cause, so it has seemed to me as a doctor of medicine, the
more obvious personal benefit thereby conferred renders the recipients
more impressionable to the views considered desirable to promulgate.
Yet only to-day, as I came home from our busy operating-room, I felt
how little real gain the additional time on earth often is either to
the world outside or even to the poor sufferers themselves. In order
to have one's early teachings on these matters profoundly shaken, one
has only to work as a surgeon in a country where tuberculosis,
beri-beri, and other preventable diseases, and especially the chronic
malnutrition of poverty fills your clinic with suffering children, who
at least are victims and not responsible spiritually for their
"punishment." Of course, the magnitude of service to the world of
every act of unselfishness, and much more of whole lives of devotion,
such as that of Miss Sullivan, the teacher of Miss Helen Keller, can
never be rightly estimated by any purely material conception of human
life.

Love is dangerously near to sentimentality when we actually prefer
remedial to prophylactic charity--and I personally feel that it is
false economy even from the point of view of mission funds. The
industrial mission, the educational mission, and the orphanage work at
least rank with and should go hand in hand with hospitals in any true
interpretation of a gospel of love.

In subsequent years the nearest attempt to finance such commonly
called "side issues of the work" has been with us through the medium
of a discretionary fund. Into this are put sums of money specially
given by personal friends, who are content to leave the allocation of
their expenditure in the hands of the worker on the actual field. This
fund is, of course, paid out in the same way as other mission funds,
and is as strictly supervised by the auditors. While it leaves
possibly more responsibility than some of us are worthy of, it enables
individuality to play that part in mission business which every one
recognizes to be all-important in the ordinary business of the world.
No money, however, from this fund has ever gone into the mill or in
assisting the cooperative stores.

Sorry as one feels to confess it, I have seen money wasted and lost
through red tape in the mission business. And after all is not mission
business part of the world's business, and must not the measure of
success depend largely on the same factors in the one case as in th