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be likened to diverting a stream to a new course. The diversion dam must be built strong enough to hold the stream. To economize on the dam may mean the loss of all that was put into it. In the past much money put into the Indian Service has been lost because enough was not put in to get employees really qualified for the task before them.

The recommendations for heavier appropriations are made on the ground of efficiency in performing the task before the government. It could be sustained on purely humanitarian grounds. The Indians are wards of the richest nation in the world, if not the most enlightened and most philanthropic, yet the fact is that Indian children in boarding schools maintained and operated by the government of the United States are not receiving a diet sufficient in quantity, quality, and variety to maintain their health and resistance. Conditions at these schools with respect to medical attention, housing, and sanitation leave much to be desired. The general death rate is ordinarily accepted as the best single index of the social wellbeing of a people. As is pointed out elsewhere in this report^[1] the statistics for the Indians are incomplete and more or less unreliable, and the published death rates for Indians are in many cases obviously understatements of the true conditions. The existing figures, unreliable as they are, indicate, however, a high general death rate among Indians with all that connotes of suffering both physical and emotional. The Indian is like the white man in his affection for his children, although Indian mothers and fathers often do not know how to care for them, especially in matters affecting health. This lack of knowledge does not lessen their suffering and grief at the loss of a child or lessen their resentment when they feel that responsibility for the death rests in part at least upon failure of the government boarding schools adequately to safeguard the health of their children, who may be kept away from their parents for years at a time. The economic and social conditions on most of the reservations are such that the typical Indian family is living materially below any standard which will give health and a very minimum of physical comfort. The fact that many of them look backward with regret to the days before the advent of the white man destroyed the economic basis of their