to work. Our idea of missionary statistics demands that they should be a
basis for action. We think that it is waste of time to collect
statistics from which no conclusion can be certainly drawn both by the
compiler and the reader--a conclusion which ought to be suggestive when
taken alone by itself, and, when considered in relation to the
conclusions suggested by similar tables, compelling.

But it may be said that we are adding to the already overwhelming burden
of accounts and reports over which missionaries toil to the great
detriment of their proper work. The tables in this book are arranged
apparently for the worker on the spot as well as for the intelligent
supporter and director at home; why multiply tables and trouble the
missionary with the sums of proportion? Why not ask the man there simply
to give the necessary facts and then let the man at home work out for
special purposes the various relations? The answer is simple: we
ourselves have been asked to fill up long schedules of unrelated facts;
and we know that the labour is intolerable. The supply of unrelated,
meaningless facts dulls and wearies the brain. Few men can do the work
with pleasure or profit, and consequently the schedules are often filled
up, not indeed with deliberate carelessness, but with that heavy
painfulness which, taking no interest in the work, often produces as
pitiful a result as downright carelessness. "Thou shalt not muzzle the
ox that treadeth out the corn" is a maxim which has a great application
here. The man who provides the information should be the first to profit
by it and to be interested in it. The first man to criticise these
tables should be the missionary who fills them up on the spot; and his
most valuable criticism might be a demonstration that the last column in
a table was futile; that the table led him to no conclusions and
suggested no remarks. That column of conclusions and remarks we hold to
be the most precious of them all. We would have no man supply