The recent investigations in Chicago and other large cities show the close relation between insufficient wages and vice. One of the greatest obstacles to the relief of these conditions is the indifference of well-to-do people who do not come into personal contact with the wrongs and sufferings of the working people. Still we are confronted by the sad spectacle of more than a million of the nation's children at work in factories and cotton mills for their living, and helping to support their families. "The child is the embodied future. We can never have good citizenship without protected childhood. Child labor is a process of squandering future wealth to satisfy present need." [Footnote: See report of Eleventh Conference of Child Labor held at Washington, January, 1915.] Defrauded childhood! Children, loaded with heavy tasks beyond their strength, robbed of the light and joy of life, plead for childhood's rights and that spiritual development that should make known to them the companionship of the Saviour and the love of the Heavenly Father. The testimony printed in the fall of 1912, concerning child labor in the canning factories of the Empire State, shows that more than a thousand children were employed in the canning industry that summer; one hundred and forty-one were less than ten years old. An experienced manufacturer has said, "You can protect a machine, you can guide the buzz-saw, but no law that you can enact can, in a large industry, protect the heart and soul of the child." A marked improvement has been made in the last five years in combating the evils of child labor. Many states forbid the employment of children under fourteen years of age in factories and mills--but in North and South Carolina, in Georgia and Alabama, children under fourteen are still permitted to labor in factories ten or twelve hours a day. To reach this evil from the Federal standpoint, the powers of the Inter-State Commerce Commission should be invoked. A bill is now pending (February, 1915) before Congress to bar from interstate commerce the products of mills, mines, quarries, factories and workshops employing child labor. Home Missions must also face to-day the infinitely complex and rapidly increasing problem involved in the adjustment of our population to cities and away from rural districts. Thus cities are becoming dominant factors to be reckoned with in all the elements that enter into the question of religious and moral uplift, as well as the ideals and the welfare of our nation. Here the aggregation of immigrants focuses acutely the complex problems peculiar to them. Here is the child laborer in factories and on the streets. Here women and girls struggle under fearful economic pressure. Here is the political boss--and what ex-President Roosevelt terms "organized alliance between the criminal rich and the criminal poor." Here is the class consciousness and hatred--the cry of anarchy and socialism.