The vexatious levee problem seemed to have found a solution. When the serious crevasses which threatened New Orleans with inundation appeared in the spring, the governor assumed control and closed the breaks with the aid of State engineers. The Louisiana Levee Company was then formed and its interests made identical with those of the State. The company contracted to construct, maintain, and control levees on both banks of the Mississippi and its tributaries according to the requirements of a competent commission of three able engineers; to construct at least three million cubic yards each year until the levee was completed to the required standard. To get the company started the State subscribed a considerable sum and levied a special tax of two-tenths per cent for twenty-one years for a repair fund, and, in the absence of any tax for the current year, issued bonds to the amount of one million dollars.[315] Although a number of additional schools had been put in operation,[316] the superimposed Northern school law still proved unsatisfactory for Louisiana and came up for further amendment. Forty thousand dollars was fleeced from the people annually for salaries of school administrators and incidental expenses, outside of the teachers’ salaries and other expenses. School directors were often unable to write their names. A letter from the president of the school board of Carroll Parish, as printed in the _National Republican_, is so ungrammatical and misspelled that it is almost impossible to read it.[317] Cain Sartain, who later figured as a Representative, now a school teacher, was appallingly ignorant.[318] Naturally demands for the abolition of this costly and inefficient establishment were incessant. The supplement passed this session tended to simplify the law, but the chief change was provision for the appointment by a State board of subordinate boards of school directors for the several parishes, towns, and cities, who should have charge of all the funds and school records, all to be under the direction of the division superintendent. An additional tax of one to two mills was to be levied on the taxable property of the parish. Special individual provision was made for the board in New Orleans and for the levying of a special tax to the amount requested by the board. But a section of the revenue law which prohibited the city from collecting taxes in excess of two per cent[319] would have closed the schools, as the limit had already been exceeded, except for the aid rendered by the State superintendent and the city government.[320] Still the system awakened great dissatisfaction, even the colored people grumbling. The governor, by the appointment of Conway, a Republican and intimate friend, to the headship of the school-system, erected it into a political machine.[321]