But what about the native ministers and teachers, who find it impossible to live on the salaries of a decade ago? The problem of the ordinary helper is not so difficult. Springing from the common people, accustomed from childhood to a meagre scale of living, the small salaries which the people can pay either in full or in large part are usually equal to the income which they would have had if they had not become Christians. But some native ministers come from a higher social grade. They are men of education and refinement. They cannot live in a mud hut, go barefooted, wear a loin cloth and subsist on a few cents' worth of rice a day. They must not only have better houses and food and clothing, but they must have books and periodicals and the other apparatus of educated men. These things are not only necessary to their own maintenance, but they are essential to the work, for these men are the main reliance for influencing the upper classes in favour of Christianity. It is not a question of luxury or self-indulgence, but of bare respectability, of the simple decencies of life which are enjoyed by an American mechanic as distinguished from the poverty which, for a cultivated family, falls below the level of self-respect. But this requires a salary which, save in a very few places, cannot at present be paid by the churches. ``Our pastors,'' writes a missionary, ``are supposed to live as the middle-class of their people do, but of late years, with the great rise in prices, they are living below the middle-class.'' The consequences are not only pinching poverty but sometimes a feeling of wrong, and, in some cases, a yielding to temptation. One Chinese pastor, for example, who was trying to support a wife and five children on $10 Mex. ($5) a month, shipwrecked his influence by trying to supplement his scanty income by helping in lawsuits. Can we wonder that he felt obliged to do something, almost anything?