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The second fundamental step in improving the Indian Service should be to strengthen those forces that come in direct contact with the Indians,

Superintendents’ Salaries Should be Increased. The Service is to be congratulated on the high average level it has been able to maintain in the positions of school and agency superintendents, despite the relatively low salaries paid for these positions. To no small extent this situation may be due to the fact that many of these men are now past middle age and have spent many years in the Service. Several of the outstanding ones entered during the nineties, when opportunities were few and when men of excellent general training and ability could be secured for relatively small salaries. In these later years of higher prices and high costs of living, they have stayed on, partly because of their devotion to their work and to the Indians, and partly because training and experience as superintendent of an Indian reservation or an Indian school have little market outside the government. The question of comparative salaries was forced upon the attention of the survey staff when on the way from a fairly large reservation with all its intricate problems of human relations a stop was made to visit a strip coal mine, and it was learned that the man who operated the electrical scoop shovel got more for his comparatively short day than did the superintendent of the Indian reservation who could know no hours.

The salaries of superintendents have been adjusted somewhat through the so-called reclassification of the field services of the government, but further increases are warranted. The effort should be to make effective the plan of having a fairly wide salary range for each superintendency, with the minimum in the neighborhood of the present salaries and with a maximum materially higher; as much as a third to a half higher would not be in the least unreasonable. Efficient and able superintendents with fine records and long service should be advanced to the maximum.

Transfers of Superintendents Should be Minimized. The range between the minimum salary and the maximum should be especially wide in the case of the smaller jurisdictions. To a certain