The school situation in Portland assumes to some extent the aspect of a sex-war; the women teachers do the work and the men bosses get the salaries. After a long campaign the taxpayers voted money to raise the teachers’ salaries, but some of the teachers got no increase, and others got only fifty dollars a year, and others a hundred dollars a year, while the principals got four hundred dollars! Even when the teachers got the “increase,” they didn’t always get the money. Some of them told me their misadventures, trying to get this money; but when I wrote out the stories, they got scared—somebody might recognize them! So you don’t get the stories, any more than the teachers got the salaries! I am free to mention, however, that teachers’ salaries are delayed for one week, and in the meantime the money lies in somebody’s bank. That may seem a small matter, until you figure that the interest on two million dollars for one week amounts to three thousand dollars a year—a sum worth anybody’s taking! The women teachers complain also of male parasites, who do little work, but draw high salaries. Many of the supervisors draw an extra salary from the state university, and seldom come to the schools; the teachers until recently had to go to them and pay to be taught. There is a drawing supervisor drawing pay in the state university; there is another supervisor who is paid twenty-nine hundred dollars a year, who also teaches in the state university, and whom you may see smoking every afternoon in a hotel lobby. Teachers assure me that he has not visited some schools in three years. There is the usual graft in the purchase of supplies, and the usual inability of the teachers to get supplies. When they make public complaint about this, they read items in the “Oregonian” to the effect that the reason there is no money for school supplies is that it all goes for teachers’ salaries. Hardly ever is the problem of school funds discussed, that this little sneer does not emerge. Some teachers became indignant, and started to investigate the expenditure of school money; the principal of their school became interested, and took the investigation off their hands, and discovered so much that he was made an assistant superintendent to keep him quiet; three other men were promoted to be principals, as a result of this little affair! They have taken out cooking, sewing, and manual training from the sixth grade in the elementary schools; last year they threatened to take out more subjects—because they are so poor. But they are not too poor to pay eight hundred and thirteen dollars and sixty-one cents per month for the teaching of poetry at the assemblies!