But it may be that I do an injustice to the mentality of Portland’s high-priced educators; it may be that they are not so naive as they appear, and really know what they are doing to earn their keep. The teachers have a pension fund, to which all have to belong. The amount of the fund is over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and some school officials are ex officio members of the board of directors of this fund. The board loaned the sum of sixty-five hundred dollars to a firm of lawyers, and there was a rumor that one school official had got the use of this money. One of the teachers came upon a newspaper clipping, telling how an official in the Philippines had been sent to jail for taking money from a fund of whose board he was a member. This clipping was mailed anonymously to the school official; and immediately afterwards the firm of lawyers began to pay up that sixty-five hundred dollars! At one time it was reported that the fund was on the rocks, and the teachers were going to lose all their money. May be it really was in danger; and again, may be somebody wanted to throw it into the hands of a receiver, so that the politicians could get it. Big Business of course wants the teachers to take out insurance with private companies; to this end the Portland “Oregonian,” organ of the Black Hand, cited seventeen cases of the bankruptcy of teachers’ pension funds! One incident from the administration of the previous superintendent, just to show you what happens to school teachers in the days of “progressive” politics. The teachers’ organizations worked out plans for certain changes in the school system, which changes were calculated to cause inconvenience to the superintendent. The teachers went out on the streets, they went to the restaurants at night, and to the market places, and got the necessary thirty thousand signatures to petitions. (This is the thing called “direct legislation,” you understand; this is what the Honorable Leslie M. Shaw, and the Dishonorable Harry Atwood and Woodworth Clum describe as “Treason to the Republic.”) The teachers gathered in the superintendent’s office with their signatures; they took them to the office of a lawyer who was a friend of the superintendent, and locked them in his safe. After supper they found that the door of the building had been unlocked, the office door had been unlocked, the safe had been unlocked, and the petitions were gone! The politicians had made off with the thirty thousand signatures, and no more was heard of that treasonable referendum! CHAPTER XXVIII THE INVENTOR OF FIVE SCIENCES