She knew that sooner or later he would learn of her and that then her husband would surely find out the truth. He was a very jealous man. What should she do: tell him, or wait and trust to chance? Mr. Cahan advised her to tell. A few weeks later she wrote again, a letter full of reproaches. She had told her husband and he had been very angry and now their lives were full of unhappiness. Another interval, and she wrote a third letter, of gratitude and thanksgiving: the husband had had no peace, had seen the other man's

face constantly before him, and was tormented with hatred; at last he had really seen the man, and his mind was at rest. The actual vision of his enemy had reassured him that his wife could no longer love such a man, and they were reconciled. Dozens of letters told the familiar story

familiar among immigrants of the son who had left Russia many years ago. who wrote regularly once a week for a year or more, then once a month, then once or twice a year, then never. All raised the cry, Where is he? May we hope ever to see him again? And in many cases these letters have reached the men whose mothers wrote them and have brought about the reunion of families.

From the "Bunch of Letters" grew up naturally another function of the Forward. People who could not or would not write came to talk with the editor about the problems of their little world, to ask for counsel. For years Mr. Cahan saw all these people personally and found their experience much the same as the experiences of those who wrote. Now he has not time to devote to them, but he has trained an assistant who receives and advises from thirty to sixty people a day.

Mr. Cahan carried his human relationship with his readers beyond the printed page. When the price of the necessities of life soared higher than he thought it should last year, and his people were complaining of the prohibitive cost of food, he organized a housewives' strike against the market dealers, and forced them to reduce their prices by a practical boycott of their shops. A similar strike of tenants against excessive rents was also successfully managed by him.

His editorial policy has run the daily circulation of the Forward up from 6,000 to 150,000 copies. His name is affectionately known to practically every resident of the East Side and to many thousands of other people in New York and in all parts of America. He once laughingly said that he knew nearly every Jew in New York, "from Big Jack Zelig to Jacob Schiff." And three years ago, when he celebrated his fiftieth birthday, thousands of people of the East Side crowded a great auditorium to show him their appreciation.

$10,983 in the District of Columbia, and $8,608 in Massachusetts, to $960 in Kansas, where the average membership is 92; to $1,013 in Florida, where the average membership is 66; and to $483 in Alabama, which has an average membership of 93. A careful study of the data presented shows that there are 192,795 church edifices with an average of 157 members per organization, and that the debt of the average body is nearly 50 per cent. of the value of the church property. This implies a heavy tax on the membership even before its legitimate work is begun. With a membership of 157, it is estimated that at least two thirds of the members are women. This leaves 52 male members, of whom doubtless a large proportion are boys too young to be of much financial assistance. If only one third is deducted for non-resident members, there are left approximately twenty to thirty men upon. whom must fall the chief burden of support of the "average" church. What such a tax would be if raised for other than church purposes is apparent.

The opinions of certain careful and candid religious leaders have been obtained in every state. These reports agree that, in certain places at least, over-churching of communities has been carried to an extreme. For example, the response from a minister in Maine says:

In at least one fourth of the towns of Maine there are more Protestant Churches than there is a demand for. But the problem is being worked out. Protestantism must plan for the future, as do our Catholic friends, and we must plan economically. The great trouble is that so many inefficient men go into the ministry.

There is no question that there is overchurching in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and many other states in the Middle West; and the response from Michigan blames the same cause for the low salaries of ministers. From New York the reply was similar:

Over-churching is not the great reason, but it is very certainly one great reason for the inadequate salaries paid in this state. . One concrete illustration may serve you. When our Board made our appropriations this year we wrote one church, which we had been helping, that we ought to expect the church to pay

a larger proportion of the minister's salary. The reply was "that as they were one of six churches in a village of 1,300 they did not feel able to raise more." I think that this is true of a large number of our churches.

Indiana believes that over-churching is not On the other hand, my correspondent in the greatest cause of inadequate church support, and the reply from Illinois says that "over-churching and low salaries are both prevalent, though their interrelation is more apparent than real."

In the far West, as is natural, there are some places where there are not churches enough, but even from such a state as Colorado comes this report: "In almost every instance the low salary is directly in consequence of the community supporting too many churches. Towns of 500 to 1,000 population containing from three to five churches of different denominations cannot but feel a heavy financial strain."

It is possible to select certain representative regions where conditions will throw some light on our problem. The following table is made from a study of the churches in southern New Hampshire:

My informant writes, "People in the Southwest stand pretty close to their own church, even if it is small. They want that or nothing." And "it is small" there being a Protestant church for every 231 people!

The Presbyterian Home Mission Society (North) has been making some investigations, selecting certain counties which would be typical of certain phases of life in the various states, and from their studies I have selected Webster County, Ky., with 20,974 white population and 68 Protestant churches. The total membership of these churches is 5,997, or 32 per cent. of the total white population. The average membership is less than 90, and 54 churches have ministers one fourth of the time or less. That is, 82 per cent. of the churches in this county have one fourth or less of the time of a minister. The average church budget is $328, and the average wage paid by a church to the minister is $183. In this region there are examples of communities of 740 people trying to support five churches. In Gibson County, Tenn., which has a population of 41,629, church for every 224 people, and one there are 179 churches. There is a white church in every four and eight tenths square miles. Ninety-five of the churches have preaching one quarter of the time. The following table has an interest of its own:

THE RECORD OF THE LAST DECADE

PERCENTAGE OF

47 TOWN

3,247

4

CHURCHES

PERCENTAGE OF 87 COUNTRY CHURCHES