The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1927, Page 30

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30 THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

upon the occasion. — The number of members of
St. John’s was recently increased by the removal of
several communicants from Gold Hill to Salisbury.
It is surely most commendable on the part of our
colored Christians that when circumstances compel
them to change their location, they remove to places
where they will have church and school facilities.
What a great leakage could be prevented if this
were always considered by our members!

St. John’s Chapel, Salisbury, N. C.

A Polyglot City. — Winnipeg, the capital of the
Canadian province of Manitoba, is the distributing-
point for Western Canada for immigrants and
settlers. It is said that there are people there from
almost every country in Christendom and that the
Bible is distributed through a local society in fifty
different languages and dialects.

A Canadian Icelandic Colony. — On the south
shore of Lake Winnipeg, not far from the city of
Winnipeg, is a colony of Icelanders. Lutheran Ice-
landers were among the first immigrants to this
part of Canada. They came at a time when it was
thought that only people from the Arctic regions
could: live there. Several thousand came in those
early days and made their living by fishing. In the
course of years many of them left this original

settlement, and now they are scattered over the
whole province of Manitoba. Not a few of the
lawyers and teachers of the province are of Icelandic
descent. The largest Icelandic church in the world
is in Winnipeg. Here, too, are published several
Icelandic periodicals.

Canada No “Melting-Pot.” — Though the people
of Canada are on tiptoe with eagerness for the
growth of their population, they are determined to
preserve their race character. While settlers from
the Northern European countries are welcomed
with open arms, other immigrants find it a hard
matter to enter the Dominion. The present popu-
lation of Canada is nine million. Before the out-
break of the World War the population increased
by leaps and bounds, no less than four hundred
thousand immigrants settling within its boundaries
in 1913. At the present rate of increase Canada
should gain at least a million every five years.
Among the immigrants to Western Canada are thou-
sands of Lutherans, whom the Church should not
neglect to gather into congregations as soon as pos-
sible, lest they be lost to the Church altogether.

Americans in Canada. — Within the last quarter
of a century more than a million Americans have
gone to Canada, and in the western prairie provinces
they form a large proportion of the population.
Among these are not a few families from our older
congregations, and we should leave nothing undone

* to safeguard the spiritual interests of these former

members of our congregations and attempt to gather
them into new congregations in their new homes.

The Doukhobors in Canada.— These came to
Canada from Russia in the early years of this cen-
tury. They were originally an offshoot of the Greek
Orthodox Church and lived by themselves beyond
the Caucasus Mountains. When they got into
trouble with the Czar’s government, American and
English Quakers helped them to come to Canada.
The Canadian government made them a grant of
275,000 acres, and from 7,000 to 8,000 of these
people settled on this grant, near Yorkton, in the
southeastern part of Saskatchewan. Here. they es-
tablished villages and lived much as they had lived
in Russia. But it soon became apparent that the
Doukhobors were subject to strange outbreaks of
religious fanaticism. Now and then they got the
notion that it was a sin to use animals on the farm
or for the drawing of vehicles, and as a result they
turned out all their live stock. Then the notion
might enter their heads that it was wrong to use
machinery, and they would throw away all their