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Show COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. lxxxi to he uot equal are rejected, and in lieu thereof the contractor is re-qnired to furnish proper 'rtides within five days. If he fail in this reqniremeut, the office is by said failure authorized to purchase proper articles at the expense of the contractor. It will be seen that duder this process of securing goods and sup-plies each bidder who offers to supply a certaiu article, as, for instance, clothing, hats, boots, shoe*? blankets, dry goods, or harness, submits a sample of the article he wishes to supply, with the price thereof stated in his proposal. Thus it will he seen that a hundred or more dealers in clothing may each send in a sample overcoat, and a dozen or more deal-ers in blankets may each send in a sample blauket. Before any award can be made all the samples of an article thus submitted are examined by an expert judge ot' the goods oEered, who determines theirrelative merits as to quality a11d price,and after such an examination the Commis-sioner, the Secretary's representative, and the purchasing committee of the Board of Indian Commissioners elect the sample of the article-the overcoat or the blanket, for instance-that they think is best for the service. Thus they often take goods of higher price than some other goods of that sort which have been submitted, because the lower-pricedgoods have not the same relative value or will not, in their opin-ion, mee,t the requirement,^ of the service. Thereupon lower bidders-for the blanket contract, for instance-charge that the inspector was incompetent or that their low-priced goods were passed over in the in-terest of soulepersou who made a higher bid for goods of no better yualitr, and tbe suspicion of favoritism easily becomes intensified into 8, charge of fraud. When deliveries commence, as for instance of blankets, and the inspector. after examiuation, passes or refuses to pass the goods as up to the sample, it may follow that disappointed bidders, partisan maligners,scandal-mongers,and even fair-minded friends of the Indians will allow the suspicion of iucon~peteucy or of partiality or of prejudice on thepart of theinspector to becomea belief in his dishonesty. Thus, the contract system of the Indian service is made in certain quarters a by-word and a reproach, and reputable dealers hesitate to make pro-posals to supply the service with their goods. Moreover public offi-cers charged with the duty of making the contracts aud supervising deliveries thereunder, often require considerable moral courage to do justice to a contractor against whom the hue.and-cry of the party maua-ger, the tlewspa1)er reporter, the disappointed bidder, or the personal enemy has been raised. A better ant1 in every wa,y more satisfactory method of making pur-chases would be fbr the Indian Office to fix the standard of the goods it desires to purchase, and have standard samples of the articles re-quired. For instance, specify the quality of the wool, the size, the color, the weight, the threads, thestrength, and the finish of the blanket required and provide a standard sample thereof. This method of re-questing bids woulcl do away with the large number of samples sub-mitted bp bidders every year. In other words, if the Bureau were to 12798-IND 8 8 v i |