coal fields. That was the primary objective of the railroad, to get at the Matanuska coal. From Anchorage it was also intended to drive farther north through the Susitna Valley and across Broad Pass, and to the south along Turnagain Arm toward the Alaska Northern track. To secure coal for Alaska was the first need. So in addition to Anchorage as a base, one was also started at Nenana, on the Tanana River, from which to reach the Nenana coal fields lying to the south. If these two fields were open, one would supply the coast of Alaska and one the interior. This program has been acted upon, with the result that the Matanuska field is open to tidewater with a downgrade road all the way. The Nenana road has been pushed far enough south to touch a coal mine near the track, which may obviate the immediate necessity for reaching into the Nenana field proper.

There is an open stretch across Broad Pass to connect the Susitna Valley with the road coming down from Nenana. This gap closed, there will be through connection between Seward and Fairbanks.

MATANUSKA COAL.

By decisions of the Commissioner of the Land Office all of the claims in the Matanuska coal field were set aside, and by act of Congress a leasing bill was put into effect over the entire field. Under this law a number of claims must be reserved to the Government. The field was surveyed, and some of the most promising portions of the field have been so reserved.

Two leases have been entered into by the Government, one with Lars Netland, a miner, who has a backer, Mr. Fontana, a business man of San Francisco, and the other with Oliver La Duke and associates. There are many thousands of acres in this field which are open for lease and which will be leased to any responsible parties who will undertake their development. Government experts who have examined this field do not promise without further exploring a larger output of coal from this field than 150,000 tons a year.

The population of Alaska has fallen off during the war. She sent, I am told, 5,000 men into the Army, the largest proportion to population sent by any part of the United States. The high cost of labor and materials closed some of the gold mines, and the attractive wages offered by war industries drew labor from Alaska to the mainland. All prospecting practically closed. But with the return of peace there is evidence of a new movement toward that Territory which should be given added confidence in its future by the completion of the Alaskan Railroad. There is enough arable land in Alaska to maintain a population the equal of all those now living in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and all that can be produced in those countries can be produced in Alaska. The great need is a market, and this will be found only as the mining and fishing industries of the country develop.

SAVE AND DEVELOP AMERICANS.

When the whole story is told of American achievement and the picture is painted of our material resources, we come back to the plain but all-significant fact that far beyond all our possessions in land and coal and waters and oil and industries is the American man. To him, to his spirit and to his character, to his skill and to his intelligence is due all the credit for the land in which we live. And that resource we are neglecting. He may be the best nurtured and the best clothed and the best housed of all men on this great globe. He may have more chances to become independent and even rich. He may have opportunities for schooling nowhere else afforded. He may have a freedom to speak and to worship and to exercise his judgment over the affairs of the Nation. And yet he is the most neglected of our resources because he does not know how rich he is, how rich beyond all other men he is. Not rich in money-I do not speak of that--but rich in the endowment of powers and possibilities no other man ever was given.

Twenty-five per cent of the 1,600,000 men between 21 and 31 years of age who were first drafted into our Army could not read nor write our language, and tens of thousands could not speak it nor understand it. To them the daily paper telling what Von Hindenberg was doing was a blur. To them the appeals of Hoover came by word of mouth, if at all. To them the messages of their commander in chief were as so much blank paper. To them the word of mother or sweetheart came filtering in through other eyes that had to read their letters.

Now this is wrong. There is something lacking in the sense of a society that would permit it in a land of public schools that assumes leadership in the world.

Here is raw material truly, of the most important kind and the greatest possibility for good as well as for ill.

Save! Save! Save! This has been the mandate for the past two years. It is a word with which this report is replete. But we have been talking of food and land and oil while the boys and young men that are about us who carry the fortune of the democracy in their hands are without a primary knowledge of our institutions, our history, our wars and what we have fought for, our men and what they have stood for, our country and what its place in the world is.

The marvelous force of public opinion and the rare absorbing quality of the American mind never was shown more clearly than by the fact that out of these men came a loyalty and a stern devotion to America when the day of test came. Had Germany known what we know now, it would have been beyond her to believe that America could draft an army to adventure into war in Europe. There should not be a man who was in our Army or our Navy who has the ambi

tion for an education who should not be given that opportunity-indeed, induced to take it—not merely out of appreciation but out of the greater value to the Nation that he would be if the tools of life were put into his hand. There is no word to say upon this theme of Americanization that has not been said, and Congress, it is now hoped, will believe those figures which, when presented nearly two years ago, were flouted as untrue. The Nation is humiliated at its own indifference, and action must be the result.

To save and to develop, I have said, were equally the expression of a true conservation. What is true as to material things is true as to human beings. And once given a foundation of health there is no other course by which this policy may be effected than to place at the command of every one the means of acquiring knowledge. The whole people must turn in that direction. We should enable all, without distinction, to have that training for which they are fitted by their own natural endowment. Then we can draw out of hiding the talents that have been hidden. The school will yet come to be the first institution of our land, in acknowledged preeminence in the making of Americans who understand why they are Americans and why to be one is worth while.1

Respectfully, yours,

The PRESIDENT.

FRANKLIN K. LANE,

Secretary.

1 Assistant Secretary Herbert Kaufman before the Senate Committee on Education presented facts and figures which accentuate the seriousness of the national situation, Among other things he said:

"The South leads in illiteracy, but the North leads in non-English speaking. Over 17 per cent of the persons in the east-south Central States have never been to school. Approximately 16 per cent of the people of Passaic, N. J., must deal with their fellow workers and employers through interpreters. And 13 per cent of the folk in Lawrence and Fall River, Mass., are utter strangers in a strange land,

"The extent to which our industries are dependent upon this labor is perilous to all standards of efficiency. Their ignorance not only retards production and confuses adminIstration, but constantly piles up a junk heap of broken humans and damaged machines which cost the Nation incalculably.

"It is our duty to interpret America to all potential Americans in terms of protection as well as of opportunity; and neither the opportunities of this continent nor that humanity which is the genius of American democracy can be rendered intelligible to these 8,000,000 until they can talk and read and write our language.

"Steel and iron manufacturers employ 58 per cent of foreign-born helpers; the slaughtering and meat-packing trades, 61 per cent; bituminous coal mining, 62 per cent; the silk and dye trade, 34 per cent; glass-making enterprises, 38 per cent; woolen mills, 62 per cent; cotton factories, 69 per cent; the clothing business, 72 per cent; boot and shoe manufacturers, 27 per cent; leather tanners, 57 per cent; furniture factories, 59 per cent; glove manufacturers, 33 per cent; cigar and tobacco trades, 33 per cent; oil refiners, 67 per cent; and sugar refiners, 85 per cent.

"You will agree with me that future security compels attention to such concentrations of unread, unsocialized masses thus conveniently and perilously grouped for misguidance.

"They live in America, but America does not live in them. How can all be free and equal' until they have free access to the same sources of self-help and an equal chance to secure them?

"Illiteracy is a pick-and-shovel estate, a life sentence to meniality. Democracy may not have fixed classes and survive. The first duty of Congress is to preserve opportunity

140922°-INT 1919-VOL 1-5

for the whole people, and opportunity can not exist where there is no means of Information.

"It is a shabby economy, an ungrateful economy that withholds funds for their betterment. The fields of France cry shame upon those who are content to abandon them to their handicap.

"The loyal service of immigrant soldiers and sailors commit us to instruct and nationalize their brothers in breed.

"The spirit in which these United States were conceived insists that the Republic remove the cruel disadvantage under which so many native borns despairingly carry on. "How may they reason soundly or plan sagely? The man who knows nothing of the past can find little in the future. The less he has gleaned from human experience the more he may be expected to duplicate its signal errors. No argument is too ridiculous for acceptance; no sophistry can seem far-fetched to a person without the sense to confound it. Anarchy shall never want for mobs while the uninformed are left at the mercy of false prophets. Those who have no way to estimate the worth of America are unlikely to value its institutions fairly. Blind to facts, the wildest one-eyed argument can sway them.

"Not until we can teach our illiterate millions the truths about the land to which they have come and in which they were born shall its spirit reach them-not until they can read can we set them right and empower them to inherit their estate.

"If we continue to neglect them, there are influences at work that will sooner or later convince them who now fail to appreciate the worth of our Government that the Government itself has failed-crowd the melting pot with class hates and violence and befoul its yield.

"We must not be tried by inquest. We demand the right to vindicate the merit of our systems wherever their integrity is questioned or maligned.

"We demand the right to regulate the cheating scales upon which the Republic is weighed by its ill-wishers.

"We demand the right to protect unintelligence from Esau bargains with hucksters of traitorous creeds.

"We demand the right to present our case and our cause to the unlettered mass, whose benightedness and ready prejudices continually invite exploitation.

"We demand the right to vaccinate credulous inexperience against Bolshevism and kindred plagues.

"We demand the right to render all whose kind we deem fit to fight for our flag fit to vote and prosper under its folds.

"We demand the right to bring the American language to every American, to qualify each inhabitant of these United States for self-determination, self-uplift, and selfdefense."

Dr. Philander P. Claxton, Commissioner of Education, in his analysis of the illiteracy figures of the census, said:

Illiteracy is not confined to any one race or class or section. Of the 5,500,000 illiterates as reported by the census of 1910, nearly 3,225,000 were whites, and more than 1,500,000 were native-born whites.

"That illiteracy is not a problem of any one section alone is shown by the fact that in 1910 Massachusetts had 7,469 more illiterate men of voting age than Arkansas; Michigan, 2,663 more than West Virginia; Maryland, 2,352 more than Florida; Ohio, more than twice as many as New Mexico and Arizona combined; Pennsylvania, 5,689 more than Tennessee and Kentucky combined. Boston had more illiterates than Baltimore, Pittsburgh more than New Orleans, Fall River more than Birmingham, Providence nearly twice as many as Nashville, and the city of Washington 5,000 more than the city of Memphis.

"It is especially significant that of the 1,534,272 native-born white illiterates reported in the 1910 census 1,342,372, about 87.5 per cent, were in the open country and small towns, and only 191,900, or 12.5 per cent, were in cities having a population of 2,500 and Of the 2,227,731 illiterate negroes 1,834,458, or 82.3 per cent, were in the country, and only 393,273, or 17.7 per cent, were in the cities."

over.

ADMINISTRATIVE EFFORT.

THE GENERAL LAND OFFICE,

1. Allowed during the fiscal year original entries of Indian and public lands 11,871,181.50 acres, an increase of 1,896,849.89 acres over the area entered and allowed during the fiscal year 1918.

2. Patented during the fiscal year an area of 10,777,001.349 acres, an increase over the fiscal year of 1918 of 1,224,519.132 acres.

3. Collected from all sources during the year $4,303,674.20, and expended during the same time in the public land service, $3,026,554.46, leaving a net surplus of receipts over expenditures of $1,277,119.74.

4. Collected and turned into the United States Treasury as the result of the work of the field service, $101,298.96.

5. Restored to the public domain as the result of investigation in the field, 164,363.83 acres.

6. Secured as escrow deposits, under contracts entered into with oil-land claimants under the act of August 25, 1914 (38 Stat., 708), up to the end of the fiscal year, $4,325,005.84.

7. Secured as escrow deposits by operators under oil-land leases from the State of Wyoming, $2,119,306.58.

8. Obtained judicial decree quieting title in the United States to 617 acres of oil-producing lands in the State of Louisiana, with an award of $462,903.39 for oil taken in trespass.

9. Obtained a judicial decrce quieting title in the United States to 54,000 acres of Arkansas "Sunk lands," of the value of $2,700,000. 10. Approved and accepted surveys and resurveys covering an area of 7,668,514 acres.

11. Approved for patent 40,131 homestead and kindred entries, as against 32,120 the year previous.

12. Allowed 15,037 stock-raising homestead entries covering an area of 5,559,235 acres.

13. Secured the withdrawal for stock driveway purposes, under the grazing homestead act, 4,303,727 acres. The total area thus withdrawn at present is 6,623,531 acres.

14. Promulgated administrative ruling of June 13, 1919, discontinuing the application of the rule of approximation in the location of soldiers' additional homestead rights.