Previous to the Civil War the work was well under way, but had been almost entirely given up.  Our visitors were not at once received as brethren, but Christian love did its work and gradually all differences were forgotten by these Christians in the wonderful tie which truly united them, and when, in 1877, the convention met at Richmond, not only harmony prevailed, but it seemed as though each were trying to prove to the other his intenser brotherly love.  The cross truly conquered.  No one who was present can ever forget those scenes, or cease to bless God for what I truly believe was the greatest step toward the uniting again of North and South.  Mr. T.K.  Cree has had charge of this work since the beginning.  Not only has sectional spreading of associations been done by the committee, but, in the language of the report already quoted:  “Special classes of young men, isolated in a measure from their fellows by virtue of occupation, training, or foreign birth, have from time to time so strongly appealed to the attention of the American associations as to elicit specific efforts in their behalf.”  Thus, in 1868, the first secretary of the committee was directed to devote his time to railroad employees.  For one year he labored among them.  The general call on his time then became so imperative that he was obliged to leave the railroad work.  This work had been undertaken at St. Albans, Vermont, in 1854, and in Canada in 1855.  The first really important step in this work was at Cleveland in 1872, when an employee of a railroad company, who had been a leader in every kind of dissipation, was converted.  He immediately began to use his influence among his comrades, and such was the power of the Spirit that the Cleveland Association took up the work and began holding meetings especially for these men.  In 1877, Mr. E.D.  Ingersol was appointed by the international committee to superintend the work.  There has been no rest for him in this.  A leading railroad official says:  “Ingersol is indeed a busy man.  Night and day he travels.  To-day a railroad president wants him here, to-morrow a manager summons him.  He is going like a shuttle back and forth across the country, weaving the web of railroad associations.”  When he entered on the work there were but three railroad secretaries; now there are nearly seventy.  There are now over sixty branches in operation; and the work is going on besides at twenty-five points; almost a hundred different places, therefore, where specific work is done for railroad men.  They own seven buildings, valued at thirty-three thousand two hundred and fifty dollars.  The expense of maintaining these reading-rooms is over eighty thousand dollars, and more than two thirds of this is paid by the corporations themselves; most of the secretaries are on the regular pay-rolls of the companies.  How can this be done?  Simply because the officers see such a return from this expenditure in the morals and efficiency of their men that they have no doubt as to the propriety of the investment.