another man. Fifteen more men should be speedily in commission. Five out of the eight churches organized this year have had no help from the Board, and one has had no preaching. And yet the Presbyterian Alliance of Denver and the Home Mission Committee have pushed work as far and fast as they were able, and energy and good-will for the work are unabated. The Mexican work in southern Colorado is advancing. The evangelists are active and faithful, and the churches give good indications of healthful spiritual life, their benevolent contributions, for instance, being proportionately larger than those of neighboring American churches.

TEXAS.

This is a Home Mission field for a whole great Church. Our people need to be familiarized by repetition with the idea that this vast commonwealth is half as large as Alaska, and half as large again as California, and six times as big as New York. It is by eminence the Home Mission ground of the Southern Church, which everywhere overshadows and outnumbers our own, though utterly inadequate to the work it would fain monopolize, and showing weak points at every turn. Our synodical missionary, Dr. Little, and our synod, show great endurance. Three churches have been built for $6,000. Five have been organized, with three Sundayschools, thirty-four missionaries have been employed at sixtyseven places, and 150 persons have been received on confession. Foundations have been broadened, and solid results surpass showing. One hundred and seventy-five German families at Fredericksburgh are inclining toward our Church, and the movement promises enlargement. There are, perhaps, 150,000 Germans in the State, two-thirds of them now English-speaking. The German church at Fredericksburg is building a new church to cost $10,000. The German call to our Church is most emphatic. Our Board spent $17,000 in Texas last year, and this year should spend $20,000 or more. No church has this year reached self-support. Contributions have increased, but Southern Presbyterians give more per member than ours do. And yet ours give a larger average than that of our whole Church. Sixty-six out of 256 southern churches are vacant, and some reported supplied have preaching only once

a month. This year chronicles noted growth in Taylor and Wichita. Very important points, like Velasco, which, with its fine harbor, aspires and promises to rival Galveston, and Waco, and Fort Worth, and Galveston itself, with 50,000 population, wait for an occupation by us, which only the load on the Board has delayed. Now that the load is lightened, our plant can and should be doubled in the coming year.

NEW MEXICO AND ARIZONA.

The Synod of New Mexico, only three years old, covers these two great Territories, with 122,000 and 113,000 square miles respectively-a combined area half as large as Alaska, and five times as large as New York or Pennsylvania. The large school work among the Mexican population will be detailed under woman's work. The synodical missionary, Rev. James A. Menaul, has both this and the church work under his charge. About twenty Mexican evangelists are doing a peculiar and excellent work under care of the presbyteries and pastors. Decided advance has been made in all directions. School attendance has improved, notwithstanding the very good public school system just inaugurated, for which the graduates of our mission schools have furnished many of the best teachers. A good church building has been erected at Socorro for the Spanish congregation, and chapels are building at La Luz and Las Valles. Want of men and means has prevented the organization of any churches during the year. Our Church has not yet established a single mission in the great counties of Chaves, Lincoln and Eddy in Southeastern New Mexico. Arizona has been sadly neglected. Phoenix and Silver City have suffered for want of attention. Mexican work is opening up more and more, and calls for schools and churches at such places as Solomonville, Tucson and Phoenix. Our mission at Flagstaff, Arizona, is only a year old, and yet the people have completed a new edifice, and are paying half the salary of their capable pastor, Dr. Coltman, formerly Superintendent of our Albuquerque school. The Albuquerque church has become self-supporting, and has built a handsome manse. At Las Cruces a fine brick edifice has been bought from the M. E. Church South, and when the congregation has completed payment therefor, it will

at once assume self-support. Spanish preaching has been begun at Pena Blanca, and a church will soon be organized.

The synod a year ago had eighty-one more Mexican members than American. This year the Mexican membership exceeds the American by 242. The membership of the Indian church at Sacaton has more than doubled during the year.

INDIAN TERRITORY AND OKLAHOMA.

There is nothing specially new to note in our mission work in Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Muscogee Presbyteries. Dr. Hill, our synodical missionary, has managed the troublesome matter of contracts for schools with the councils in a wise and economical way. The three Presbyteries number 43 ministers, seven or more of them natives, nine licentiates, and 77 churches, with 2,173 communicants. Changes are frequent, and good men are not as plenty as desirable. The schools are here relatively a more important part of our work than in any other field. A few new points have been opened. The white children of the territory should have more recognition and provision than hitherto. Both churches and schools could be wisely increased if means were sufficient. Mission work might be indefinitely extended among the full-bloods, as also among the "blanket" tribes in the western part of the territory, for whom very little has as yet been attempted. The Southern Utes in Colorado, the Uintahs in Utah, and the Apaches in Arizona, are all open to us, and all utterly neglected and needy. A move has lately been made toward beginning work among the latter, means having been offered by a wealthy member of a New York rural church.

Oklahoma will be greatly enlarged by the opening and addition of the "Cherokee strip," 200 miles long and 30 wide, lying between it and Kansas. The Board has already authorized six new men for the six new county seats. The inflow of population will open a new field and a new demand for Home Mission work, as in the case of the lately-opened Sisseton Reservation in South Dakota. Our church in El Reno, under Rev. C. L. Miller, has perhaps the largest audience in Oklahoma. Rev. W. L. Miller, his father, our missionary at Oklahoma City from the beginning, is just leaving

his neat church building and large and flourishing congregation for a field near his former one in Indian Territory. Our church in Guthrie, the capital, has not done so well, but is holding its own. Oklahoma will make new demands upon us before long. We have been too slow there already. Older places can wait awhile, but this cannot be put off. Kansas, for instance, can afford delay of new work, since thousands of its people will pour into the new tract just open, depleting its border counties for the time, as when Oklahoma itself was opened three years ago. So even Missouri's valid and waiting claims will bear a brief and partial postponement until the new centres have been pre-empted by pioneer missionaries who go in abreast of the first wave of settlers. Time and tide wait for no missionary. The older part of Oklahoma is not more than half manned, and the new section must be more promptly and punctually handled. Presbyterian hands must not fail to lay their share of the foundations of the coming state, and for this a little haste will be more effective, as well as more economical, than undue deliberation.

UTAH, MONTANA AND IDAHO.

These may be grouped together as included in the Synod of Utah, though part of Idaho belongs to the Synod of Washington. Utah and Idaho are linked by the Mormonism which dominates one and partly holds possession of the other. "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" has suffered from the growing incursion of the "Gentiles," who have fairly established their majority and supremacy in Ogden and Salt Lake City, and have in hand the municipal offices and the public schools. Park City, twentyfive miles east of Salt Lake City, the site and product of the great Ontario mine, and the other mining towns throughout the territory in general, are, as they have always been, under Gentile influence. Logan and its surrounding villages in the lovely Cache Valley in the north are moving fast in the same direction. The Americanization of Mormondom is only a question of time, and can only be retarded or prevented by the premature granting of statehood to the territory, the prospect of which is growing no brighter, eagerly as the Mormon hierarchy would welcome it. Mormonism as a system

remains unchanged in its antagonism to Americanism and Christianity and the social ethics characteristic of both, despite Mormon protestations of the abandonment of plural marriage and of loyalty to the Government. Some of its staunchest opponents have mistakenly inclined to credit the strenuous declarations to this effect, but most from past experience "fear the Greeks even when bringing gifts," and deprecate any legislative movement toward granting a state organization until it is put beyond question that Gentile officers are to manage it. The territory is full of wealth, agricultural and mineral, and its development is rapidly growing. Large parts of its area of 82,000 square miles are as fair and fertile as any land the sun shines on. During its history of fifty years its population has reached 207,000, and when American and Christian ideas shall fairly become dominant, its people will have as rich a home and heritage as any State of the Union.

Dr. Sheldon Jackson first prospected here for the work of the Board, soon followed by Dr. Cyrus Dickson, in 1871. The first Presbyterian organization was at Corinne, a thoroughly Gentile station on the Union Pacific Railroad. The Rev. Josiah Welch was sent to Salt Lake City the same year, and the church was organized in November of the same year. The city then had a population of 15,000, with less than 3000 Americans. Mormons then filled all the offices, and the priesthood controlled public sentiment and defied courts and laws. The Presbyterian ministers and their sympathizers from the first were foes to the hierarchy, but friends to the people. In the face of difficulties and menaces they advocated free thought and speech, and stood steadfastly for Americanization, Christian patriotism and moral reform. In 1875 our Collegiate Institute was established on a commanding central site, and it has been ever since, as it still is, in spite of insufficient buildings and equipment, the best school in the territory. The lately-established free-school system has somewhat narrowed its range, or, rather, elevated its plane and aim from primary and academic to collegiate education; but in the new shape of a Christian college, with ample appliances and perhaps on another and suburban site, it has before it a valuable and notable career as a chief radiating centre of the higher education in the coming State.