there a hundred years behind us in every respect? Why are they sunk so low? Simply because they have been let alone. They are just as much separated from this land, without any share in its marvellous progress, as if a Chinese wall had been built around them. They have been let alone; and American institutions, American schools, and the American press, have flowed around them and beyond them without effect." XXV. CHRISTIAN WORK IN A LUMBER-TOWN. Until a few years ago I knew little or nothing of mill-towns or lumber-camps. I had seen a saw-mill that cut its thousand feet a day when running, and it was generally connected with some farm through which ran a stream. It was a very innocent affair. But in 1889 I saw for the first time the great forests of pine, and became acquainted with part of the immense army of lumbermen. Michigan alone had at that time some forty thousand; Wisconsin has as many; Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana are now engaged in a vast work; and when we add the great States of Oregon and Washington, with their almost illimitable forests, we feel that we are speaking within bounds when we say an immense army. The one great difficulty of the problem is the transitory character of the work--like Count Rumford's stoves, if they could only have been patented and money made out of them, every house would use them; so if the lumber village had come to stay, many a church would have gone in and built. But more than once a man in authority has said, "Oh, I have looked that field over, and it won't amount to much." No one who has not had experience in the field can form any adequate idea of its vastness or its crying needs. The one great trouble of the whole question is the massing of so many men away from the softening influence of wife and mother. It is unnatural; and nature's laws, as sacred as the Decalogue, are broken in unnatural crimes, and sins unknown to the common run of men. The lumber business may be divided into three distinct classes of workers,--the mill-men, the camp-men, and the river-men. The last are the smallest company, but the hardest to reach. They flit from stream to river, from the river to the lake, from scenes of sylvan beauty to the low groggery--and worse. Their temporary home is often made of blackened logs papered with _Police Gazettes_, which come in vast numbers, and form the largest part of their not very select reading. Books of the Zola type, but without their literary excellence, are legion. Good books and good literature would be a boon in these camps.