The formal report of your committee can without injustice be brief; not
because the field considered is narrow, or the work unimportant as a
missionary movement, but from the fact that a certain unity pervades
both, making it possible to comprehend in one view even the diversities
of a population of over two millions, and an area of above one hundred
thousand square miles.

The official summary of the year's work, on which we report, once again
sets before this Association the situation and its involved problem; a
situation full of contradictions, a problem at once serious but not
hopeless.

Here is the amazing spectacle of a self-isolated people, begirt with the
active life and thought of our eager times, yet sharing neither. Here is
an empire that is content to live in the past: having rich resources it
neglects to develop them; a productive soil but niggard crops. Amidst a
veritable Lebanon of forestry it has shanties for homes; with coal
deposits that are the envy of the world, its shivering women in
stoveless hovels attempt to defend themselves about their domestic toil
with coarse homespun shawls and slat-bonnets. In an age that has
harnessed mechanism, beast, and steam to the plow, scythe, sickle and
flail, these owners of mountains of iron and mines of power still
indolently vex a grudging soil with tools of such barbaric simplicity
that their intrusion is scarcely more than a provocation to weeds.

Here is needless poverty in the lap of potential wealth, thriftlessness
in the face of every seeming stimulus to diligence. Here is a
diversified landscape that should inspire and a climate that should
invigorate, but in place of vivacity and health we find apathetic