THE STORY OF OUR PUBLIC DOMAIN 63 



twelve hundred employees divided among the head- 

 quarters in Washington (now removed to the new 

 Interior Department Building) the field offices and 

 the ninety-four district offices among the states. 



President Coolidge's era of administrative econ- 

 omy found here great opportunity for legitimate re- 

 duction. The report of the Secretary of the Interior 

 for 1927 shows only twenty-nine district offices re- 

 maining and a personnel reduced to seven hundred 

 and twenty-six. Whatever work remains to be done 

 in the many states in which district offices have been 

 abolished is now done at the Washington office. 



But there is another view of this question. Per- 

 haps we are not watching the swift extinction of the 

 oldest institution of our government, as the General 

 Land Office has frequently been called, but its more 

 or less ruthless reorganization for a new career. It 

 will be many years before the remaining Public 

 Lands are surveyed, and decades before they all find 

 takers, if they ever do. As administrator of open 

 grazing lands under a policy now in evolution to 

 meet the new conditions of new times, the future of 

 the Public Domain has immense importance. And 

 as administrator of the mineral leasing act of 1920 

 under which minerals in lands thereafter patented 

 are held in national ownership under a percentage 

 of minerals mined, the Bureau's continuance and 

 growth are without predictable limit. Operations 

 under the Mineral Leasing Law during its first six 

 years including 1927 are shown in the table. 



