compensate for home shortages and compete with the doubtful allurements
of the city. This she may do in part within her own plant and in part by
encouraging and supporting all wholesome outlets for the athletic zest,
social adventure, worthy ambition, and vocational quest of youth. Those
segments of the church which believe in bringing every legitimate human
interest within the scope and sanction of religion will in the nature of
things offer a more immediate and telling competition to the harmful
devices of the city.

But with the exception of a few boys' clubs and scout patrols, for whose
direction there is always a shameful shortage of willing and able lay
leadership, the church has not as yet grasped the problem; and this
remains true when one grants further the value of organized boys'
classes in the Sunday school and of the "socials" and parties of young
people's societies. To be sure, the Protestant church, expressing itself
through the Young Men's Christian Association, has laid hold of the more
respectable edge of the problem. But with few exceptions this work is
not as yet missionary, militant, or diffused to the communities of
greatest need. A few experiments are now being made, but probably the
Y.M.C.A., more than the individual church, is under the necessity of
treating the underlying economic evils with a very safe degree of
caution; and in both there is the ever-recurrent need of an unsparing
analysis of motive for the purpose of ascertaining which, after all, is
paramount--human welfare or institutional glory.

The tendency ever is to cultivate profitable and self-supporting fields
and sound business policies. But the case of thousands upon thousands of
boys living in localities that are socially impoverished, unfortunate,
and debasing constitutes a call to the missionary spirit and method. If
the impulse which is so ready and generous in the exportation of