CHAPTER IX.
SURVEY OF DISTRICTS WHERE TWO OR MORE SOCIETIES ARE AT WORK AND SURVEY OF MISSIONS WITH NO DEFINED DISTRICTS.
I.Districts in which Two or more Societies are at Work.
Hitherto we have taken for granted that only one missionary society is at work in the district and that the survey is therefore simple; but in many mission station districts some other society is also at work.
Occasionally the district of one station overlaps part of the district of a station of another society.

In many districts Roman Catholics are at work, and certain forms of their work cannot be ignored, and no form of their work ought to be ignored in surveying the district.
If two missions sent by different societies are at work in the _same_ district then, it would be an immense advantage if the survey of the district could be made a joint production.

Union for study is often possible, when union in work is impossible, and the common understanding of the situation is most useful.
But if that is impossible, then each society must survey the whole district, and, what an immense amount of labour would be wasted in the preliminary survey, the physical toil of travelling over the country to see the villages and towns, which must be seen to be known, and must be known to reveal the secret of the task which the mission is founded to fulfil, that labour is known only to one who has undertaken such a task, and will soon be known to anyone who starts out conscientiously to survey any district.

But it is helpful and illuminating labour, and it would be far better that the heads of two missions should survey the whole of the same district separately than that neither should survey any of it.

If both feel that in any real sense that is "_their district_," then they ought both to survey it all; for to call a district _mine_ which I have not even surveyed and do not know even by sight is absurd; but it would lighten their labour and help their mutual understanding if they surveyed it together.
If a part of the district overlaps part of another mission district, that part should be surveyed together if possible, or if that is not possible, by each separately.
In this survey the work of no Christian society, however remote ecclesiastically or theologically from the surveyor's point of view, should be omitted.