the young women of their village, and have accordingly suffered in their prospects of matrimonial alliances.

It may not be possible to introduce another industry at once so new to this people and so exactly suited to their needs as is the reindeer industry, but a constant endeavor is making in other portions of Alaska to put the natives in possession of such industrial skill and apparatus as will meet their present needs. The improvement of their boat building and fishing, the introduction at suitable points of agriculture and gardening, the erection of saw mills, the organization of coöperative buying and selling, are undertakings which are either already under way, or under careful consideration. Sets of wood-working tools have been introduced into many of the schools, a good deal of systematic instruction is given to the girls in cookery and sewing, and other industrial plans have been put upon trial.

Here as everywhere the need of moral training is the first educational need. Moral education through cleanliness, healthful home conditions, and remunerative industry are of incalculable importance. There are, however, portions of Alaska in which the demand for labor is so great that the natives can easily earn enough by day labor to keep them with their families in comfort or even in a low grade of luxury. The problem in such a case is that of keeping them up to such a moral plane that they will not squander their earnings in demoralizing indulgences. There is a work here to be done by churches and missions rather than by public schools, and at many points I believe this work of religious education is well done. But direct instruction in morals is needed, too, such as public schools can give and in some measure are giving. Still further, there is need of legal restraints, particularly as regards the sale of intoxicants. On the side of legal provisions two important acts were passed by the Congress at its session of last winter. One of these makes the sale of alcoholic liquors to the Alaskan natives a felony; the other provides for the appointment of members of the Alaska school service as special peace officers, with power, under the general direction of the Department of Justice, to make arrests in cases of wrongdoing either by natives or against natives. The importance of these two enactments can hardly be exaggerated. Already the Department of Justice is proceeding vigorously against the traffic in strong drink from which the natives have suffered, and only last week word was received of the conviction of ten men who had been engaged in such traffic, all of whom were already on their way to the penitentiary on Puget Sound.

I will not detain this Conference with a more extended account of new undertakings in the Alaskan field. What has been pre

sented is of course only a part of the whole. We believe that even such a fragmentary statement may not be without interest to those engaged elsewhere in similar work. The Alaska service recognizes a responsibility, which is indeed a responsibility of the service for any backward people, of blazing new ways among new difficulties. In so doing it may hope not only to share in bearing the white man's burden among the members of darker race, but also in widening the conception of education everywhere, even the education of highly cultured peoples.

A word as to present needs of the service will close this account. The Congressional action most immediately needed by the Alaska service, in addition to the maintenance of the present scale of annual appropriations is twofold: First, the adoption of an effective school attendance law, and, Second, provision under which the Secretary of the Interior may prescribe sanitary regulations which shall have the force of law, after the manner of the regulations of boards of health in this country. So much of authority, backed by power as peace officers which will be lodged in some of our employees in Alaska, will undoubtedly render a recourse to actual compulsion generally unnecessary, and will enable us to make better progress toward a condition in which the Alaskan natives shall be ready for free and self-directed citizenship. (Applause.)

THE CHAIRMAN: At our meeting last year we were addressed by the Hon. Francis E. Leupp, then Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who gave an account of the work of the Indian Bureau, and brought forward a number of speakers, representing the Indian service. In the year that has just passed, Mr. Leupp, after a long, honorable and extremely useful service as the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has retired from that service.

One of the speakers in Mr. Leupp's program of a year ago was Mr. ROBERT G. VALENTINE, who has since succeeded Mr. Leupp as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. It now gives me great pleasure to introduce Hon. ROBERT G. VALENTINE, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who will take charge of the morning's program from this point.

WHAT THE PUBLIC SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE

INDIAN BUREAU

ADDRESS OF HON. ROBERT G. VALENTINE

The people of the United States ought to know certain things. about their Indian Bureau. Throughout the country are groups of people and numerous individuals who know a good deal about

its work in this or that particular; but both these and the people at large know too little about the two or three fundamental principles in the light of which all the multiform activities of the Indian Service fall into well-ordered array in an advance toward a single goal. In the minds of most people the Indian Service is a mere hodge podge of activities. Indians are going to this or that kind of school, being allotted, farming allotments, leasing allotments, selling allotments, raising stock, working in the woods, learning to irrigate, drawing per capita payments in some cases and rations in others, owning bank accounts of all sizes from a few dollars to many thousands, going to church and engaging in Pagan rites, dealing shrewdly with traders or becoming an easy mark for them, developing all kinds of diseases, getting drunk, and even, to the surprise of many naive neighbors, keeping sober; loafing here, and there making some of the best workmen the United States possesses; and all these various activities are kept in further confusion by the kaleidescopic changes introduced by the rapidly developing economic and social life of the white people. scattered more and more around and through the Indian country. And in the popular mind which hears more or less about this apparent chaos, there sits in a kind of semi-paralyzed control of it all the Indian Bureau, groping with such energies as it pos sesses more or less feebly among the thousands of statutes which go to make up Indian law, the hundreds of court decisions, the mass of ill-digested regulations, and turning out five or six hundred letters and decisions in a day, and solemnly mailing them to the reservations and allotted districts scattered through twentysix states, hoping in a half-conscious way that each document will fit the case about as well as a coat made in Paris would meet the need of a Western ranchman its maker had never seen.

This apparent chaos in Indian affairs is only true superficially. There are a few fundamental principles which explain these phenomena, unifying them and vitalizing them into a single great progressive force. I confess that these principles frequently lie deeply hidden, and in many quarters would not even be suspected; but they are there and they are the roots of accomplishment. In order that in the few decades which remain in which it will be still possible for the United States to do anything for Indians the best results may be accomplished, it is necessary for the people at large to realize what these principles are, to assist in bringing them to the surface, and to demand of the Indian Bureau and of the Congress their intelligent and forceful application.

I am in no way reflecting on the achievements of the past in Indian affairs in Congress, in the Indian Bureau and in the country at large when I put before you the exact condition

of things as they are to-day. I am merely asking you to face with me a work that lies before us, that we may better accomplish

it. The Indian Service is to-day wide open to the whole country for inspection, both in the Office at Washington, and on the reservations where the Indians live. Speaking as a member of the Government, I say that we have nothing to conceal, and everyone, good or bad, who has any worthy or unworthy interest in Indian affairs is welcome at all times to come to see me. I was talking with a man the other day whom I know to be a liar, and a friend of mine protested against my receiving such a man. He thought that I should not countenance such a person by consulting with him or with another one whom I know to be in an underhanded way inimical to me; but I replied that I have no personal feelings of the kind that would make me resent the presence of such a person while I am Commissioner of Indian Affairs. I can no more find time for rows in this fight than can a soldier in a charge. I must listen to all, gather every scrap of information and advice, seek to see every rock and shoal and hidden danger, and think of nothing but of using the knowledge so gained to better the condition of Indians. While I am in this work I am enemy to no man, personally, in the United States, but only to the things which get in the way of the Indians. (Applause.)

But I cannot meet and hear and see all the good and all the bad myself. I must have eyes and ears in the field, going openly or secretly, seeing clearly, hearing fully, all that there is. Congress must give me, and I use the word "must must" speaking as one of the people of the United States who elect Congressmen, a corps of inspectors who should be at least thirty as high-grade men in business training and moral sense as this country affords. At present, more or less accidentally, I have some three or four of this grade. These inspectors should be paid enough so that they can give their lives to the work. The Indian Service is weak in the head, weak-eyed, and hard of hearing. The ten millions or so which go to make up the annual appropriation by Congress for running the Service is not well-apportioned. It does not recognize the necessity for leadership. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are wasted because the managers are not paid business salaries.

Likewise we must have real superintendents. It is possible to get cabinet officers for far less money than they can earn in private business. It may, perhaps, be possible to get Commissioners on the same terms, but it is not possible, as a rule, so to get the 170 Men on the Ground. If the head of a great corporation paid a man in charge of one of his plants to handle a

property valued at something like the number of millions involved on the Osage Reservation, less than ten thousand a year, he would be criminally negligent in the eyes of good business. It is criminal negligence to pay the Superintendent of the Osage Reservation only $2,000 a year. I am not asking for a cent of increase over the present appropriations. If Congress will do what I ask, I will take far less in appropriations than at present, because with well-paid men I could save more than their salaries each year. In many cases the tribal funds could well be taxed for good salaries to their own safety and preservation from waste. But this business side is the least important side. Superintendents should be big men, for Indian affairs is above all a human business. Only by the closest personal acquaintance with the Indians under his charge can the Superintendent hope to do the right thing for them. His place is out on the reservation, not in the office; and out there are all the intricate problems of humanity which demand a great leader.

There, too, in the field the multifarious activities in the Indian Service fall into transparent orderliness under three main heads — health, schools, and industries.

It is possible to do only two things with the Indians — to exterminate them, or to make them into citizens. Whichever we choose should be done in the most business-like manner. If we choose extermination, we should do it suddenly, painlessly and completely; but, instead of frankly engaging in that course, the country has set itself to make the Indians into citizens. It has no business to bungle this job as it is now doing, any more than, if the course of extermination were now to be decided on, it would have any business to bungle that. Our present course is, as a matter of fact, a cross between extermination and citizenship. If we would escape a disgrace greater than any which has attended this Indian business yet, we must stop at the beginning of this twentieth century and think clearly about the Indians, and set ourselves resolutely to certain clean and high courses. The whole American people must do this thinking. No group, no section alone can do it effectively. The pressure of private interest, the clutch of private greed, the political interests of public men, unless smoothed for them by wide public demand, are too omnipresent, too overwhelming for anything less than the attention of the whole people turned to the Indian to avert. (Applause.)

And this course which the thinking of all the people will make clear demands of us more than would be demanded in the case of the backward among our own people, or in the case of the immigrant. We are dealing with a people without generations back of them trained more or less in the ways of civilization.