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Show BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS THE POVERTY OF THE INDIAN SERVICE The Indian Service has not kept pace with the progress elsewhere along health, educational, industrial, and social lines. The appro-priations for general purposes for the fiscal year 1923 were $10,316,- 221.30, and in the five fiscal years since they have been increased by about $2,338,463.70, principally for medical and health activities. But the cumulative effect of many years of financial neglect has i demanded even larger appropriations, if the Government may perform its full duty to the American Indian. Underrating the requirements of the Indian Service has continued so long that it has become a habit difficult to correct. The direction of Indian sffairs to-day affects the education, health, morals, 'and religion of approximately 350,000 people, all of them recently made citizens of the United States. There are 193 Indian tribes, speaking 58 languages; 200 reservations, widely sepa-rated in 26 different States and occupying a territory as large as New England and New York combined; 106 superintendents in charge of reservations; 202 Indian schools, with 700 teachers; and 96 hospitals, with 178 physicians and 146 nurses. The efficiency of an organization depends on the rank and file of its personnel. Supervision may be competent, but the struggle with untrained, incompetent, or dissatiified help, especially when far re-moved from final administrative authority, is discouraging. With a more stable field force, the officers of the Indian Service could devote more attention to constructive work and less to training new em-ployees and doing the work of the inefficient. Authority could then be decentralized by transferring more of the administrative responsi-bility from Washington to the field, where it belongs. The Assistant Secretary of the Interior in Washington, having supervision over the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for example, was required to take 18,000 administrative actions on Indian cases last year, in addition to many thousands receiving final action in the IndianBureau. Much of this work should have been handled in the field offices. That the situation has not been entirely hopeless is due to a great extent to competent supervision and to the innate missionary spirit of many of the employees. Advancement among the Indians has been accomplished despite the financial handicap, but the mission-ary spirit largely depended upon to hold underpaid employees in the Indian Service years ago is not now adequate in itself. The greater opportunities for remunerative employment in aJl lines which have 1 |