On that part of his contention he lost; and it would be useless now to try to ascertain the respective merits of the two sides to that question. The second part of the letter just cited discussed the abandonment of Tengchow as a mission station. The plan of those who took the affirmative of this debate was to leave that city to the Southern Baptists, who almost forty years before had preceded the Presbyterians a few weeks in a feeble occupation, but who had been entirely overshadowed by the development of the college. For the retention of the station Dr. Mateer pleaded with his utmost fervor and eloquence. Though the decision remained in uncertainty while he lived, and the uncertainty gave him much anxiety, large gifts, coming since, from a consecrated layman, have rendered the retention of the Tengchow station secure. The wisdom of the decision is vindicated by present conditions. At the close of 1909 the station reported a city church with three hundred members; a Sabbath school which sometimes numbers five hundred pupils; thirty out-stations with about five hundred members; twenty-four primary schools, giving instruction to three hundred and sixteen boys and girls, and taught by graduates of the higher schools of the station; a girls’ high school with an average enrollment of forty-six pupils, and for the year then closing having twelve graduates, nearly all of whom became teachers; a boys’ high school with an attendance of forty, and sending up a number of graduates to the college at Wei Hsien or to other advanced institutions, and having a normal department with a model primary department; and also a helpers’ summer school; besides other machinery for reaching with the gospel the three millions of people gathered in the neighborhood of Tengchow. Nor has the work of the Presbyterians in the least hampered that of the Southern Baptists.