In the West there are cities devoted entirely to the motion-picture industry. In some of the elaborate plays hundreds of thousands of dollars are expended in getting the scenic effects. Cities have been built and then burned to give the effect of a sacked town being destroyed by the enemy. Shipwrecks have been shown where real ships have been purchased, and then run upon the rocks and deliberately wrecked to get the proper setting for the pictures and the necessary thrills for the people. What of these people who follow the motion-picture industry for a living? Their lives are apart from the rest of the community. It seems fascinating, but it is one filled with hard labor, uncertain hours, and affords rather scanty pay. The pastor of one of the Los Angeles churches attempted to reach the people living in the near-by “movie-city” but he failed. A plan should be devised whereby a sympathetic understanding might bring these hard-working people into relationship with the church. The influence of such a tie would be far-reaching in results. =The Makers of Other Luxuries.= Another group of workers are those who make jewelry; others are at work making fancy costumes, special designs in millinery, and artificial flowers. In fact, when we take a census of all of the people who are at work serving the demands of this age, which loves the extraordinary and insists upon luxuries as a right, you find that there are in reality hundreds of thousands of these workers who are in every sense of the word serving humanity. Whether they are serving in the highest and best way is not the question we are discussing. As long as we tolerate an age of luxury and draft an army of thousands of men, women, and children to help produce these luxuries, so long must we consider the needs of the men, women, and children so drafted. The church, if its appeal is to reach all the groups, must reach all the workers who are making possible the abundance of things that minister to an age of luxury. CHAPTER IX THE WORLD OF SEASONAL LABOR AND THE CASUAL WORKERS “Why is it that those who produce food are hungry, and that those who make clothes are ragged? Why, moreover, is it that those who build palaces are homeless, and that those who do the nation’s work are forced to choose between beggary, crime, or suicide in a nation that has fertile soil enough to feed and clothe the world; material enough to build homes to house all peoples, an enormous productive capacity through labor-saving machinery of forty thousand million man-power; and where there are only sixty-five million souls to feed, clothe, and shelter?”