Reading for Everybody.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2449, 13 March 1909, Page 9 (Supplement)

Reading for Everybody.

THE Y.M.C.A. x ITS ORIGIN AND PROGRESS. (Concluded from last week.) (By F. A. McKenzie, in tlie “Windsor Magazine. ’ ’) In America the workers have not been bound, as in Europe, by old traclitious. For instance, in British universities the intense caste feeling vjfig&es work such as this charged with all unanner of difficulties; in the universities of the Western States there is no such- tradition. And although British business men .have liberally supported the organisation, they have been outdone by their trails-Atlantic rivals. Big American associations receive great gifts as a matter of course, such as England scarce dreams of. The Association in each city is the pride of the place, and the leading men feel that their local reputation is bound up with making the building as fine .as possible. The result is that the American Associations have been able-to do tlieir work on a scale and with a degree of luxury undreamed of here. In Chicago the home of the Association is a fifteen-storied sky-scraper, valued at nearly £400,000, and with twenty-five branches. The receipts amount to £42.000 a year, and the salaries paid total £5600, excluding the allowances paid to the heads of different departments. At Montreal, in Canada, the Association is housed in a veritable palace. In Cleveland, the Association, with its magnificent homo, is a power throughout the city. UniversL ties vie with cities, and the wealth of America stands behind. The notable work recently pushed forward for the U.S. Navy has been promoted and financed by Miss Helen Gould. The building alone cost just on £IOO 000. A beginning with the sailors has already been made in England by the recent affiliation, as an auxiliary of Y.M.C.A., of the Royal Naval r-' Christian Union, which embodies the results of Miss Agnes Weston’s remarkable work among British seamen. The three main lines where the American movement is distinguished above others are the railroad work, the student volunteer movement, and the boys’ organisations. Tile railway work is typical of the land of long distances. The railwayman is, by the nature of his toil, more away from home than others. From sheer lack of companionship, when waiting at different junctions, he has been driv- - on to saloon and gambling-den. The Y.M.C.A. set out to help him by building premises at the great centres where trains wait, solely for the use of tlio man of the trains. Bedrooms at reasonable rates, good feed, pleasant surroundings, baths, and homeliness have been the note of these homes. They have succeeded beyond expectation. Bart of this success lias been due to a lady—Miss .Helen Gould, daughter of the late king. Mies Gould, who. is to-day perhaps the \-Tflhst prominent figure in American apparently inherits the brains of her father, for she brings an amount of shrewdness and practical business skill to bear on her benevoWh b schemes which is even of more .Service than’the liberal gifts slio sup—Tn the case of the railroad she has not only supplied funds IHjiantifullv, but gives them in such a that the railroad authorities themselves have been led to give more. She travels largely among the radroad branches, encouraging and helping, her special train being always (.welcome on the lines. But the railroad authorities tliem- ' selves have recognised the merits of this work. On American railways, character among the men lias always been given special prominence. Company after company absolutely forbids smoking or drinking by its servants while on duty. Sobriety is so valued that the railway hand who is even distantly suspected of love oi drink is doomed. The American railroad corporations are ruled with a strength the world little realises. Their presidents are kings in their way, who lift men to fortune or W dueo them to penury at a stroke or f the pen, who make districts prosperous or bankrupt almost as they will, and who hold the well-being of scores of thousands in tlieir grasp. I _ found that the railroad work was helping to give them more reliable helpers, and they opened tlieir colters To-day the Railroad Y.M.C.A.-has 197 departments, 125 buildings, valued at nearly £350,000, and / 0,000 members. Most of the funds come, not from the gifts of corporations and philanthropists, despite their Jibennitv, but from the men who show tlieir appreciation of wmm is done by paying well towards itThis is an organisation wlncn _ concerns every citizen. The clear beau, steady nerve, quick eye, and courage necessary at a crisis are better cultivated in one of these Young Men s Associations than in a public-nouse. The students’ volunteer movement represents one of the gi'eat waves c self-denying enthusiasm the world at . rare intervals witnesses. In loco, K Mr. D. L. Moody, the well-known evangelist, invited representative students to meet for a summer conleience at his great missionary scnoo..J at Mount Hermon, Worth held. the conference was a remarkable one, marked by great enthusiasm, and at the end a hundred men volunteered to go out into the foreign mission field. Some months afterwards an executive committee of six was chosen to spread .the fire. Men went everywhere preaching a new crusade, and soon the volunteers were- counted. not by the hundred, but by the thousand. Lads with great prospects before them threw up tlieir all, Mr. . John R. Mott, known in many lands as the apostle of the movement, came to the front, and lie and. his fellows set themselves to carry out the spread of faith throughout the world in this generation. In this country the Cambridge Seven,- including the famous athletes, Stanley Smith and Studd, aroused similar enthusiasm by their journey through our universities before proceeding as missionaries to China. America alone 1800 of those 'who thus volunteered have gone abroad on tlieir new crusade, and the end is not yet.

England and America have united lor the purpose of work in heathen eon lines. ' In India there is keen friendly rivalry, on co-operative lines, between them, to see which will do most. English merchant princes rival American business men in their Sifts for new buildings there. These donations are never heard of outside a very limited circle, yet for size they will compare with bequests on more popular lines that give men great reputations.

The boys’ work is the newest, organised branch, and promises to be one of the greatest. The Association now deals separately with lads, providing special secretaries for them, and in some cases special buildings. The new departure was formally adopted in America some years ago. Within a year 40,000 lads had been .enrolled. Flic men at the head of the lads try to rive them a due sense of tlieir coming manhood, and to afford them abundant means for physical training and for mental improvement. Boys’ camps are one of the most successful means of catering for the younger fellows, a means which must make lads in older lands feel somewhat envious. The camps are -planted down in some country part during holiday time, where the youngsters can live for weeks together in tlio open air, leading a free and easy life such as boys love, and yet overlooked by those who can take care of them. The favorite site for a camp is by. lake or river side, and in America it is often possible—as, alas! it is not here—to get right away from other people and from civilisation. In such camps, of course, all depends on tho leader. One man will plan a camp of a hundred boys, and manage it successfully without a single set rule. Another will make all manner of regulations for a camp of ten, and will fail. In dealing with boys, tho character of tlio man at tho head is tho only thing that tolls, as many a well-meaning but weak man has found to his cost. Woe be to the loader who attempts to rule a camp without clearly knowing his mind and being able to enforce it! In England the boys’ movement has yet to come to any extent, although come, it must. The summer camps here, such as the one Sir Alfred li’armswortli has each year for East London lads on the cloffs at Broadstairs, have not been carried out under the auspices of the Association. But it is one of the new fields of work for the .twentieth century of which wo will hear more.

In Greater Britain, as is fitting, this young men’s movement has made steady advance. Canada shares the progressive movement of the United States. India and Ceylon, and the Far East have been the centre of a strong missionary movement, that lias resulted in the planting of 167 Associations in our Eastern Possessions alone. In Hong Kong there is an outpost. Australia received a check during the time of the great financial crisis a few years since, but it now has nineteen Associations and over three thousand members. In New Zealand, strangely enough, the movement is weak. In South Africa, workers such as Sir Henry Bale, K.C.M.G., Mr Gordon Sprigg, nephew of the ex-Premier of Capo Colony) are seeing that the now nation arising there has ail organisation worthy of it. Abroad, Germany comes next to the United States. In the number of separate Associations, including Lutheran and other societies, it comes first of all, before even England; but for membership it ranks third. It has 1,885 organisations, and 100.588 members. (Finland makes a gallant fight with forty Associations; and even in Russia there are thirtythree. There is not a. country ip Europe—excluding petty Principalities —where this body is not represented. It stretches further —to Iceland and Hawaii.

If the AT. M. C. A. had done its work, and were merely of historical Interest, it would have no place here. Jt is, as I write, in the beginning of its strength, and with prospects before it such as it never had before. Its founders wisely kept it free from many restrictions, leaving it free io develop along certain very broad lines. It has a platform on which men of every variety of creed who hold to the basic facts of the Christian faith can unite. It is definitely religious and makes no concealment of the fact. Christianity at once supplies the foundation of its strength and the motive for its work, and will continue to do so.

Its leaders recognise that the methods and agencies of the nineteenth century may not do for the twentieth. This is'' a generation impatient ot formalism and pretence. The Y.M.C.A. lias to hold its own by practical v oik, and by clearly doing what it professes to do —helping men at the beginning of their manhood. A movement like this always has dangers, chief of which, perhaps, are cliquish and an unhealthy pietism afc war with real, manly Christianity. The Y.M.C.A. youdo- man” has not always been an admired type. The exceptionally flabby specimens who brought down sneers on all are being more and more eliminated or improved. The Associations have to see. to it —as, . m fact, they now do —that the t*y<pc is stamped out; and if'this movement is to accomplish its full purpose it must give young men more and more a controlling voice in its councils. In a young men’s movement we do not look for tho caution arid wisdom of mature manhood, but for the mad enthusiasm, the apparently -forlorn hopes, the generous endeavor which, by their very seeming unreasonableness, accomplish things which ; leave mature wisdom astounded. The madness of youth has before to-day. done what tho sages declared impossible, and in this young men’s movement it will do the same again if given a free hand. . AVhat are. to be the great lines ot advance in the twentieth century? n the nineteenth century the Britisii movement was most successful in ca tering for the cleric and shop assistant. Now it will lay itself out for two other kinds of mer T—the skilled mechanic and tho college student. A splendid field lies open for it m providing technical training for young men of a good type. Hero the thing must be superbly well done., or had better not bo attempted. An effort to house young men, such as I mentioned earlier, and to provide them with reasonable comforts, involves so much that those at the head may well hesitate j but it. is an obvious field,

with tho greatest possibilities. In religion this movement has already been the great feeding-ground for foreign, mission workers; it will be so more and more.

Here everything depends on tho men. Ancl it is from the character of the men at the head that I augur well for the future of the Y.M.C.A. They recognise that the deeds of yesterday will not satisfy the need of tomorrow, that new times want new plans, and that while the principles of tlieir work are the. same, the way those principles are proclaimed must change.) They have the record of great accomplishments behind them, and the promise of greater things before.