nding the money committed to its treasury.

II. It secures proportion in different parts of the work.

(a.) In appeal.--This Association, constituted, as it is, the immediate
agent of the churches, ought to be your watchman on the tower.

Every pastor is crowded with parish duties. Few intelligent laymen can
give time enough to study thoroughly the whole field covered by the
missions of the A.M.A. It is now an enormous field. Representatives of
five distinct races, Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Mountain Whites and
Negroes wait for Christian instruction very largely upon the missionaries
you are sending out.

Now, no one who is not compelled by official duties to do it can find
time, nor has he the information at hand, to investigate thoroughly each
department of this missionary work. The A.M.A. is your agent to discover,
through careful and patient investigation, the exact facts, and so to
direct its appeals to the churches that the department of work which is
especially pressing may be given due prominence. Systematic spending
involves this.

(b.) Greatest care is required and exercised in planting new work. Let us
in fancy plant a new school in the South, as the Association does it.
Exhaustive correspondence is of course, the first step. Then the Field
Superintendent visits the field. He gathers every possible fact bearing
upon the question: The population; schools, if any; the opinions of white
and colored citizens; the religious complexion of the community, etc.,
etc., etc. Now this Field Superintendent has studied maps and statistics
and school reports, and been back and forth until the whole field is in
his mind, not simply this one locality. These facts _in extenso_ are
reported to the officers in New York. Conferences many and patient are
held over them until finally it is settled that this place rather than
some other shall be selected for the new school. Now such care as this
would be impossible except as the A.M.A., through its officers and
teachers, knew the whole field. By independent or individual effort this
could not be done. It is not the absolute, but the comparative need and
hopefulness that determine the wisdom of fixing upon a certain place for
a school or church. This comparative need can only be known by an
organized society which has frequent and abundant communication with the
whole field, and has officers whose business it is to know that field.
The experiments being tried in different places