religious gatherings, while in some communities stones are thrown through
the windows of buildings where public worship is being held.

While it is true that out of the poorest and most unfortunate districts
bright boys and girls frequently emerge, escape their surroundings, and
become good citizens, it is none the less true that a large proportion of
those who remain have no reasonable chance for wholesome development.

The bad influence of the Eighteen Counties extends far beyond their
borders. Out of them many farm laborers have gone to communities to the
north and northwest, often with deplorable results to the social,
religious, and moral conditions of the communities where they are
employed. (See Table B.) It is calculated that no less than 61,000 persons
emigrated in the ten-year period from 1900 to 1910 from the strictly rural
districts of _sixteen_ of the Eighteen Counties.

In Madison, a fertile county near the center of the State, in an area
sixteen miles long and from seven to eleven miles wide, there are three
closed and no active churches. One of the causes of this condition is the
fact that the farm laborers imported by the owners of large tracts of
lands were never made familiar, before they came, with a normal type of
religion. These men come from the Eighteen Counties or from sections
across the Ohio River where the conditions are very much the same. In
parts of several other counties the situation brought about by similar
immigration is extremely bad.

The Eighteen Counties demand missionary activity on the part of the church
as a whole, not only for the sake of the unfortunate people who live in
them, but also for the sake of the other regions whose welfare is
threatened by the transfer of low standards of all kinds, which, like a
forest fire, are creeping away from the region where they originated.

Among the large number of intelligent persons who know and deplore the
situation in typical communities of southeastern Ohio, very few seem to
cherish hope of improvement. Such pessimism appears to be unjustified.
Good work is now being done by missionaries of the American Sunday School
Union. What is more important, there is much promise that the trouble can
be reached and cured by the modern country church movement, which is
already making real progress in Ohio. As a result of this movement, for
example, the Board of Home Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church has,
for the first time, appropria