We take the Southern Pacific Railroad, which was plundered by the founder of Stanford, aided by the father of a Stanford trustee and the father of a California trustee, and which now has a Rutgers College trustee, an Equitable Trust, a Guaranty Trust, and a National City Bank director. We travel north for a day and a little more, and find ourselves in a country ruled with iron hand by three great lumber companies, and the interlocking banks which finance them. The headquarters of this oligarchy of the Northwest are at Portland and Seattle, and we begin with the former city. You expect, perhaps, to find a lumber country crude and wild; but you will find in Portland an old city with a long-established aristocracy, as much concerned with its ancestors as Philadelphia. Fifteen years ago there was a strong movement for social justice in Oregon, led by reformers who fondly imagined that if you gave the people the powers of direct legislation they would have the intelligence to protect their own interests. We see now that the hope was delusive; the people have not the intelligence to help themselves, and the interlocking directorate is vigorously occupied to see that they do not get this intelligence. To this end they utilize two institutions, Reed College in Portland, which is privately endowed, and the University of Oregon, located in the neighboring town of Eugene. As we have seen with Eastern universities, it makes no particle of difference whether an institution is directly owned and controlled by the plutocracy, or indirectly controlled through the plutocracy’s political machine. The grand duke who attends to the education of Oregon is Mr. A. L. Mills, president of the First National Bank of Portland, and vice president of a trust company and an insurance company which handle the finances of the state. Mr. Mills is an active and efficient ruler; as his right-hand man he maintains a political boss, Gus Moser, and through him he beat the teachers’ tenure law in Oregon, denouncing it as a move to establish a “teachers’ soviet.” He called in the Black Hand from California to his aid, and the pamphlets of Mr. Clum were distributed in Oregon, and a law was put through the legislature to compel teachers to take an oath of loyalty to the constitution, the flag, and the state. There is as yet no law requiring any oath of loyalty to truth, to freedom, and to justice.