CHAPTER XI - CHEAP MISSIONARIES

Summary

THE question of missionaries is always à l'ordre du jour in China, and the question of the day before the Boxer uprising was distinctively cheap missionaries. For that missionaries of some sort or other have come, are coming and will continue to come, must appear certain to all who are acquainted with the interior of China. Whether it is better to have one missionary backed by a salary of, say, two hundred pounds a year, or to have four missionaries struggling against the Chinese climate and the difficulties of the Chinese language on a doubtful fifty pounds a year or less is there the point debatable. How they do it is the question. The China Inland Mission gives its members house-rent. But they have to find everything else, food, clothes, medicines, travelling expenses, books or tracts to give away, together with salaries of Chinese assistants. Mr Horsburgh says he can live on ten dollars a month. We find our Chinese coolie reckons his food alone costs him $4 65 for a month of thirty-one days. That leaves $5.35 for everything else per month. But how an English gentleman accustomed to the generous fare of old England is to keep alive even on what sustains a Chinese coolie is again a difficulty. During one summer we had the pleasure of visiting several mission stations in the West of China, both those of the Roman Catholics, to whom most travellers award lavishly the praise they deny to missionaries of their own Church, and those of the China Inland, and of Mr Horsburgh's new Church Mission.