You will not need to be told that a Black Hand such as this rules firmly the thinking of the people of Oakland. How they do it was narrated at a meeting of the Better America Federation at the Oakland Hotel, where Mr. Levenson, manager of the biggest department-store, stated that the police under his direction had undertaken to crush street speaking, and had crushed it. Also the school department under Fred M. Hunter was put to work, and the Honorable Leslie M. Shaw, author of “Vanishing Landmarks,” was brought to Oakland, and all the teachers in the school system were compelled by official order to listen while he denounced the referendum and woman’s suffrage. Then came Woodworth Clum, of the Better America Federation, to tell the high school children that a proposition to amend the Constitution of the United States is “akin to treason.” The Black Hand shipped up from Los Angeles eleven thousand copies of Clum’s pamphlet, “America Is Calling,” the substance being that America is calling her school children to mob their fellow students with whose opinions they do not agree. The Black Hand gave them a practical demonstration of this program by mobbing the editor of the Oakland “Free Press,” who was too freely exposing graft. It was proposed to distribute Mr. Clum’s pamphlet to every pupil in the high schools, but the Central Labor Council made a protest to the state board of education, and the state superintendent, acting by vote of the board, forbade the distribution. Here comes an interesting test of the Black Hand. The thing they are in business to protect is “law and order”; their one purpose in getting the school children into their military classes is that the children may learn discipline and subordination to authority. Now the state superintendent of education is the superior of the Oakland superintendent, and under the law it was his right and his duty to forbid the distribution of propaganda in the schools. In issuing his order to Hunter, he was acting by vote of the state board; and what did Hunter do about it? Why, he went ahead and distributed the pamphlets, and the Better America Federation proclaimed him a hero throughout the state! Every once in a while a hero like this arises: first Ole Hanson of Seattle, then Cal Coolidge of Massachusetts, then President Atwood of Clark University, who leaped into the limelight upon the face of Scott Nearing. I invite you once more not to forget Fred M. Hunter, Oakland superintendent of schools. There is a strong movement under way to establish a new cabinet position, a secretary of education, and Hunter has his eye on this goal, and is bending every effort toward it. How beautifully he would fit in the cabinet of Cal Coolidge, strike-breaking hero of Massachusetts! What a demonstration of national unity—from Boston Bay to San Francisco Bay, one country, one flag, and one goose-step! Black Hands across the continent!