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398 EZRA FISHER

for the purpose of obtaining a grant of land in Oregon for an Oregon Institute Methodist, of course. You will be let into the secret by turning to the President's message, with the accompanying documents, from page 492 to page 495 inclusive. Please be at the trouble to obtain it from some of the political printing offices in your city and read it. Then ask the Baptists of the United States if it is not time for Baptists to look to Oregon.

Yours respectfully,

EZRA FISHER.

Rock Island, 111., March 31st, 1845. Dear Br. Hill:

At the request of the members of the Board of the Iowa Convention, I now sit down in great haste and in the midst of confusion and a little anxiety, to write you a private letter, presenting in brief the views of the members of the local board in Davenport relative to the future operations of your Board in Iowa. We have been contemplating our field of labor with a prayerful interest, but we cannot do less than feel emotions of gratitude for the liberal patronage your Board has extended to it. Yet we feel convinced that all your funds are not the most judiciously appropriated. . . . We believe that the present year you will expend from $1300 to $1700 in the bounds of our convention, including Rock Island Asso- ciation, and yet numbers of the most important fields of labor are entirely unreached Burlington, and at present Iowa City, Fort Madison and the entire county of Lee, with a pop- ulation falling but little short of 10,000 souls. It is the decided opinion of the brethren of the Board that some changes ought to take place, so that these points may effectually be reached and the cause sustained in them.

We think there is another defect, although we are far from charging your Board as being in any measure the cause, yet we think you may be the cause, when the defect is pointed out. The appropriation of just $100 per annum to your missionaries irrespective of the place they occupy and other