The burning question, therefore, had been how to raise this _extra_ sum for _Dayspring_ Maintenance. Our Victorian Church proposed to increase her quota from £500 to £750, and issued appeals to the other coöperating Churches to make a similar advance. It did not seem too much to expect, in the interests of the Mission, all whose operations had trebled since the original responsibility was allocated; but they pled inability to comply, and so the project hung fire for ten years and more, experiments being meanwhile made in other arrangements for the Maritime Service of the Mission, and new interests of various kinds being thereby created, which have not tended to unity and peace in the management of the New Hebrides. There is peril also incurred to the highest spiritual interests of the Mission, which I daily pray God, in His loving kindness and mercy, to be pleased to avert! Without ascribing anything but the most ordinary motives in the world to those who opposed the getting of a new _Dayspring_, the situation that thus grew up is perfectly transparent. The Australian New Hebrides Company was employed to do the work of our Mission by their Trading Ships. In 1805—_e.g._, we paid to them the large sum of £2,451, 8s. 1d.; all found money, for, without us, these Ships in their outgoing trip to the Islands would have sailed comparatively empty. To secure a Ship of our own would be, therefore, to deprive the Company of this handsome subsidy; and it is but Human Nature, and implies no necessary dishonor, that the shareholders and their Ministerial and Missionary friends should have become the keenest and even bitterest opponents of the new _Dayspring_. Further, the headquarters of the Company being at Sydney, and the subsidy for our Mission, as well as the money for the upkeep of our Missionaries and their families, being consequently expended almost exclusively there, it is, from the world’s point of view, equally natural to anticipate that the very heart and centre of the opposition has been in New South Wales, and has concentrated itself in the Advisory Committee which sits at Sydney and is known as _The Dayspring Board_. All this, I say, was only to be expected, if the whole transaction is to be weighed and measured by the standards of men of the World, instead of being put into the balances of Jesus Christ, and estimated in the light of the spiritual and eternal interests of the Islanders whom He has committed to our care.