The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1927, Page 5

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

a few of the Southern farms, where the nature of
the crop permits the workers to spend the mid-
summer months elsewhere before the fall work
begins. These begin to harvest the wheat-crops of
Northern Texas. As the harvest migration moves
northward into Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas,
it is continually being reenforced by factory
laborers, who come to work in these harvest-fields
of the grain-belt during the dull factory season. As
the season advances, many of these workers move
northward, while a small number remains for the
threshing of the harvested crops. Those workers
who move northward have to compete with new
labor forces from the farms of the Northwest and
the Northeast and from the lumbermen and mine-
workers of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
Some of these harvest-workers even go far north
into Canada as the season advances. It is cal-
culated that in an average year about 250,000
transient laborers are used in the grain-fields of
the Middle West. When the season is over, one
stream of men turns southwestward and looks for
work in mining or railroad building or in work in
the sugar-beet fields and fruit-areas, some going as
far as the Pacific Coast, while others go South to
take up mining and lumbering or continue farm-
work as corn-pickers. Thus they move from place
to place and from one class of labor to another —
a restless, roving class of men.

Cannery Workers. 3
While the canning industry is widely dis-
tributed, practically the only part of the country
where migrant workers are employed in this
industry are in portions of New York, in the
southern half of New Jersey, in Delaware, and on
both shores of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
Probably about 25,000 migrant laborers are em-
ployed in this territory to harvest the fruit and
cannery crops each season. The housing, sanitation,
and moral problems among these cannery workers,
for various reasons, are very acute. At times a
long two-story tenement must serve a large numier
of families. Sometimes a number of families are
housed in a barn-loft, without any partitions what-
ever. Men, women, and children, young people and
adults, married and unmarried alike, are compelled
to live in this promiscuous way.

What Can be Done for the Migrants?

It is plain that religious work among the mi-
grants must. necessarily .be greatly handicapped.
Little can probably be done in the way of direct

religious work among the cannery and _ harvest
workers. These will probably have to remain prac-
tically untouched fields. But it is not so with the
lumbermen. ‘The men engaged in lumbering are
not migrants in the same extreme sense as the
others mentioned. If an earnest effort were made to
reach the Scandinavian Joggers and mill-workers,
and also others, such efforts, with the help of God
and by Ilis grace, should be attended by some degree
of success. And there are many reasons why just
we should feel called upon to make an earnest
attempt to deal adequately with this problem. The
Presbyterians have been doing successful work in the
lumber-camps for some years, and our obligation to
take up the work is greater than theirs. TF. J. 1.

Why Do We Carry On Foreign
Missions?

1. Because of What Foreign Missions Have Done
for Us.

We owe it to foreign missions that we are
Christians. Our churches, our Bibles, and our
homes we owe to foreign missions. The civilization
which we to-day enjoy is the result of foreign mis-
sions. More than a thousand years ago the first
Christian missionaries came to our ancestors in
England or on continental Europe and brought to
them the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For these mis-
sionaries to go from Rome to England or from
England to Germany in those days was a far greater
task than for our missionaries to go to India or
China now. Out of the work of those foreign mis-
sionaries of old for our heathen ancestors grew
Christian Northwestern Europe and Christian
America. We enjoy the blessings of Jesus’ Gospel
to-day because Paul went to Rome and Augustine to
England and Boniface from England to Germany
and our Christian fathers from Europe to America.
Would it be right for us, who owe all this to foreign
missions, to refuse to have foreign missions bring
like blessings to others? For us to refuse to send
missionaries to the billion people that are still with-
out Christ would surely be the most ungrateful and
selfish act that man could be guilty of. We cer-
tainly should do all we can that the stream of life
which has blessed us so richly will flow also to other
places, make the waste places of the earth become
green gardens of the Lord, and gladden the hearts
of many thirsty souls.