would like to do and that he is best fitted to do, shall thereby forfeit a right to the 

 essential conditions of social equality, and that he shall surrender hope of a 

 living wage. The scandal of underpaid postal service has been a menace to our 

 civil life, and the scandal of underpaid service in the Department of Agriculture 

 has weakened the very foundations of our national prosperity. In particular, 

 the Bureau of Biological Survey, whose conception of service was fraught from 

 the very outset with the highest promise and which for decades has made good 

 by every enlightened standard of efficiency, this bureau has been, latterly, scanted 

 in appropriation and pinched at the waist-line until only a heroic few are left 

 of its once splendid personnel. When a plumber can command twelve dollars 

 a day, and a house carpenter eight or nine, how much service, think you, can 

 Uncle Sam expect for $1800 a year from men who are supposed to know orni- 

 thology, mammalogy, entomology, botany, taxidermy, accounting, and manage- 

 ment? How much from men who, if they are really to succeed in their profession, 

 ought to have a college education, to have command of three or four modern 

 languages and two ancient, to be able to write magazine articles and scientific 

 treatises, and, in general, to make first hand contributions to the sum of human 

 knowledge? The answer is, None. And so we find among the ranks of artisans 

 and small farmers and grocers' clerks and real estate agents and brokers — among 

 teachers even — ex-employees of the Bureau of Biological Survey, men whose 

 natural gifts would have entitled them to become brilliant exponents of bio- 

 logical science; indefatigable collectors, ready to endure any hardship; experts 

 and technicians of almost limitless capacity and serviceability. The writer knows 

 a truck driver who was once a distinguished collector for the Biological Survey, 

 and who could put up a mammal skin in five minutes with no implement but a 

 pair of scissors. He knows also a bank clerk whose supple fingers once trained 

 in the Biological Survey service, and guided by an active intelligence, would 

 serve a commonwealth with distinction; but now the potential Nelson shuffles 

 greenbacks and punches a "Burrows," because, forsooth, the Government of the 

 United States of America will not pay a biologist a wage upon which he can 

 marry and raise children. 



We learn from the last annual report of the Secretary of Agriculture 

 (Dec. 10, 1920) that eight of the sixteen departmental divisions "are without 

 directing heads because the vacancies could not be filled at the available salaries." 

 We learn, further, that during the fiscal year 1920, 528 of the scientific and tech- 

 nical employees left the service of the Department for economic reasons. 



If the present stage of democratic [note we are using a small d] administra- 

 tion of public affairs is a success, we shall have to re-state President Jordan's 

 tefinition: Governmental success evidently consists in failing to do what ought 

 do be done, and in making us pay through the nose for it. 



SANE LEADERSHIP 



In the face of the present wave of senseless criticism of a certain depart- 

 ment of biological science, it is pleasant to recall that some of the official heads of 

 governmental administration are not likely to be stampeded by sentimental out- 

 cries. Our leading officials are men who themselves received training in the 

 school of the woods and in the great open; and they have served their apprentice- 

 ship as collectors. Of the Chief of the Bureau of Biological Survey we read in 

 a recent governmental publication that he spent fourteen years in Mexico and 

 Guatemala. "The result of his work was an accumulation of the most extensive 

 collections of birds and mammals, and the most complete records of its wild 

 life ever made in Mexico." Certainly; and because of this and similar services, 

 E. W. Nelson was justly chosen as the administrative head of one of the strongest 

 institutions of scientific service in the world. Possibly Dr. Nelson did not col- 

 lect birds' eggs, but the, say, ten thousand birds he killed would have laid, say, 

 one hundred thousand eggs, more by a good deal than any institution in the 



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