Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ignorant, the degraded, the vicious, which it is impossible to escape, are forcing us to do them good in self-defense."— Josiah Strong, The New Era, P-345- III OTHER NEEDY FIELDS " It is the important point in illumination to put your light where it is dark. If corporations did not understand the philosophy of lighting cities by gas better than some of us understand the philosophy of lighting cities by the gospel, the nights in some of our wards would be as black as the morals are." Thus speaks Dr. M. M. Parkhurst, Ex-General Superintendent of the Citizens' League of Chicago. Yes, as will be shown later, this is true. If the city lighting company should follow the same principle in its business that is pursued by the church, it would plant its brightest lights in front of the mansions where private lights already illuminate the doorways, and would leave the dismal streets of the poor unlighted. Now, as always, " the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light." Josiah Strong says of the church : " She is spending her energies on the best elements of society, her time is given to teaching the most intelligent, she is medicating the healthiest, she is salting the salt, while the determining masses, which include the most ignorant and vicious, the poorest and most degraded, are alike beyond her influence and her effort." Let us see how far this is true of Chicago. A gknce at the accompanying ward map will show that the most congested districts of the city, and the wards where foreigners predominate and where ignorance, poverty and sin abound, are the wards that border upon the two branches of the Chicago River. The wards 9, 10, n and 12; 16, 17, 18 and 19 west of the river; 1, 4, 5, 29 and 30 south of the river, and 22, 23 and ...