6 REPORTS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE. 
PERSONNEL. 
The personnel of the Bureau, both at headquarters and in the field, 
has performed with efficiency and fidelity the ordinary duties devolv- 
ing thereon, and, furthermore, has assumed in admirable spirit the 
added personal, official, and civic responsibilities imposed by the state 
of war. Throughout the Bureau, employees have freely offered them- 
selves for active military duty; a comparatively large number have 
entered the Army and Navy; and in the relatively few cases in which 
deferred classification has been asked, the Bureau, rather than the 
employees themselves, has taken the initiative in recognition of cer- 
tain definite needs of the fishery service. It is an honor no less than 
a pleasure to commend to the Secretary a loyal, capable corps of tech- 
nical and clerical assistants, both permanent and temporary, to whom 
is to be attributed the success of the Bureau’s operations and the 
enlarged scope and increasing public appreciation of its activities. 
The administrative staff at headquarters during the fiscal year 
1918 comprised the following persons: H. F. Moore, deputy com- 
missioner; Irving H. Dunlap, assistant in charge of office; Henry 
O’Malley, assistant in charge of fish culture; Robert E. Coker, as- 
sistant in charge of inquiry respecting food fishes and the fishing 
grounds; Lewis Radcliffe, assistant in charge of statistics and meth- 
ods of the fisheries; Ward T. Bower, chief agent of the Alaska serv- 
ice. At the beginning of the fiscal year 1919, Mr. O’Malley was 
transferred to the position of field assistant for the Pacific coast, a 
place newly created by Congress, and Glen C. Leach, field super- 
intendent and an employee of the fish-cultural branch since 1902, 
became assistant in charge of the division. 
The Bureau has long been handicapped by the extremely small 
salaries allowed by Congress in the lower grades, particularly in the 
clerical and fish-cultural forces. In recent years, and particularly in 
the fiscal year 1918, the situation has become acute because of the 
difficulty, often the impossibility, of inducing persons to accept statu- 
tory positions or of retaining persons who may have been willing 
to enter the service. The result is that a very large proportion of 
the low-grade positions in the fish hatcheries has been vacant much 
of the time, and there has been in the Washington office a floating 
corps of clerks, many of them appointed without regard to civil-serv- 
ice qualifications. The entrance salaries in the fish-cultural branch 
are so low as to be almost absurd under present industrial con- 
ditions. The clerical service is overcrowded at the bottom, and there 
1s little opportunity for advancing capable and deserving juniors. 
As a move toward the remedying of this situation, there has been 
included in the estimates of appropriations for 1920 provision for the 
substitution of a reduced number of higher-grade clerical positions 
in lieu of certain low-grade positions and for general increase in 
the salaries of the field force in the fish-cultural branch. 
Other recommendations affecting personnel that have been placed 
in the estimates of appropriations for the next fiscal year are as 
follows: Increase in the salaries of assistants in charge of divisions; 
creation of a chief of the Alaska service; provision for eight addi- 
tional technical assistants for work in fish culture, biological investi- 
gation, and commercial fisheries; provision for two new statistical 
