"HOME MAKERS," CLEVELAND YOUNG WOMEN COME AND SEE! Indianapolis, Ind. Berenice Fuller, Girls' Secretary. The girls' work of the Indianapolis Association is divided into the High School Girls' Club, the Grade Girls' Club, and the club for the young employed girls. Let the girls "run themselves," with proper guidance, of course. The high school organization is entirely self-governing and self-supporting. Officers are elected once a year, and the monthly dues of ten cents easily defray all expenses. If a girl cannot afford these, she is taken care of in such a way that her feelings are respected. After the weekly Bible class of half an hour the "surprise hour" is held. A large social committee takes charge of the entertainment, in which every girl in the club has in turn some share. The girls from the different high schools prefer meeting in one organization, saying that it gives a broadening spirit, a chance to meet girls from the other schools, whom they perhaps would never know in any other way. This organization has a membership of over one hundred, with an average weekly attendance of sixty. The Grade Girls' Club is very similar in plan to that of the High School Girls' Club. As soon as a girl leaves the grades for high school, she can go from one club to the other, and not be strange to the priu ciples of the organization. If a girl's interest and co-operation can be gained when she is young, she will grow with the Association and will become one of the standbys in future days of furthering the higher ideals for girls. "Won't you come and eat supper with us?" This is the weekly invitation of the young employed girl to her friends. From sixty to seventy girls sit together at one long table in a corner of the dining room every Thursday night. The Indianapolis building fairly swarms with these girls from fifteen to eighteen years of age-in the gym, in the pool, some sewing in one group, and others singing at the piano and the officers of the club feeling their responsibility-collecting fees, paying for those who can't afford it, and seeing that the girls are so well entertained that they will come again, and new ones do come every week! Every girl in this department sooner or later becomes a member of the Association. If she cannot afford to pay her membership all at once, she pays so much a week to the treasurer of her particular club. Then, as soon as the whole amount is paid in, she becomes a member. "All aboard for Brown County!" This was the cry a few weeks ago of a group of young employed girls who were on their way to the summer bungalow of the Indianapolis Association. Some of them had never been on a train before. One little girl expressed amazement that the sun could go down, the moon rise and set, and the sun come up again all in one night! At the roller skating on Saturday night in the gym the Girls' Department is there in full force with their boy friends, skating to their hearts' content from seventhirty to ten. At Sunday vespers every third person is a member of the Girls' Department, taking her turn at serving at the social hour following vespers, and feeling her importance and ownership in the Association just as much as the older girl. At a recent meeting on Sunday afternoon, where women from different departments were asked what the Association had meant to them, a homeless girl from the Girls' Department told how she had been picked up off the street and given a home and happiness in the Association. She concluded with the following: Now Young Women Come And see People have been heard to remark that there was no need in caring for young girls. If these same people knew that in our Girls' Department five girls were rescued from unmentionable homes and put into proper places; that two girls with no homes or parents have been put into beautiful families; that three sisters who had gone to dances on Sunday afternoons quite frequently are regular attendants at Sunday vesper services, wouldn't they feel that the girls' work was of vital importance? A VERY NEW GIRLS' DEPARTMENT. Erie, Pa. Elizabeth C. Wright, Girls' Secretary. Membership in the new Girls' Department at Erie is limited to girls between the ages of twelve and eighteen. No one below the age of twelve can be called a member of this department, and few over eighteen years of age are attracted by its activities. Another grading, which for the present seems wise, is within the department itself. Only to the high school girls and to young employed girls are the Camp Fire groups open. Thus there has been established a partial graded system which gives impetus to the work. Girls under twelve years of age are looking forward with eagerness to the birthday which wil open to them the privileges which their older and more fortunate sisters enjoy, for to be a member of the Girls' Department means much more than to belong to the Children's Sewing School held for those between the ages of eight and twelve. Then again, the girls from twelve to fourteen look forward to the time when they can wear the fascinating Indian gown and enter into the mysteries of the Wohelo ceremony. Deserving of special mention among the classes and clubs of the Girls' Department have been the practical elementary sewing classes, the Social Service Club of high school girls, and the Christmas Gift Clubs, which in December reached many girls not previously attracted. It is hoped that an evening class for young employed girls will be the result of one of these clubs. Perhaps the most unique feature of the girls' work thus far has been the special "Girls' Department Sundays," when once a month the girls come together for an informal vesper service which takes the place of the regular Sunday afternoon meetings. The value of this service cannot be overestimated, for it is the foundation of all of the other work and shows as in no other way the real purpose of the Association. Over-abundance of material and the fact that a few contributions were received too late to be included in this number have crowded out interesting accounts of girls' Central work in the following places: Branch, New York City; Brooklyn, N. Y.; Portland, Maine; Providence, R. I.; Cleveland, Ohio; Association House in Chicago; Goodhue County, Minn.; Hall County, Neb.; Akron, O.; Buffalo, N. Y.; Erie, Pa.; Yonkers, N. Y.; St. Paul and Minneapolis; Cedar Rapids, Ia.; Peoria, Ill.; Bridgeport, Conn; and Lakewood and Ocean County, N. J. These will be used later. Three Hundred and Sixty-five Days of Giving When we begin to pull down the Christmas greens and put away our Christmas gifts, we are inclined to think that our playtime is over and settle down to the year's drudgery again. There seems to go out of us with the putting away of these outward expressions of the season much of the real spirit which has actually been generated in our hearts by the very fact of the Christ coming and of the Christmas season. We have spent days in selecting and writing cards to express to our friends our thought of them at this time, and then we pass on into the hurry and rush of life. Yet conceive of the world this could be if we kept this same spirit of Christmas thought during all the days of the coming year, if there were a giving of ourselves not dependent on the sight of holly and mistletoe. Among the records left of a great simple life whose light went out last year we find him saying that he tried to write a friendly letter each day. The style or kind of stationery used mattered not, nor when nor how it was written. The letter went to some one whose name and face came to him, as it were, out of space, but he always felt that the very thought was prompted by a real need of what he had to say. Replies to these letters were found which revealed the life history of many a person and some confessed that letters had been received which had saved them from the falls that hurt and mar. A college woman who was in failing health spent her last twelve years in pouring out her life in forming clubs for working girls in New England. She could not be at all their gatherings, but she learned the art of remembering by letter all the hosts of girls she knew, and availed herself of odd moments to write, using anything she had at hand. To-day girl after girl treasures the notes she received which had so largely influenced her life. One girl tells of a note written on the back of an envelope, but which made all life different. In this day of typewriters we deleate our correspondence, but we cannot. delegate the expressions of our hearts by cold steel. It all loses out in the transmission. The world, and our friends, need the gift of thoughtfulness, of the little remembrances which lighten the burden and lessen the load. This is but a little of what we can offer the whole year round-gifts, the impulse for which have been generated by the special season of joy. They are a kind of a fruit of the spirit which dwells within us which can only be of use as it is handed out, appropriated and passed on. "God so loved the world that he gave," and the measure of our human love finds its expression in our giving of the abundance of our personality, which is the result of the overflowing spirit within. The Fifty-Year-Look That disturbing beginner of dazzling thoughts which he can never. quite finish for himself, Mr. H. G. Wells, has sometime lately evolved a fairly original philosophy which argues that a working knowledge of the future is humanly possible. "I believe," declares Mr. Wells, "that the deliberate direction of historical and social study toward the future, and a deliberate and courageous reference to the future in moral and religious discussion, would be enormously profitable to our intellectual life." So Mr. Wells tries it, and for a while scales his way to the stars, and in the end confesses that the question of what is to come after man he finds the most insoluble in the world. Jt is pleasant for us to reflect that Mr. Wells has run into his customary blind alley and ours is the better portionof having the promise that man shall be changed from glory to glory and shall see His face. But stop for a moment is it just possible that we have settled down peacefully into a ready-made theology that explains the future for us with supreme beauty and satisfaction, to be sure, but in such a way that having once tried our imagination on its superlative figures, we allow them to stay quiescent, leaving the intervening and more immediate future unexplored? Is it perhaps possible that because one of the greatest prophetic dramas on earth has given us picture after picture of "the things which shall come to pass hereafter," we are contenting ourselves with that and forgetting to use for the future more close at hand our own sense of prophecy, as instinct in us in this new year 1914 as it was in the prophets of the actual days of our Lord. He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit saith of this year, and the next, and the next fifty years on earth. It is harder for a woman to look ahead than for a man. Women are not yet so accustomed to shaping whole businesses and whole lifetimes as generation upon generation of men have been trained to do. Nevertheless, it is not of our personal futures we would speak, but of the potent future of that which as women individually or communally we hold in our keeping our associations of young women, to which we stand on this New Year's Day, in some relation of influence. whatever it may be. Suppose, in our city or college or country places, we should this day really go up upon the ramparts and take the fifty-year-look, and then come down again and do our day in and day out work more as a piece of what we saw there. For instance, among our questions for this day might be such as these: 1. Some of the beliefs of only one generation ago have undergone a distinct change. It is hard enough to preserve all that is best and vital under the fire of modern criticism, but fifty years from now practical theology will utterly have overtaken even the most radical thought to-day: is the cup of faith which I am helping to fill in my Association this very year, that which will hold new wine, when it is time, with the least loss of religious vitality? 2. The Association this year in my community depends upon this one and that one and stil! another; fifty years from now probably not one of these will be alive: do our classes and influence and atmosphere in general constitute such a training ground for fresh workers that leaders as wise and strong will be ready to take their places? 3. To-day we are at the eddying center of the social unrest of women: fifty years from now surely women's relationship to society will be much further adjusted; will the Association in those fifty years have contributed wisely and well to this adjustment? 4. To-day, too, we are in the very center of economic unrest: fifty years from now industrial changes may have regulated women's work till very many of the Association's present problems are taken away from us; will we still have enough reason for existence? The leaders of mankind commonly have the fifty-year-look, or they would not be leaders, nor do they reserve its use for the first day of January alone. And no one who is a leader of one branch of this incalculably potent young organization of ours can escape the necessity of from time to time. mounting to her watch-tower to exercise that gift of prophecy which will point us all toward the same great ends. About This Issue Are occasional special numbers desirable? such as the conference issue in October, this number packed to the covers with girls, and a March number, if we should have it—which we will if you say so-on country life and our rural work? And indeed, after we have given Miss Griffith and Miss Field a chance, there will perhaps, once in a while through the year, be other calls for special issues devoted to one or the other of our many types of work. To a degree we can measure your wish already, if the quick and full response to letters asking for the material in this particular issue be any indication. Our regret is that such an undertaking must be only representative. There is other "girls' work" in quantity, as good and as different as any recorded here, that we shall hope to hear from at other times. The abundance of material for this issue has made it necessary to postpone the report of the December meeting of the National Board until February. The major part of the last meeting of the Department of Method at headquarters was given to a Round Table on the Girls' Department. In more than one way the girls in their teens, who are, after all, our raison d'être, are this month our chiefest interest. THE ASSOCIATION MONTHLY has never more gladly opened its pages than to this group of just girls. At Kansas City "A cause that will call together over three thousand men and women, students, professors and friends from every part of the United States and Canada, in the dead of winter and in the midst of the Christmas holidays, must be regarded as a cause of vast importance and value." (Press comment on the Rochester Convention of 1910.) The trains that carry the mail bags The trains that carry the mail bags for this issue of THE ASSOCIATION MONTHLY are carrying delegates to the supremely important gathering in Kansas City, the Seventh International Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions meeting from December 31 to January 4. There has been no preliminary program, but we are told in advance that these are to be certain of the outstanding considerations: This once-in-acollege generation Convention comes together now for the first time since two significant occurrences, the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 and the services of its famous Continuation Committee express themselves through just such channels as the Student Volunteer Movementand the series of remarkable conferences held by Mr. Mott in his recent tour of the "transition nations." The appointment of such boards as those for missionary preparation recently formed in the United States and Great Britain, acknowledges Christianity's realization of just such training for mission work as the Student Volunteer Movement demands. The days of religious over-pressure are past; even such a potent gathering as this will permit no general or public appeal for volunteers. Emphasis is rather upon essential fitness, character, and a simple facing of things as they are, especially in the Orient. Some five thousand delegates, most of them undergraduates, representative of more than seven hundred colleges, will journey to this central city to hear such leaders in Christian statesmanship as Mr. Speer, Mr. Mott and Mr. Zwemer, Bishop Kinsolving of Latin America, Professor Warneck, the German authority on missions, and Dr. Robert Horton of London, "than whom there is no greater spiritual force in England today." The Convention's call to prayer these six days with the commission to faces the unprece iented potentiality of all, delegates or friends watching from a distance, "that with decisive obedience and daring faith we may literally give ourselves to praying as our Lord commands: Our Father, thy kingdom come.' A Worth While Investment Was there ever another such campaign for the raising of funds as that which closed on Thanksgiving eve in |