o consequences have followed. The Protestant
churches in much the larger part of their activities have drawn
themselves apart in an intellectual and social round of polite
entertainment for the families of the mercantile, clerical,
professional, and employing classes, while the Catholic churches
minister to the laboring and wage-earning classes. In a minor and
relatively insignificant part of their activities the Protestant
churches have supported missionaries, colporters, and chapels among the
immigrants, the wage-earners, and their children. Their home missionary
societies, which in the earlier days followed up their own believers on
the frontier and enabled them to establish churches in their new homes,
have in the past decade or two become foreign missionary societies
working at home. Nothing is more significant or important in the history
of American Protestantism than the zeal and patriotism with which a few
missionaries in this unaccustomed field have begun to lead the way. By
means of addresses, periodicals, books, study classes, they are
gradually awakening the churches to the needs of the foreigner at
home.[140] Among certain nationalities, especially the Italians and
Slavs, they find an open field, for thousands of those nationalities,
though nominally Catholic, are indifferent to the church that they
associate with oppression at home. Among these nationalities already
several converts have become missionaries in turn to their own people,
and with the barrier of language and suspicion thus bridged over, the
influence of the Protestant religion is increasing. Perhaps more than
anything else is needed a federation of the Protestant denominations
similar to that recently arranged in Porto Rico. That island has been
laid out in districts through mutual agreement of the home missionary
societies, and each district is assigned exclusively to a single
denomination.

While the Protestant churches have been withdrawing from the districts
invaded by the foreigners, the field has been entered by the "social
settlement." This remarkable movement, eliminating religious propaganda,
is essentially religious in its zeal for social betterment. Its
principal service has been to raise up Americans who know and understand
the life and needs of the immigrants and can interpret them to others.
In the "institutional church" is also to be found a similar adaptation
of the more strictly religious organization to the social and
educa