Bible Society Colporteur Distribution
“FIFTY years since,” says the Missionary Review of the World, “the average number of colporteurs employed by the British and Foreign Bible Society did not exceed 150, and the average yearly circulation by colportage was about 150,000 copies. To-day the society’s colporteurs distribute by sale one out of every three copies issued, and the 870 men employed throughout 1902 circulated no fewer than 1,833,000 copies, in over two hundred different languages. Of these colporteurs, twenty-nine were at work in Turkey and Greece, forty-seven in Austria-Hungary, fifty-one in France, fifty-one in Korea, eighty-eight in the Russian empire, one hundred and fifty in India and Ceylon, and two hundred and thirty-eight in China.”