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Show 16 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF IXDIAN AFFAIRS. written, but jnmped to the conclusion that I had demanded tlie imme-diate and total destruction of this class of schools. That I had done nothing of the sort, the report shows for itself; but, had I cared to go even to that extreme, I could have defended my course by some arguments more striking than any mere considera-tions of economy or consistency. I could, in short, have cited the opinions of physicians, missionaries, and others familiar with the subjectthrough living among the Indians themselves, that this very class of schools, with their herding practice and their " institutional " routine, their steam-heated buildings and their physical confinement, furnish ideal conditions for the development of germ diseases among the race put through the forcing process there ! I could have added the testimony of experienced members of the field staff of our Indian Service to the effect that the greatest percentage of 'cases of tuhcr- 'culosis on the reservations where they are respectively at work is to be found among the pupils returned from the nonreservation I schools before gmduation. The whole method of conducting these schools is conducive of nn-wholesome conditions for young people who have been always ac-customed themselves, and are descended from an ancestry always accustomed, to the freest open-air life. It might be asked why it would not be better to change a method than to break up a school; but the fact is that the method is practically the only one which can be pursued in an institution where several hundred undisciplined children are crowded together continuously for a period of years and nearly everything has to be done on a wholesale scale if it is to he clone at all. As long as appropriations for such schools continue to be voted by the legislative branch of the Government, it will be the duty of the executive branch to make as effective use of the money as possible; hence the application of palliatives rather than remedies to present evils. As a first measure of relief I have this seasonissued two circulars, designed to insure more faithful enforcement of the regulations of the Indian Office against taking from the reservations children who are too young, or mentally deficient, -or of weak con-stitution, or actually diseased, remwing them recklessly from one climate into another and mixing them with a horde of other children gathered with equally little discrimination. 'The worst abuses of the practice permitted in past years could be checked, I believed, by cutting off the irivilege of sending irresponsible canvassers into the field to collect children and ship them in to the schools; for out of , that custom had grown up a regular system of traffic in these help-less little red people. The schools are supported by appropriations based upon the number of children who can be gathered into them, at the rate of $167 a head; in other words, the 'more children, the |