Holding this view, we desire to discover what place each mission station occupies when we take a wider view and survey the province or country.  Here we shall be able to adjust many apparent inequalities in the mission stations viewed by themselves.  From our previous survey of the mission stations one by one we may have got the impression that some of them as mission stations designed for work in a district were very ill-balanced.  The medical work, or institutional work of some kind, may have seemed to be out of all proportion to the other forms of the work, and this impression may remain when we view the province.  But on the other hand it may be seriously modified; because when we review the work of the province as a whole, we may find that the institutional work of the province as a whole is out of proportion to the evangelistic work, and in that case we should think the disproportion at the station more serious.  On the other hand we might find the institutional work in the province inadequate, and in that case the emphasis which seemed undue in the one place, and may really be improper in that one place, nevertheless, in view of the situation in the whole province, may be shown to be reasonable in relation to the whole province.  How then can we gather together the returns from all the stations so as to present a view of the work in the province?  For that is the first thing.  We cannot put the station into its proper place in the province until we have a view of the work in the province treated as a unity.

In provinces, large cities and towns, which are not reckoned as part of any mission station district, have to be taken into account.  These large cities, capitals of provinces, countries, or empires, need special consideration, and must often be surveyed separately.  They are centres in which many societies have their head-quarters, and many missionaries live, yet the work done in them is not always so impressive or extensive as the numbers of missionaries might suggest:  occasionally the missionaries are all congregated in one quarter of the city, and large portions are practically untouched.  In them, too, are sometimes large city congregations, self-supporting indeed and self-governing, but sucking into themselves all the more vigorous elements of the Christian community and employing them within a somewhat narrow circle.  The problem of the evangelisation of these cities is a very serious one.

We suggest that these great cities might be treated either as one district or as several, and that they ought to be surveyed systematically by a body representative of all the missions in each city.  If a proper survey were made and the facts tabulated, the statistical tables would be similar to those for the station district, and we could use them to complete a survey of the work done in the province treated as a unity.