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Show OOMM18EIIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. 5 pist hires to carry a pile of bricks from one side of the road to the other and then back again. The employment bureau recently organ-ized for the Indians in the Southwest is designed to gather up all the able-bodied Indians who, through the pinch of hunger it may be, have been moved to think that they would like to earn some money, and plant then1 upon ranches, upon railroads, in mineswherever in the outer world, in short, there is anopening for a dollar to be got for a day's work. The clerk who has been placed in charge of the bureau is to supervise their contracts with their employers, see that their wages are paid them when due, and look out for them if they fall ill. For the rest, the Indians engaged are to be required to stand on their own feet like other men, and to understand that for what comes to them hereafter they will have themselves to thank. Some one has styled this a policy of shrinkage, because every Indian whose name is stricken from a tribal roll by virtue of his emancipa-tion reduces the dimensions of our recl-race l ~ r o l ~ l IcI , J! ~:r ~f l. , < , I :i~. very small, it may be, but not negligible. If we can thus gradually watch our body of dependent Indians shrink, even by one member at a time, we may congratulate ourselves that the final solution is indeed only a question of a few years. The process of general readjustment must be gradual, but it should be carried forward as fast as it can be with presumptive security for the Indian's little possessions; and I should not let its educative value be obscured for a moment. The leading strings which have tied the Indian to the Treasury ever since he began to own anything of value have been a curse to him. They have kept him an economic nursling long past the time when he ought to have been able to take a few steps alone. The tendency of what~er~qr17t4reai ning in money matters he has had for the last half cenqry +as)%een toward making - him an easy victim to such waves of ci:vi,chqresy as swept over the country in the early nineties. That i ~ !@i :%t ~ . , rotf politics into which we wish the Indian to plunge as I+,> ;he responsibilities of citizenship. This is, of course, a bare outline of a policy. The subject is too vast for treatment in a report. I should not feel satisfied to leave it, how-ever, without trying to meet a few conventional objections which I know from experience are sure to be raised. 'L Would you,)) one critic will ask, "tie the young Indian down it11 his schooling to 'the three R's ' and then turn him loose to compete with the white youth who have had so much larger scholastic opportunity ?" I answer that I am discussing the Government's obligations rather than the Indian's. I would give the young Indian all the chance for intellectual training that the young Caucasian enjoys; he has it already between govern-mental aid and private benevolence, and in a population teeming with benevolent men and women of means no young Indian with the talent |