The next town of importance that we reached was Shen Chowfu, where there is quite a large group of American missionaries with hospitals, schools, etc., whom we had been asked to visit. Their buildings stood up conspicuously at both ends of the long river-front of the city. We were told that the hospital had been built with indemnity money paid by the Chinese Government on account of the murder of C.I.M. missionaries many years ago, but which the C.I.M. declined to accept. It is a well-known fact that such money never comes from the guilty parties, but is extorted from the people, and consequently is always a source of ill-will. We were told by some charming American ladies there, how bitter the feeling had been against them, and that for years they were guarded by soldiery and never left their houses unaccompanied by a guard. They had spacious gardens, and the missionaries’ families lived there without ever going into the streets. It seemed a strange kind of existence, and brought home to us acutely the question of mission policy. There seem to me to be two classes of American missionary ideals—roughly speaking—one of which is responsible for some of the finest work possible in China and which every one must heartily admire; such work may be seen at St. John’s University, Shanghai, and in the American Board at Peking. But there is another increasingly large class whose faith seems to be pinned on a strange trinity—money, organization, and Americanization. The first necessity for them is large and showy buildings, generally apart from the busy city life, or at least on the outskirts of the city—this may be all right in the case of boarding-schools, but for hospitals it renders them practically useless. I have seen groups of residential premises miles away from the work. The welfare of the missionaries is the foremost consideration. The means of transport are slow, so that hours must be spent every day by the workers getting to and from their work, and they live a life wholly apart from the Chinese. The work is highly organized, and they have much larger staffs than our missions provide, as they seem to have unlimited means and men. Undoubtedly we err grievously in the opposite direction: our missionaries have all far more work than they can perform. Added to that, our missionaries have about one-third of the holiday that the Americans do and less money to make the holiday a real one. Our societies are all hard hit by the question of finance, but it would be better to cut down our work rather than spoil its quality by insufficient staffing and underpay.