With the recognition of many fields of responsibility besides home and foreign missions and the consequent multiplication of societies, each having an annual “special day” to promote its work and raise its funds, a good deal of rivalry and confusion ensued. There were not enough days to go around. For example, the Foreign Society bitterly opposed the claim of the new American Christian Education Society (1903) upon the third Sunday in January as Education Day, because this interfered with the exclusive occupancy of January and February in preparation for Foreign Missions Day, the first Sunday in March; but it could do nothing about it because the latter was an independent and theoretically coordinate society. Moreover, the conventions were conventions of the societies rather than of the churches. The first step toward remedying this condition was the appointment of a “calendar committee,” at Buffalo in 1906, to devise a plan for reducing the number of special days. There was no immediate result. At New Orleans in 1908, the constitution of the American Christian Missionary Society was amended to provide for a delegate convention in which every church, whether contributing or not, should have elected representatives. So much parliamentary confusion attended this action that it was not carried into effect. The Centennial Convention of 1909 appointed a standing committee to consider unifying all missionary and philanthropic work under one or two boards. The committee’s intimation that it would recommend a strictly delegate convention to which all societies should report touched off a long and heated discussion. “Delegate convention” became, for the more conservative element, a symbol of apostasy, as “higher criticism” and “federation” had been a few years earlier. The formal report of the committee was made at Louisville in 1912, and the vote was almost unanimous in favor of a general convention to be composed of elected and accredited delegates from the churches. The convention of the following year, at Toronto—which was supposed to be composed of delegates but was not, because few churches sent them—ratified the delegate plan which it failed to exemplify. In subsequent conventions also there were few delegates. The delegate system failed not because of opposition but because of indifference to it. The vast majority of churches did not elect delegates, and habitual convention-goers continued to go whether they were delegates or not. At Kansas City, 1917, a new constitution was adopted, which, while retaining the delegate feature, made it meaningless by giving equal voting power to all members of churches who were in attendance. (It was like having an elected Congress with the provision that any citizen who cares to attend its sessions shall have all the powers of a congressman.) But with a large and representative “Committee on Recommendations” serving as an upper house, the plan works surprisingly well.