Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/814

800 walketh in a dumb show of saving the city for herself or her Lord.

There are three ways of changing this situation, and increasing the social service to the city of Protestantism’s millions of dollars of property exemption. Two of these plans have a history, but it is a history of failure in New York, and they failed because they were not fitted to facts.

One is to give to the neighborhood churches that combine to make a house-to-house canvass in any community a list of the families which would attend their respective churches, if attending any. This plan is not adapted to New York, because of physical obstacles. It is statistically possible, for instance, in the locality just canvassed, that the families assigned to the weakest denomination might, for the most part, live on the fourth floor of the tenements, and be scattered through more tenements than the families assigned to any other church. This would insure the failure of the plan. Moreover, a family living on the corner may move down the block before the church representative comes along, and so be missed. In any case it is certain that three years hence there will be practically a new set of tenants in the district’s dwellings. The federation’s canvass shows that the average residence in the New York tenements is three years. The Roman church will know her people among this new population, her machinery insures it; but Protestantism’s acquaintance with the population has then to be made anew. The shifting special responsibility which this entails insures the ephemeral existence of any coöperative canvass that lapses into denominational care.

A more excellent way was proposed by the Evangelical Alliance in 1888, but it too failed, and failed, as I conceive, because too ideal and too unpractical.

The plan was that each pastor should select one able layman among each hundred members of his church to act as a supervisor of visitation, and ten members from each hundred members to act as visitors. In a church of five hundred members there would thus be five supervisors, fifty visitors; in five