The Socialists had never been able to elect more than three of the seven school board members. In the 1916 campaign the Anaconda crowd made the open boast that they had controlled the schools for twenty-five years, and would continue to control them. They elected their ticket, and proceeded upon a campaign to “clean out the radicals,” dismissing without charges twenty-four of the most efficient and intelligent teachers. There was a roar of protest from the city; a prominent society woman, friendly to the teachers, made the statement at a mass meeting that it was the program to discharge every teacher who had attended the study classes conducted by the Reverend Lewis J. Duncan for nine years prior to his election as mayor. This lady’s husband happened to be cashier of the First National Bank, and at the next meeting of the directors of the bank this cashier lost his position. The school board took to meeting in secret and refusing admission to the angry public. Nevertheless, the people succeeded in having their way, to the extent that the teachers were reinstated and the superintendent retired. Then came the world war, and that made things easy for the grafters. Since then there has been in Butte the same situation that we found in San Francisco; the Catholic schools are flourishing, while the public schools are deprived both of their money and their brains. A couple of years ago, through misuse of funds, the school treasury was so low that the schools were about to be closed two weeks in advance of the regular time. As a consequence of the Anaconda’s control of the state government, the mining companies pay taxes only on their net profits, and when they close down, as they did for a whole year, there are no net profits and no taxes. At the last moment the banks agreed to lend the money to keep the schools going—Big Business could not quite afford to have the news go out to the world that “the richest hill in the world” was unable to afford schools! In connection with this problem of mining company taxation in Montana, you may read in “The Goose-step” how Professor Louis Levine was kicked out of the state university for writing a treatise on this subject.