West Port Experiment

One of the reasons Chalmers advocated territorial city missions was to reunite the classes, particularly by the clergy’s concentrated evangelistic efforts in the slums.  It was ultimately a missionary policy, yet it had distinct advantages for the social fabric.  Here’s an interesting quote that helps illumine Chalmers’ rationale for the parish plan in urban context:

In a provincial capital, the great mass of the population are retained in kindly and immediate dependence on the wealthy residenters of the place. . . [which] brings the two extreme orders of society into that sort of relationship, which is highly favourable to the general blandness and tranquillity of the whole population. In a manufacturing town, on the other hand, the poor and the wealthy stand more disjoined from each other.  It is true they often meet, but they meet more on an arena of contest, than on a field where the patronage and custom of the one party are met by the gratitude and goodwill of the other (Thomas Chalmers, Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, Glasgow, 1821, p. 51).

As the clergy and benevolent Christian volunteers adopt mission districts in the cities and thoroughly work them, the net effect should be a re-harmonization of the upper- and middle-classes with the working class.