The Land and the People ir

Boundary there are hundreds of just such lonely
families.

The men in canneries and logging camps present,
in many respects, a peculiar problem in service. It
is difficult to establish regular ‘‘machinery”’ to serve
them. The personal factor counts for so much,
religions and languages are so varied, and the men
move about so continuously from camp to camp all
over the province and to and from the prairies, that
it seems impossible to do permanent organizing
among them. There are probably over 6,000 men
engaged in logging, directly tributary to tide-water,
in this whole district. Of late years, here and there
along the coast, large permanent camps have grown
up around mine or pulp mill, as at Powell River with
its 5,000 people, Ocean Falls, or Port Alice. But
when a place grows large and seems permanent it
goes out of the Marine Mission and is given its own
missionary or minister. This is one reason why this
mission will probably never be anywhere near self-
supporting and will always need generous aid from
Church funds.

So our marine missionaries must ever be
ministering to lonely people, holding up the Christ
in word and daily life to a procession of men passing
through the camps, to white, and yellow, and brown
folk, proclaiming the message by act and voice in
bunk-house, cook-house, fishing boat, hotel, lonely
shack and in the open. My heart goes out to the
homeless men in the camps, wanderers many of them;