(b.) Greatest care is required and exercised in planting new work.  Let us in fancy plant a new school in the South, as the Association does it.  Exhaustive correspondence is of course, the first step.  Then the Field Superintendent visits the field.  He gathers every possible fact bearing upon the question:  The population; schools, if any; the opinions of white and colored citizens; the religious complexion of the community, etc., etc., etc.  Now this Field Superintendent has studied maps and statistics and school reports, and been back and forth until the whole field is in his mind, not simply this one locality.  These facts in extenso are reported to the officers in New York.  Conferences many and patient are held over them until finally it is settled that this place rather than some other shall be selected for the new school.  Now such care as this would be impossible except as the A.M.A., through its officers and teachers, knew the whole field.  By independent or individual effort this could not be done.  It is not the absolute, but the comparative need and hopefulness that determine the wisdom of fixing upon a certain place for a school or church.  This comparative need can only be known by an organized society which has frequent and abundant communication with the whole field, and has officers whose business it is to know that field.  The experiments being tried in different places have already been made by the A.M.A., and proved to be either absolutely failures or relatively an uneconomic use of funds.

The saving to you who furnish the money is very great by this method of systematic spending.  Let me illustrate by a single example which occurred only a few months ago.  Two towns, only a few miles apart, were clamoring for help in school work.  We opened a school tentatively in one of these places, as we had one missionary there already, and I visited the other place.  This is what I found:  A teacher independent of any society, and consequently knowing only a small part of the South, had opened a school.  She had labored very faithfully, but very unwisely, putting money and years of hard work into a field which, from its very conditions, could not be largely successful.  She had a poor building for teachers’ home, a rough school-house with no desks, a narrow strip of land, and an enrollment of about eighty pupils.  She was anxious to have the A.M.A. take the work.  She informed me that in order to secure it, it would be necessary to pay out from $2,500 to $3,000 in paying debts and putting the buildings in shape for advantageous use.  This was the case then:  A fairly good house, a rough school-house, a bit of land, and a school of less than one hundred pupils, costing at least $2,500.  At the other point under discussion, there were five acres of land, five buildings, an enrollment of about 250 pupils, and the whole property could be secured for $600! $2,500 vs. $600.