To adopt the policy of removing the Indian child from the reservation at an age of six or seven years, as is advocated by many persons, would necessitate closing or curtailing the reservation day and boarding schools, thus removing the greatest factor for advancement on the reservation.

Aside from the benefits to be derived from the presence of the child at the reservation school, there are also other reasons, from the standpoint of the child, why he should not be transferred from his home until he has passed a few years at school there.

First, the period in a child's life from six to fourteen years is a very important one, probably the most important of his early life; and climatic changes at this time have frequently been the cause of a breaking down of the constitution.

Scrofulous or tuberculous tendencies are more liable to become manifest during this period, and changes in altitude and temperature only tend to hasten the general breakup of the system. For this reason alone I contend that none but pupils of at least thirteen years of age should be allowed to transfer to any non-reservation school, where the change involves any material change in climate.

Again, the young child entering a training school does not appreciate the character of the work that should be accomplished there, and has little desire to do; the school is simply his home, and he is contented to remain there and drift with the current.

He may advance, but never with the same spirit that inspires the pupil that enters with the thought that it is a school, and that he has a task before him which he should be able to complete within a certain number of years. At the age of about fourteen years the reservation child, if he has been regular in attendance at the day school, should be ready for the sixth or seventh grade, and four years added to his knowledge already obtained should prepare him for the life he will be most likely to lead, or, in a few cases, for higher education.

At this age he enters, prepared for a broader life, with the intention of reaching a higher plane, with the knowledge that he is no longer a child to be led, but that he should rely to a greater extent upon his own strength for his standing.

Surrounded by new influences, he soon acquires new ideas and habits, and falls into line to take up the march of advancement, keeping step with others toward citizenship, with prospects for success largely in his favor.

Finally, the boy who has been taught habits of industry at the reservation school is better prepared to take up industrial training at this time than at an earlier age. At the age of fourteen years he is ready physically and mentally to take up this industrial training, not only in theory, but in practice; and I think experience has shown that better results can be obtained in the non-reservation schools between the ages of fourteen and eighteen than at other periods, provided, of course, that the proper foundation has been laid in the reservation school.

The industrial side of the Indian's education should receive highest consideration, for it is by habits of industry and frugality that he must finally make his success in life, and become a self-supporting and respectable citizen in every sense of the word.

D. THE INDIAN EMPLOYEE

C. J. CRANDALL, SUPERINTENDENT OF INDIAN SCHOOL, SANTA FÉ, n. m. There are few schools and agencies at present where Indians are not employed. It is safe to say that at least one-third of the employees in the school service are Indians. Indian employees in the service, as a rule, come from one or another of the large Indian schools that annually turn out a class of so-called educated Indians. The great objection to our system is that really the Indian is not educated when he leaves our schools, neither in the academic sense nor in the real sense of his responsibilities to himself

and the state. Education, therefore, as it is limitedly applied to the Indian, may often do him as much harm as good. This is best seen when positions are given to Indians for which they are partially or wholly unfitted. There has been too great an inclination to promote the Indian employee to some position which he could not creditably fill; then, when he failed, to charge the same to the race. There can and should be but one way of treating the Indian employee, and that is in putting him on a level with the white employee. Require him to take the same examination that the white employee must undergo, instead of assuming that a certificate of graduation from one of our Indian schools shall be evidence of his fitness for the teacher's position. To make the Indian especially favored above his white compeer does him more harm than good. To give him a position simply because he is an Indian puts a premium on Indian blood, the evil of which is to be seen in our present ration system, and on those reservations where the government has large sums on deposit to the credit of the Indians.

The needs of the Indian employee are, first, to learn that he is on an equality in all respects with the white employee, and can hold his position only by rendering efficient service; that he can aspire to those positions only for which he is qualified; that his being an Indian is neither a particular advantage nor a barrier in securing employment in the Indian-school service.

It may be said that, as a rule, the Indian makes a satisfactory employee. I am in favor of giving the Indian the first chance, when he is equal or superior to the white employee, but I make it a rule never to recommend him for a position which I feel that he cannot fill with credit.

E. THE NECESSITY OF TEACHING THE BOY TO IMPROVE THE ALLOTMENT THE GOVERNMENT HAS GIVEN HIM

F. F. AVERY, SUPERINTENDENT OF FORT SPOKANE BOARDING SCHOOL, MILES, WASH. The arguments in favor of this proposition are plain and simple. Permanent location and ownership of a home are helpful to most of us, and especially helpful to the individual who is constitutionally inclined to roam, and yet particularly unfitted to roam among the conditions created by modern civilization.

Land is capital, endowment, opportunity. His allotment is the largest amount of capital, the best endowment, the most available opportunity, that the average Indian boy has. It is located where he is familiar with general conditions. Fortunately it is also, for a time, inalienable.

I thoroly believe that the average Indian boy should be educated and encouraged to cultivate his allotment. But this merely follows from a belief that it was a wise and beneficent thing to give him an allotment and to make it, for a term of years, inalienable. It seems appropriate to defend the two convictions together.

By way of concrete illustration, allow me to mention brief papers which a number of Indian boys with whom I am personally acquainted recently prepared as a class-room exercise on the subject: "What shall I do when I leave school." All of them were written without assistance or suggestion-except as to the subject. Some were quite crude in a literary way. But they, nevertheless, encouraged me as to the mental result of the education the boys are receiving. Each boy stated definite plans for using and improving his allotment. Each, of course, proposed to build a house, and none forgot shelter for stock. I am more hopeful of them than I should be if they were yearning to get away from their allotments into towns, and were expecting to be merchants or clerks, to work in the mines, or follow trades, or to be lawyers, doctors, or preachers. I have no prejudice against any of those callings. simply believe that these particular boys are more apt to succeed on their land than elsewhere. If, for a few years, they hear no gospel of discontent, do not learn that the reservation is a disgraceful pen from which

they ought to escape, and are simply given by a good agent some part of the business advice and protection which the fortunately born white boy gets from his father and his neighbors, I think they will become useful, independent, and self-supporting citizens, so that there will presently be no "Indian problem" of any kind. For the solution of the problem in question is near at hand.

Leasing lands to the white neighbors is, in the majority of cases, wholly demoralizing. It is not any better for the able-bodied Indian than it is for the able bodied white man to receive an income without doing, or having ever done, anything to earn the income.

Population is congesting in cities. Mechanical industries are being minutely specialized and passing into the joint control of enormous corporations and labor unions. The professions are overcrowded. In the meantime the farm-owner and the farmer remain fairly prosperous and comparatively independent citizens. Looking at the matter broadly, does it not seem wholly desirable to attach to the land, and to country life, all who can be so attached, especially the Indians, to whom citizenship and civilization are new facts not yet fully assimilated?

RUSSELL RATLIFF, SUPERINTENDENT OF OMAHA BOARDING SCHOOL, NEBRASKA

Every Indian boy who has land should combine all his resources— native capacity, acquired growth, undeveloped possibilities, and material assets - into one organic whole for the purpose of making himself a citizen who is to be a credit to his country's flag. No person is truly educated, no person is a safe and satisfactory citizen, who does not have the habit of industry imbedded in his character. The Indian boy's allotment provides him a location for himself, a focal point for his habit of industry. His mind, his body, his land, are all potential energy. By working his allotment he can improve his land, develop his body, train his mind, educate himself as a whole.

The farming and stocking up of an allotment help decidedly toward forming settled habits of life. Cows, pigs, and chickens, if properly cared for, require that someone stay at home and attend to them. In proportion as the Indian or anyone else roves over the country, his real advance movement will be correspondingly slow. Progress comes rather by uniting settled life with intelligent and purposeful communicative relations.

Leasing an allotment to white men may furnish a young Indian with money enough to live as well as his father lived. Farming it intelligently for himself will give him a great deal more. It will not only provide him with money enough to live better than his father lived, but will also keep him from being idle and doing worse. In making some more money he will make a very great deal more of himself.

Learning to cultivate the land intelligently, that is, with mind and thought as well as hand, should also help him to avoid that false idea, too often gotten, that the few years spent at school have so highly cultivated and refined the student that any such work as tending a farm will soil his intellect. Farming is all the time gradually becoming more and more a matter of head-work and management as well as a matter of manual labor. There is no lack of room and no lack of compensation for all the thought and study the farmer can bestow upon his work. If the Indian boy wishes his mind to keep on growing after he leaves school, he can find as much room for expansion of ideas on his farm and in his field as at the clerk's or teacher's desk.

F. PRACTICAL METHODS IN INDIAN EDUCATION

S. M. MCCOWAN, SUPERINTENDENT OF PHOENIX INDIAN SCHOOL, NEW MEXICO It is my opinion that practical methods in Indian education, when cleared of all educational millinery, means nothing more or less than practical faculties of sensible men and women. Experience has proven to my satisfaction that there is no royal road to

manhood and womanhood; that from the heart flow the real issues of life; that the best text-book from which to study the purest ethics is the open heart of a great teacher, whose 'illumined faith and love are the powers that attract and bind, and whose example and influence are the forces that redeem and elevate.

Every human being should be an important factor in the body politic. By that is meant that each and all should be bread-winners; that none should be paupers or parasites. Methods will not bring about this result, but example will. Methods will not give character, but example will. Character strengthens the will and enables it to achieve to do something; and not only to do something, but to want to do something.

It is the teacher's duty to discover the child's ideal and lead him up to it. It is not enough to develop the brain. It is not sufficient to perfect the brawn. The child should be formed to stand alone and stand proudly, grandly. This result cannot be obtained by any other method than that which appeals to the good and true in the human heart. Brainculture may make an intellectual giant or an intellectual fool. Heart- or soul-culture will develop a man or woman whose desires and instincts are for the good, and whose ambition is to know and comfort mankind.

G. THE FUTURE OF THE PUEBLO INDIAN

MISS MARY DISSETTE, SUPERVISING TEACHER, SANTA FÉ DAY SCHOOLS, NEW MEXICO The future of the Pueblo Indian will brighten when we begin to treat him as a responsible human being to whom we show the same respect that we demand from him; when we judge him, as we do other people, by the character and not by the complexion.

We must then provide in the future such practical education as will enable these children to make the most of the resources and opportunities of their home life. We must study the conditions of their homes, and prepare them to meet and improve them, not by destroying and abolishing the native arts and employments of their parents, but by bringing to them the benefits of the trained hand and eye, improving their quality, and extending their market.

Self-support means self-respect, which is the basis of all morality. I believe, therefore, that with the introduction into these villages of the spinning wheels and handlooms of our grandmothers there would also follow some of the shining virtues for which they were so conspicuous.

The future of the Pueblo Indian will take care of itself when every Indian child under fourteen years of age is compelled to attend a well-equipped day school, and every child between fourteen and twenty is placed in a manual-training school. The Pueblo Indian governors should learn that they and their people are amenable to all the laws of the territory, and that the office of the governor will be continued only as long as these governors respect the laws and support the schools in the matter of compelling attendance and sustaining the authority of the teacher.

H. THE NECESSITY FOR A LARGE AGRICULTURAL SCHOOL IN THE INDIAN SERVICE

C. W. GOODMAN, SUPERINTENDENT OF CHILOCCO INDIAN SCHOOL, OKLAHOMA A large agricultural school for Indians is a necessity: (1) because the large majority of Indian boys need a practical knowledge of agriculture; (2) because a large, wellequipped school of this kind, in an agricultural region, can teach farming and the kindred industries more thoroly and economically than other schools.

Tilling the soil and caring for stock are the primary methods of earning a livelihood,

and it is upon the industries that supply mankind with food that all the other industries, trades, and professions are finally dependent. The Indians especially should learn farming and stock-raising, rather than trades, because they own land. Nearly all are receiving individual tracts of land which they should learn to care for and make the most of. Much of the Indian land is rich and fertile, as they had first choice when the allotments were assigned. Some have holdings in the arid region where irrigation is practiced exclusively, and most of the land still held in common lies in the semi-arid belt where stock-raising is the principal industry. Most Indian boys should work at farming in some form, as it is the natural employment for them, and insures the most independent as well as the most healthful life. Boys who would not live a year in a shoe shop or a tailor shop may have many years of usefulness and happiness in the open-air life of their western farms. The Indians live near to nature, but not so near as to have discovered all her secrets, so that a thoro agricultural training is essential to success. It is well for these boys to know something of carpentering, blacksmithing, painting, and plastering, and some may be called to teach or preach, or practice law or medicine; but of those who own land many more can make a comfortable living on farm or ranch than will succeed at a trade or in a profession.

A large, well-equipped school of this kind, in an agricultural region, can teach farming and the kindred industries more thoroly and economically than other schools. While nearly all the large schools have farms, they do not make farming the important feature. Some are not in an agricultural region; some have unproductive soil; and few, if any, have a sufficient quantity of tillable land. Chilocco, with its 8,600 acres of choice land, should be the great agricultural school. It is centrally located in the rich farming region of Oklahoma, where the conditions are similar to those that surround the Indians of a large area. There are about 80,000 Indians, exclusive of the Five Tribes, within a radius of 600 miles. Being on the border between the North and South, and near to the uncertain boundary line of the semi-arid regions, the crops and the methods of caring for them partake of the nature of all of these areas. Wheat is harvested with both binder and header; corn is planted with check rower and lister. We can raise the southern crops of cotton and castor bean; the northern products of flax, broom corn, and oats; corn and clover for the East; and alfalfa, barley, millet, and sorghum for the West; peaches, apples, grapes, and cherries for everybody; and cattle and wheat for the world. This school would differ from the agricultural college in increasing the practical and limiting the theoretical teaching. The boys would learn to do by doing, under the direction of a sufficient number of competent, educated farmers to insure thoro work.

I. COMPULSORY EDUCATION

H. B. PEAIRS, HASKELL INSTITUTE, LAWRENCE, KAN.

The report of the honorable commissioner of Indian affairs for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1900, shows that there are in the United States, under government control, between 45,000 and 47,000 Indian children of school age. Of this number there are probably 30 per cent. who, on account of health and various other reasons, should not be enrolled as students. This leaves about 35,000 children of school age who should be in school.

The capacity of all schools where Indian children are admitted was, according to the report herein referred to, 27,460. The enrollment was 26,451. The average attendance was 21,568. The great difference between the enrollment and the average attendance was partially due, no doubt, to the fact that in many schools pupils who are not physically qualified for enrollment are received because it is difficult to keep up the attendance. Of course, there are other causes for the discrepancy between the enrollment and the average attendance, but it is fair to assume that of the 30 per cent. who are classed as disqualified because of health, etc., 2,000 are, for various reasons, received and