"3. The plan also includes a list of premiums or prizes given to the
people of Freetown to encourage neatness, thrift, and industry. These
prizes are to be offered for the best gardens, the finest individual
collection of vegetables, the neatest-looking front and back yard and
alley, the neatest interior of a house, the best flower-beds, the
largest and best fruit-garden, and the most improvements on any place
in a year.
"4. The plan also includes the establishment of regular Sunday work, a
Sunday school, preaching services, good music, and distribution of good
reading-matter at the houses during the afternoon.
"5. To make the plan succeed, we must have money enough to endow the
institution. It must be permanent in its character in order to produce
results. As much money must be put into it as is put into a business
of any sort where we expect to get large results. Over $50,000,000 are
invested in the bicycle industry in the United States. The redemption
of Freetown is of much more importance to the human race than all the
bicycles in the world. It is useless to expect to lift up the people
over there unless we can get and use large sums of money. I have
estimated that it will take from $2,000 to $3,000 a year to maintain
the work in Freetown on a successful basis.
"6. The last point in the plan is the most important."
The minister paused in his reading, and looked around at the three men.
They were all very much interested, and Judge Vernon and Mr. Carlton
seemed to be specially excited. Mr. Douglass went on.
"What is absolutely necessary to the success of this plan is the
voluntary residence in the heart of Freetown of some of the best men
and women in Merton. That is, the house must contain, all the year
around, Christian men and women who are willing to live for certain
weeks or months with the work, direct it from the centre, and give
their talents, their strength, their wisdom, personally to a solution
of the terrible problems over there. We can get money to build the
house; we can get premiums to carry out our plans for encouraging
industry; we can get enough money, probably, to endow the work.
"The question now is, Can we get _people_, the best and best-known,
and most able to go over there and live with the people? That, to my
mind, is the heart of the problem. When the Christian world is willing
to give itself to the redemption of the unchristian world, it will
be redeemed. When Christian Merton is willing to give itself for
unchristian Freetown, it will be redeemed. The question really is, How
many of the best men and women are ready to go and live for a while in
that house?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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