These reports roused the President’s fighting blood. He sent for Mackenzie. "Read that stack of letters, Mac, and you will see that the negroes in the South are in a fair way to be trampled to death. Now I must head this thing off, and I want your help. I am determined to defeat that Wordyfellow movement if there is power in the Federal government. I’ll not be content to have the laws annulled by the Federal Supreme Court after they are passed, even if that can be done. We must find some way to win this fight _in the elections_ and thus give the lie to these prophecies that that luncheon has lost the battle." So he and the astute Mackenzie rubbed their heads together for a week: and finally came to a remedy so simple that they were ashamed not to have thought of it at once. Simple indeed—if they could apply it. In less than another week, Mr. Hare, the recognized administration mouthpiece in the House, introduced a bill appropriating moneys from the national treasury to the States in proportion to population for purposes of public education. The milk in this legislative cocoanut was a provision that the money apportioned to each State should be so distributed among the individual public schools of the State that, when taken together with the State’s own appropriation, all the schools in the State should be open for terms of equal length. From statistics carefully compiled in the office of the Commissioner of Education Mr. Phillips and Mr. Mackenzie had calculated the amount of the appropriation so that if the Southern States adopted the Wordyfellow plan the negro race would get virtually the whole of the appropriation from the national government. Elise Phillips, persuading herself that she was on the lookout for reasons to despise Mr. Rutledge, regularly read the editorial column of _The Mail_.