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Show I REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. 15 statements is a matter of weeks instead of a matter of months or an impossibility. 6. Reforms in administrative examination of accounts and claims have reduced the work, approximately, 33B per cent, and increased the efficiency of examination at least 50 per cent. That the gain in time has been more than swallowed up by the increased work from the care of individual Indian moneys and the allotment of tribal funds in the Treasury, makes it even more a matter of congratulation. But for the gain, some of the most important fiduciary work would have stopped until the Congress had supplied a clerical force one-third larger for the accounts division, or more than ten clerks. As it is, I am compelled to ask for only three. 7. As one example of many reforms in papers, the abolition of the old form of report of employees brings to the office the more valuable original pay rolls themselves sworn to, and saves the serv-ice in time and clerical hire at least $3,000 a year. 8. Even the limited extent to which I have so fan been able to send office men on trips into the field has paid in dollars and cents. Only one of the reforms instituted by the chief of the accounts division immediately after his return from a six weeks' trip this summer will, in the course of a year, more than have paid his expenses. 9. Nearly every clerk in the office now has his understudy. I hope soon to have no exceptions. The end of the '' indispensable man " is an administrative blessing, no less evident because it is not always to be stated in figures. Formerly illness and vacation often resulted in tying up the most important matters for weeks; to-day they have little effect, and I believe it possible to eliminate them as brakes on work. In general, the office force, substantially unchanged for years, is carrying forward more expeditiously, and at a diminishing wst per unit, a work which has rapidly increased. I THE NONRESERVATION SCHOOL QUESTION. The subject of the nonreservation boarding school system was given a good deal of prominence in my last report, and has since, as a result, received not a little attention from the Congress and the public. For the larger part, the popular comment has been favorable to the opinion I had attempted to impress, that the system has passed the height of its usefulness, and henceforward must be tolerated only as a survival and allowed to disintegrate by degrees. The most positive approval came from persons who had lived among the Indians and knew them and their needs; but there were not lacking the usual corps of critics who did not attempt to read what I had actually |