The record is amazing to one who has never thought about this subject. Easily a hundred thousand children at work in New York, in all sorts of employments unsuitable and injurious. Try to realize these totals, taken from Mr. Hunter, of children under fifteen, compelled to work in employments generally recognized as injurious: Over 7,000 in this country in laundries; nearly 2,000 in bakeshops; 367 in saloons as bartenders and other ways; over 138,000 at work as waiters and servants in hotels and restaurants, with long hours and conditions morally bad; 42,000 employed as messengers, with work hours often unlimited and temptations leading to immorality and vice; 20,000 in stores; 2,500 on the railroads; over 24,000 in mines and quarries; over 5,000 in glass factories; about 10,000 in sawmills and the wood-working industries; over 7,500 in iron and steel mills; over 11,000 in cigar and tobacco factories; and over 80,000 in the silk and cotton and other textile mills. [Sidenote: Soul Murder for Money] Now, all of these industries are physically injurious to childhood. But more than this, schooling has been made impossible, and immorality, disease, and death reap a rich harvest from this seed-sowing. And why are these helpless children thus engaged and enslaved, stunted, crippled, and corrupted, deprived of education and a fair chance in life? Simply because their labor is cheap. Mr. Hunter speaks none too strongly when he calls this "murder, cannibalism, destruction of soul and body." And it is the children of the immigrants who are thus sacrificed to Mammon, the pitiless god of greed. Shall our Christian young people have no voice in righting this wrong? Within a generation they can put an end to it, if they will. Here is home missionary work at hand, calling for highest endeavors. QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER VI AIM: TO SEE CLEARLY THE DANGERS ARISING FROM CONGESTION OF FOREIGNERS IN OUR CITIES, AND THE BEST WAYS OF GUARDING AGAINST THEM I. _Foreigners in Cities._ 1. What are the chief causes of the following: (1) the rapid growth of great cities; (2) the existence of slums; (3) the settling of immigrants in colonies? 2. Is your knowledge of the lives of the poor sufficient to move you to work for their redemption? Are any of those persons, about whom we have studied, your neighbors? 3. Is the prevailing tone of New York and other cities American or Foreign? Give illustrations. 4. What is the prevailing tone in city government? Is there any connection between the answers of these last two questions? II. _Tenement-House Evils._ 5. Where do most of the foreigners settle first in the United States? Of what races is the mass chiefly composed? 6. Describe the conditions under which they live. Do they find them so or make them so? 7. What remedies can be applied to tenement-house conditions? What do the workers among them think of the needs and prospects?