(a.) Waste in administration of funds.  Its accounts are open to and audited by those whose money is being spent.  Reports of the financial standing, receipts and expenditures to the half-penny are presented every year.  Look them over and note how minutely your accounts are kept.  Officers and missionaries are held by you to strictest responsibility.  This is sound business sense applied to missionary work.  But one naturally asks why, when such absolute safeguards are thrown around the administration of the funds committed to the A.M.A., some of those who established those safeguards give a considerable portion of their money to individuals over whose expenditure they have absolutely no control, and where funds may be, and often are, wasted?  And in this way the percentage of the cost of administering the funds committed to the A.M.A. is also increased.  This can scarcely be called sound business wisdom.

(b.) Waste in field work.  It requires wide experience and knowledge of the whole field in order to adjust and direct, without waste of laborers, the force of missionaries.  Those who know only one locality cannot do this.  It is often remarked that each missionary thinks his particular field the most important, and the one especially needing help and enlargement.  This is a grand tribute to their faithfulness and Christian enthusiasm.  But the systematic investigation of the whole field, constantly and patiently carried on as it is by the A.M.A., determines with larger wisdom whether work should be strengthened and developed in Tennessee, or Georgia, or Texas.  Gen. Grant was familiar with the whole field, and placed his men according to the varying exigencies of the campaign.  Just so the systematic methods of this Association place these noble missionaries where there will be least waste of labor.

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.