_The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the
storm center. The city has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.
Here is heaped the social dynamite; here the dangerous elements are
multiplied and concentered._--Josiah Strong.
VI
THE FOREIGN PERIL OF THE CITY
The city is the most difficult and perplexing problem of modern
times.--_Francis Lieber._
We must save the city if we would save the nation. Municipal government
and city evangelization together constitute the distinctive problem of
the city, for this generation at least.--_Josiah Strong._
Talk of Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture
chamber of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and bleeding heart
through the shambles of our civilization needs no such fantastic images
of the poet to teach him horror.--_General Booth._
With the influx of a large foreign population into the great cities,
there have come also foreign customs and institutions, laxity and
license--those phases of evil which are the most insidious foes of the
purity and strength of a people. The slums of our large cities are but
the stagnant pools of illiteracy, vice, pauperism, and crime, annually
fed by this floodtide of immigration.
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