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Show REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, 9 If a controversy arises, in the midst of the construction, over some question of how a cellar should be drained, or a pipe run, or a heat-ing apparatus installed, operations have to be suspended till the special agent who is the adviser of the office on snch subjects can be summoned from wherever he happens to be at the time, perhaps 1,000 miles away, to proceed to the scene of trouble, investigate and report. It would be hard to conceive of a more clumsy arrangement. , The wonder is that, handicapped with such a system, the Indian Service has procured as respectable agency and school plants as it has. Nothing very elaborate as to plans is needed, a few simple stock designs being capable of almost indefinite reproduction with a little adaptation in detail to differences of elevation, climate, topog-raphy, water supply, etc. But if all this business could be handled I by an office like that of the Supervising Architect, with a complete 1 modern equipment and system and trained representatives scattered all over the country, how far the friction could be reduced and the mistakes avoided which now creep in irrespective of the conscientious efforts made to improve this branch of the service! I hope to be able to make some definite recommendations to yon later on this . subject. 1 REORGANIZATION OF THE INDIAN OFFICE. . . During the last year the improvements in office methods, some of I . which I have spoken of in earlier reports, have in the process of natural evolution resulted in an almost complete reorganization. -I 1 am glad that it has been possible to effect the change in this slower but more orderly way, because the Indian Service, handling more i than 1,000 appropriations and funds, hedged about with some hun-dreds .of statutes, might have been actually. wrecked by having even a better organization thrust violently upon it. As all my work 1 is guided by my general aim of preparing the whole Indian estab-lishment for going out of business at no very distant date, snch an' organization as has taken place of late in growing bureaus l i e the Reclamation Service in our own department and those of the Department of Commerce and Labor would have been largely un- I adapted to our purpose. Yet in another sense, improved organization is almost more important in a diminishing than in a growing bureau. : . No greater help can come to the Indians or to the neighborhood in which they live than through having this service pass out of existence in just the right way; and as for the next few years it is going to . take more men and a higher class of men to wind up the affairs of the Indian Service, I am hoping to obtain some time from the Con-gress an increase, aggregating a little more than $5,000, in the salaries of the employees who .are going to guide the Indian O5ce in its |