But there are also positive advantages secured by the systematic methods of the A.M.A. in expending 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 have already been made by the A.M.A., and proved to be either absolutely failures or relatively an uneconomic use of funds.
The saving to you who furnish the money is very great by this method of systematic spending. Let me illustrate by a single example which occurred only a few months ago. Two towns, only a few miles apart, were clamoring for help in school work. We opened a school tentatively in one of these places, as we had one missionary there already, and I visited the other place. This is what I found: A teacher independent of any society, and consequently knowing only a small part of the South, had opened a school. She had labored very faithfully, but very unwisely, putting money and years of hard work into a field which, from its very conditions, could not be largely successful. She had a poor building for teachers' home, a rough school-house with no desks, a narrow strip of land, and an enrollment of about eighty pupils. She was anxious to have the A.M.A. take the work. She informed me that in order to secure it, it would be necessary to pay out from $2,500 to $3,000 in paying debts and putting the buildings in shape for advantageous use. This was the case then: A fairly good house, a rough school-house, a bit of land, and a school of less than one hundred pupils, costing at least $2,500. At the other point under discussion, there were five acres of land, five buildings, an enrollment of about 250 pupils, and the whole property could be secured for $600! $2,500 vs. $600.
These are not very exceptional cases. It is only fair to the generous constituency of this Association to know that their funds are being thus guarded, and that those who give through independent agencies may have their funds squandered because they cannot hold those doing this independent work to strict account as they do the Association, nor can these independent missionaries know the whole field as the A.M.A. knows it. Here are nearly 500 missionaries in constant correspondence with this office, besides the field officers appointed especially to gather information.
(c.) Again, this systematic method of disbursing funds secures a methodical arrangement of field work. Take the mountain field as an illustration of this. This field has been divided into two general districts; one having for its base the L.N.R.R., the other lying along the Cincinnati Southern Railroad. Each department has its general missionary, who goes back and forth in his district to lay out new work, and to superintend the old. The missionaries, pastors and teachers are all busy in their own places. Here then is systematic development of this whole work. These noble missionaries in this way form a well-organized army, and are not guerrillas fighting behind trees and stones, and scattered hap-hazard over the mountains. We shall hold these lines of railroad in the name of the Lord. Churches and missions and Sunday-schools will supplant the saloons and gambling hells if you as churches generously support this painfully urgent work. But when school-houses shall stand in all their fertile coves and church bells shall call to intelligent Christian worship on all those mountain sides, and the people shall be lifted up into spiritual citizenship, it will simply be the victory under God of the systematic planning and execution possible only when funds are disbursed on the sound principles of this Association.
III. This systematic spending of benevolent funds also secures permanency. How few deaths there are in the family of A.M.A. schools and churches! Why? Because these missions are born through wisdom and sound judgment. These schools and churches are not only permanent but they will also perpetuate the great fundamental principles of the churches whose prayers and money have gone into their establishment.