Secretary FISHER. No, sir; there is a Board of Pension Appeals under the Second Assistant Secretary. Mr. Ucker tells me that under the present arrangement that work has been assigned to the Second Assistant, and that is because of the pressure of work on the First Assistant. It is increasingly important, as I see it, that the Secretary of the Interior should become personally familiar with the facts on the ground out through the western country. The West has a very legitimate demand that the Secretary shall be in personal contact with these things. That means when he is gone somebody must handle this mass of detail, and the First Assistant Secretary has to handle it. Now, if you ask a man who is engaged in the private practice of the law, and he must be a lawyer, to come into the office of First Assistant Secretary, and you expect to get a man who has had any previous experience with these land questions, who has the qualifications to enable him to handle that work, you are asking him to make a large sacrifice even if you give him $7,500. I regard the country as being peculiarly fortunate in being able to get the services, for instance, of the First Assistant Secretary I have now. Mr. GILLETT. Who is he?

Secretary FISHER. Mr. Samuel Adams. Mr. Adams is a Harvard man who practiced law in Chicago for a great many years, and had probably passed on land titles before he came to Washington in every State of the Union that the department has to do with. It simply so happens that was his business. He happened to be interested in these public questions that the department is interested in, such as the disposition of the public domain and its natural resources, the water-power question and the irrigation question. It happened to appeal to him, and he happened to be associated with me in the working out of the Chicago traction difficulties when we attempted to harmonize public and private interests so as to recognize both, and when I asked him to come here, the public matters appealed to him; but for that we could not have gotten such a man. If something should occasion his separation from the department and I were looking forward to a longer term of office, where I would look for his successor I confess I do not know. It would be with the greatest difficulty we would find anybody who would approximate his abilities in that direction. Now, I mention that only by way of illustration, because, assuming I am wrong and that some other Secretary might know a number of men avilable, I think it is a safe thing to say that a man possessing the professional qualifications necessary to handle that office ought to be offered more than $5,000 a year.

Mr. GILLETT. And you do not see any prospect of his duties becoming less, very soon at any rate?

Secretary FISHER. I see every reason for the contrary. I see that if any Secretary of the Interior does his work as he should do it, he is going to have to throw more rather than less work on the First Assistant, if the work of the department as a whole is going to be done properly, and I think that the incoming of a new administration is a good time to recognize that situation. I would like to see some increase made. I suggested $6,000 last year simply because I wanted to get the subject before this committee and have it given consideration, because I assumed under the then political conditions and the demand to make a showing for economy it would be difficult to take exceptional action in a matter of that kind; but I hope that

that reason, if it did exist then, does not exist now. I would like to see some recognition made of the exceptional character of that position.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY.

I have also asked that the salary of the Assistant Secretary be increased from $4,500 to $6,000, which, I think, is important, although not so important as in the case of the First Assistant.

Let me say just once more, Mr. Chairman, that the work in the Interior Department is different from the work in any of the other departments in that it involves such an enormous mass of detail that comes to and through the Secretary's office, and all of that detail is important either in the intrinsic amount of money involved or the property interests involved, which amounts to millions of dollars in many individual cases, but also because even in the small cases of the individual homesteader who may only have 40 acres such a case frequently means financial life or death with the entryman, and it is important that it should be given as careful consideration as a case involving millions of dollars.

Mr. GILLETT. Are they pretty difficult of decision? Do they require a high grade of legal ability?

Secretary FISHER. If you speak of them as a whole, no; but if you speak of the exceptional cases, yes. The records are frequently quite involved and difficult.

INDIAN OFFICE.

[See also p. 191.]

In addition to the things I have mentioned in connection with the public domain, there are matters which come to the Secretary's office from the Office of Indian Affairs, and I want to take this opportunity to say I believe that is the most difficult office of administration in the entire Government service, that it is as important as any office in the Government service, and has phenomenal difficulties attached to it.

I need only refer to the fact that the property interests are roughly estimated at from three hundred to five hundred million dollars; that they are not merely held in mort main, but they are in active processes of administration all the while. It is out of the Indian's land, his timber, his coal, his oil, his gas, his asphalt that he gets the greater portion of the money for his daily and yearly support, and this property is all in process of active administration all the time. Then when you turn to the human side of the equation you have got questions of the very greatest interest for him to decide. The Indian Office does not merely hold this land and parcel it out to individual interests, but decides what individual interest Indians are competent to have parceled out to them. If the property were all held merely for distribution among, say three or four hundred thousand adult Indians, all fully qualified to take it, it would be an enormous task to meet all the difficulties. If these Indians were in a territory segregated by a wall which excluded the white man, so all you had to do was to handle the question per se, it would be an enormously difficult question. When you couple it with the fact these Indians are many of them women, many of them children,

many of them living under primitive conditions, having primitive views and desires, not desiring to be adjusted to industrial civilization at all, and that many of them are slaves to their own appetites whenever they get the opportunity, for instance, in connection with the use of liquor or opiates, you begin to see how the difficulties increase.

When you add to that the fact that the white man is not separated from the Indian, but lives with him, and while probably that is helpful to the Indian in many ways it also puts the Indian in constant peril; on the personal side from the effect that contact with whites has usually brought to a dependent race, and, in addition to that, on the property side, because the Indian's property looks very good to the white man. And frequently the people living in the adjacent communities have a very legitimate feeling that the Indian, not being willing or desiring to improve his property, not wanting to handle it, is retarding the development of the whole community in which he lives, and they feel that if the community is to go forward this property must be gotten out, so it can be taxed and improved, and there is a good deal of natural resentment that arises from that source. Now, add to that cupidity and greed and you have got some conception what the problem is there. That is all on the property side. Then when you add the health question, the education question, the religious question, the liquor question, you have got some conception of what the Indian Office is; and we handle. that with a man at $5,000 a year, and the next man under him at $3,500 a year, and then they drop to $2,750, and then we get down to the $2,250 and the $1,800 clerks, and these men must pass upon matters involving millions of dollars as well as questions of immense human interest to the individual Indians. Those questions come up to the office of the Secretary and go to the First Assistant Secretary, and he must know something about oil leases and coal leases and timberlands.

Mr. GILLETT. You mean there is an appeal from the Indian Commissioner to him?

Mr. FISHER. The Indian Commissioner has no authority to pass on these matters. He will draft the letters and initial them and send them to the Secretary's office. Of course, the Secretary's office issues general instructions, and then the Indian Commissioner goes ahead and administers under them; but you would doubtless be amazed at the number of exceptional cases that come up and the immense mass of questions that must come up, every one of which involves dynamite of some kind. There is seldom a matter of any importance that comes from the Indian Office that is not scrutinized by the Secretary or the Assistant Secretary with the idea that it may be explosive somewhere. There is hardly a day there is not a superintendent in the Indian Service under investigation of one kind or another, because they are not only subjected to the ordinary human temptations of men who live by themselves in isolated districts, but there is the constant temptation of the gentlemen on the outside to make it worth while for the superintendent to close his eyes; and those are the questions that come up almost daily.

Now let us consider for a moment just the business side of it. If we are talking about the man who is going to have the supervisory

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authority over the business end of the Indian Office and decide the many questions of policy about coal leases and oil leases, as well as sales and distribution, you have some conception of what that man has to do, and no one man can do it. The physical capacity of the Secretary is absolutely unable to cope with the situation. Take, for instance, a little question we have had up with the President and the Attorney General and Mr. Lane of the Interstate Commerce Commission just recently, whether in making Indian oil leases we shall put a limit on the area. The large producer comes in and says he has to build a pipe line, and he wants 200,000 acres and insists that really we ought to give him the whole 800,000 acres, and there is a good deal to be said on that side of the question. On the other hand, there is the small oil producer, who says there ought not to be more than 5,000 acres in a unit. We also had to fight the Indian council, which has been worked on by the local representative of the larger interest, and they want to beat Congress on the theory of the law.

The law expressly provided these lands should be apportioned and allotted to individual Indians, reserving, however, for the tribal fund the mineral contents, including the oil. There was a clear declaration of intent. What does the Indian council do in conjunction with this oil company? They say they want to put in the leases a provision, notwithstanding that theory of the law, which was that the allottee had no interest in the oil, that the lessee under the oil lease can not enter upon the land without getting the written consent of the allottee who owns the surface, and when we put into the regulations the provision that the allottee is to be paid any damages that the lessee under the oil lease may do to his property they are not satisfied with that. They want the privilege of giving or refusing their written consent. We increased the royalties very substantially, and they said we could not get any bids. We got bids for about 40,000 acres and a bonus, in addition to a compliance with these rigid regulations, of $142,000 or $143,000.

Now, somebody has got to pass on those questions. In addition to that there was the fundamental question as to whether or not the principle underlying the commodities clause in the railroad law should be applied to oil leases. The Interstate Commerce Commission has held in accordance with the act of Congress the pipe lines are common carriers and should perform those duties. Instantly the query arises, Shall we allow a common carrier to make an oil lease or do it through a subsidiary company? Of course, the economic principle underlying the whole question is that a common carrier should not have a financial interest in the commodities it transports. The law with regard to railroads has been largely nullified by the decision of the Supreme Court that, through a subsidiary corporation, a coal-carrying road can continue to have its coal interests. It does not prohibit stock holdings in a coal company. But the fundamental principle remains as an economic principle. That is just one illustration of the sort of questions we must cope with, and it is not a mere theory, because when we make our leases we are largely determining the policy of future oil development in that territory. If we elect not to give the common carrier the lease, we might pass the whole development there until somebody affords the facilities of a common carrier by means of a pipe line, because otherwise the oil can

not be gotten out. Those are some of the questions that require men of real breadth of view to consider.

Mr. GILLETT. Is there in sight in our lifetime any possibility of ending these relations with the Indians?

Secretary FISHER. Not wholly, Mr. Gillett, but largely. If you can tell me how long it is going to take to adjust a primitive people to the conditions of modern industrial civilization, I can answer your question. We ought to do it just as rapidly as we can, and my theory is that the Indian is going to progress more rapidly if we give him a chance to handle his own property. The way to learn to swim is to get in the water, but to throw a man who does not know how to swim. into the water and not have a rope conveniently at hand, or a boat, is pretty disastrous. We ought to go just as fast as we can, but we are going to be left with a residuum that is going to be slowly brought up out of primitive conditions into conditions of modern independent citizenship.

Mr. GILLETT. Are you making any progress in that direction?

Secretary FISHER. We are making very substantial progress, and during the past year we would have made more progress if I may be pardoned for saying so-but for the fact I have hesitated to go into a general reorganization of the Indian Office because of the fact that a committee of the House was investigating that office and was hearing all of the complaints of every kind that came up, and I hoped to get some constructive suggestions out of it, and I felt they might feel I was trying to cut under them if I started in with a thorough investigation of the office. I think it is one of the things that ought to be done at once, not so much on the question of individual misbehavior, but on the question of whether the methods employed are really properly adapted for efficient administration. I am satisfied they are not. In this respect it has a bearing on your work here. I am satisfied the men in charge of these large subdivisions do not get enough money to enable us to obtain, in the first place, men of the proper kind, and when we do happen to be fortunate enough to find them to keep them in the service. I think out of 6,000 men last year there were more than 2,000 shifts under that office.

Mr. GILLETT. You mean resignations?

Secretary FISHER. Shifted from one position to another or resignations. We have to keep constantly shifting, because you can readily see a man getting $2,400, and asked to handle millions of dollars worth of property and questions of the character I have described, if he demonstrates he is able to do that, he is the kind of man who wants to look higher, and the kind of man who is going to have an opportunity to go higher outside of the Government service. The men who stay in are apt to be men who are winning their spurs, or a good many of them men who can not make up their minds to get out and take their chances, and consequently they stay. I am talking about the men now who demonstrate capacity; and if you will look through our Indian Office pay roll and consider what we have got there, I think you will agree with me. I would like to see some of the mechanical clerical force cut off and the money put in at the top, where more efficient supervision will give better results out of fewer

men.