One Reason for Our Existence
By M. BESSIE DE GRAW
I would like to have you read a little story. I read it in a bulletin issued by the Southern Board of Education, which contains the proceedings of the fifth conference for education in the South. It is written by Mr. Evans, superintendent of the schools of Augusta, Ga. Here is the story:— “If one child gets my sympathy more than another, it is the one with the pale and old-looking face and stoop shoulders, that indicates work in a hot mill, little food badly cooked, and insufficient sleep in a stuffy room. But of such there are many in the mill districts of the land, and they need our prayers. “About ten years ago a great big mill was built on the outskirts of our town. It was a ‘hummer.’ About five hundred hands were set to work, and for every hand at the loom there were two extra mouths at the home. Before the mill was in operation, a great big barroom was opened, and many of the little mouths went unfed while the big bar took toll of the hands. “I saw this would never do, so I set up a school, and the only place I could get for it was the vacant hall above the bar. A house-to-house canvass brought in about fifty children, and the teacher in charge was one of the saints of the profession. While lessons were going on overhead, the clink of the glasses and the shouts of the drinking could be heard below. Several times there was a big row down stairs. But the teacher sat steady, and the school held on. It was barkeeper and beer glass versus school-teacher and reading class. But we started out on top. “The year following, the school had outgrown the room over the bar, and a schoolhouse of two rooms was built in a field near by. Two teachers were needed, and a hundred children were gathered in. The year after that serious attention was directed to the needs of the community, and the two-room house was turned over to the negro school, and a four-room house was built in a better place for the white children. The school grew to one hundred and fifty children. “One day a young teacher came to me begging for work. She was willing to do anything at any price. I told her to go out to the factory, look up and down the street, and get thirty pupils to promise to go to school, and when she had them, to let me know. She was of the right sort, and in two days she had collected her school, and I had her a room in the new house. Her thirty pupils grew to fifty. By this time we had two hundred pupils in the school. “The community was also growing. There were churches, stores, houses to rent, and people were moving in on us fast. But it was not a school-loving crowd—far otherwise. However, we had to keep up with the times, and so we added four rooms to our schoolhouse. We sent four teachers out in the highways, one after another, to seek for the lambs to bring them in, and they brought them in—poor little outcasts, who agreed mainly to try it awhile, and stay as long as they liked it. Thank Heaven, most of them liked it and stuck.” The reason I wanted you to read this is because it shows some of the conditions which God calls us as Christians to meet. Our young people can gather together the children just as easily as the teachers described, and there should be hundreds of them doing it all through these States. The familiar statement is, “One hundred for every one now here.” Have you ever thought that that means you? There is a work which Christian teachers can do which the public-school teachers can not. Not only the gospel of work is needed by these children, but the whole gospel of salvation. The mothers in their homes should be taught how to cook. The fathers should be encouraged to raise a garden, that the family may eat the products of the soil. I head this article, “One Reason for Our Existence.” That “Our” means the Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute. The school has been established to bring teachers to just such children. It is to help Christian men and women who love to work with the soil to find places where their farm and their godly lives can be the means of spreading the gospel of a soon-coming Saviour. It is to help the nurse, the teacher, and the canvasser into needy places. There are hundreds of stories as pathetic as this one. Do these children call you? M. BESSIE DE GRAW.
Madison, Tenn.