The supply of unrelated, meaningless facts dulls and wearies the brain.  Few men can do the work with pleasure or profit, and consequently the schedules are often filled up, not indeed with deliberate carelessness, but with that heavy painfulness which, taking no interest in the work, often produces as pitiful a result as downright carelessness.  “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn” is a maxim which has a great application here.  The man who provides the information should be the first to profit by it and to be interested in it.  The first man to criticise these tables should be the missionary who fills them up on the spot; and his most valuable criticism might be a demonstration that the last column in a table was futile; that the table led him to no conclusions and suggested no remarks.  That column of conclusions and remarks we hold to be the most precious of them all.  We would have no man supply meaningless information.  Only, we believe, when the information is of vital importance and interest to the man who supplies it will it be supplied carefully, correctly, willingly, and above all, intelligently.  We venture to hope that our tables may be one step towards the day when the supply of statistical information by the missionary will cease to be mere drudgery.

(iv) Seeing that the missionary task is essentially world-wide, it is obvious that a world-wide work cannot be properly directed without a world-wide view.  Now, missionary survey is in its infancy, and in most parts of the world it has yet to be begun.  A full and complete missionary survey of the whole world would necessarily be a considerable undertaking, for many important facts could not be easily or quickly collected.  There is then a strong tendency for men to argue that, since all the facts desirable cannot be known at once without much time and expense, it is futile and dangerous to collect those facts which can be collected speedily without great expense.  A little knowledge, they say, is a dangerous thing ... let us remain ignorant.

We would venture to suggest that a little knowledge is only dangerous when it is mistaken for much knowledge; that it is far better to act on knowledge which can be obtained than to act in total ignorance, blindly.  Where we must act it is our duty to know all that we can know, and if, because we cannot collect all the information that we should wish to possess, we refuse to collect that information which we can obtain, because we realise that it will be incomplete, we commit a serious moral and intellectual crime.  If we can know only one factor out of one hundred, we offend if we refuse to know that one.  We must act.  We have no right to shut our eyes to knowledge which ought to guide our action because we are aware that action taken on that one factor will be insufficiently guided.  The one factor is an important one and must influence our action, and would influence our action if we knew all the other factors.  We ought to allow it to influence our action even in ignorance of the other factors.