We saw at the University of Pennsylvania a peculiar arrangement, whereby a private institution, entirely controlled by private plutocrats, receives a subsidy every year from the state, and spends this money for anti-social purposes. At Pittsburgh we see the same arrangement; the state contributes nearly a million dollars a year to be expended by these steel and oil and coal and railroad and money kings. This means in practice that every year the chancellor of the university has to make a deal with the political bosses. Finding himself inadequate to the task, he has turned it over to a firm of lawyers, one member of which was speaker of the legislature, and afterwards candidate for the Republican nomination for governor. Those who put through the appropriation get ten per cent of it; this is known as the “cut,” and is a regular custom—even the public hospitals in Pennsylvania have to pay such tribute. There is a network of graft, involving every kind of organization in the state; the saloons, the doctors, the fraternal organizations—anybody who wants special privilege or freedom to break the laws has to put up bribes. The lawmakers protest against this or that steal, but when the orders come, they vote. How big is the rake-off we may judge from the fact that the mayor of Pittsburgh put up six hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars to secure his election to an office which pays a salary of eleven thousand dollars a year! The people are helpless; they have no idea what is going on, because they have no newspapers, the so-called newspapers of Pittsburgh being merely house organs of the steel companies. The papers have an association regulating their output and prices, also the number of editions. They have agreed to issue no “extras,” and have put up a bond of ten thousand dollars, which they forfeit if they violate this agreement. At the time of the steel strike they flooded the country with hysterical lies about the strikers; the record stands complete in the report of the Interchurch Federation. Pittsburgh University is another mushroom establishment, with five thousand students and no ideas. The steel kings condescend to run it, but they do not patronize it; the interlocking trustees send their sons, not to Pittsburgh, but to the big Eastern universities. “Pitt” is bitterly jealous of “Penn,” which is old and aristocratic and athletic. For a time Pennsylvania refused to play football with them, and they went to the state legislature, seeking to have this made a condition of the state appropriations for their rival!