Before the Government awoke to the need of health protection, a gentleman in California was a pioneer in the fight against disease. He has lived to see the fruits of his planting, but for many years his voice was that of one crying in the wilderness, and few there were who thought of repentance. I refer to Charles F. Lummis, Esq., an authority upon the Pueblo and California Indians. Mr. Lummis has written me a long letter in which he sets forth the difficulties under which he labored, and how that he was roundly denounced because he opposed the scheme of taking children accustomed to open-air life, shipping them East, crowding them into contract schools—thus making of strong, healthy boys and girls, consumptives. Lummis fought—not education, but this pernicious and wicked policy. Some of his experiences were interesting. He speaks of the former school conditions, and I take it that his strictures do not apply to the past two or three years. “It is obvious that to take children from the high, dry climate of New Mexico and the general Southwest, back to the Eastern winters and to steam-heated halls, can have but one effect. That is no theory. I have seen the practical workings for more than a quarter of a century; and it is my sincere conviction that Carlisle and similar schools away from home have graduated more consumptives and more sons and daughters forever alienated from their parents and kin, than they have produced of scholars or other people seriously useful in any walk of life. “I do know that thirty years ago consumption was almost unknown in most of the Pueblos in New Mexico. I do know that the first consumptive Pueblo I ever saw was from Carlisle; and that most of the consumptive Indians that I have known in my thirty years acquaintance with New Mexico have come back thus infected from these Eastern Government Schools”. “At a meeting of the National Educational Association in this city in July, 1899, I had a serious clash with a distinguished Indian educator. An Indian convention was held in conjunction with the N. E. A. I was busy; but seeing the daily reports finally became so incensed at the inhuman and stupid proceedings, that on the last day I went to the Convention and took the floor almost by force, after listening to most of the afternoon’s proceedings. “This man had with him two very charming and well-schooled Indians—a young man and a young woman, who were called up by him to answer some of my strictures as to the Carlisle methods. And they made eloquent and loyal defences. The audience (being as unobservant as American audiences generally are) were very much surprised when in my reply I called attention to the fact that the two model students that Mr. Educator brought with him were both consumptives, and I asked him point blank if they were consumptive when they entered Carlisle. “Of course I got no answer—and I was lucky in getting out of the hall alive.” LOS ANGELES, SEPT. 14TH, 1914.