Religion as being one-half the ingenuity and adventure of diversified
personal service in every kind of neighborly and civic fellowship;
the truth which Dr. Parkhurst long ago voiced, that the congregation
is not the minister's field but his force,--this is what has produced
Pittsburgh's small but heroic group of present civic leaders. A
widespread contagion of it is what Pittsburgh needs more than
anything else. In this the city must find its chief resource for
bringing about and continuing a better order. The response of the
churches to the sickening series of breaches of trust, to bribe
giving and bribe-taking, to the overwork that means debauchery, to
the mill-owners' Sabbath-breaking that breaks the mill-worker's body
and soul,--must be a bold relaxing from tradition and letting their
dynamic go free. The outcome would be a new synthesis which would
overcome the weakness and shame of sectarianism, and give a broad,
strong front to the city's renascent moral life.
[Illustration: JOSEPH W. MARSH.
Vice-president and general manager, Standard Underground Cable Company,
Member Civic Improvement Commission.]
Along with the detailed, patient, comprehensive work that is needed
to build up a moralized democracy, the industrial and commercial
leaders of the community, including those who are the responsible
representatives of absentee capitalists and landlords, must rise
to a far more generous, not to say discerning, conception of their
opportunity. Big men of a generation ago said, "After us the
deluge,"--they cut the forests off the Alleghenies, and Pittsburgh
literally suffers the curse in destructive floods once or twice
every year. The way of life in the local communities about many of
the great steel plants is infallibly preparing for the near future a
worse form of deluge in a mass of unfit, under-vitalized, unproductive
citizenship. It is but fair to say that the really big men of to-day
in Pittsburgh are passing beyond the attitude of indifference to
the human problem that confronts the captain of the industrial army.
Indeed, the past few years have brought about a distinctly receptive
point of view. The lesson to be learned and aggressively applied during
the coming decade is that a great city's industrial supremacy, no less
than its moral well-being, depends largely upon the proper provisioning
and sheltering of the industrial rank and file, along with training in
capacity for citizenship and for associated self-help.
[Illustration: H. J. HEINZ.