There are now hard times in Montana, and in his 1922 report the superintendent of public instruction tells of the retrenchments and sacrifices which have been necessary to keep the schools going. “In hundreds of districts last year all expenses but teachers’ salaries were eliminated, the parents even donating the fuel and hauling. The teachers caught the spirit of sacrifice, and scores of them gave their services from one to several weeks in order that the children would not be deprived of any more school than necessary.” In this report appears a photograph of a mother who drove a team twenty-three miles a day in order to get her three children to school, and brought with her two younger children whom she could not leave at home; she came forty miles to a teachers’ meeting, so that she might get suggestions as to how to help these children at home. The report tells also of an eighth grade boy walking sixteen miles, and of five families who dug holes in a hill-side near Broadus, and lived there during the school season in order that their children might get instruction! I am dealing in this book with Big Business; but you will understand that in this lair of the gigantic Anaconda, there are many little snakes hoping some day to become Anacondas, and diligently swallowing all they can. In the report of this state superintendent I find several pages of details about the plundering of the district schools by local business men: every kind of graft you could imagine—sixty dollars a month for transportation to bring the child of one trustee a mile and a half to school; a thirty-dollar pearl necklace for a teacher; trustees and clerks paying themselves all kinds of money on school contracts in violation of law; another trustee who hired his brother-in-law as principal for two hundred dollars a month, his wife as teacher at a hundred dollars a month, and his daughter at ninety-five—and the following year raised the principal’s salary to three hundred dollars, and the wife to a hundred and fifty! Under such economic conditions it is inevitable that teachers should be terrorized. Here, as in Washington, there are grave-yards of radical teachers scattered everywhere. Certificates are continually refused to teachers who refuse to “take policy,” and on the other hand the State Normal College is freely distributing credits to teachers who carry on propaganda for the Black Hand. The teachers have been completely deprived of control of their own organization. At the Montana State Teachers’ Association convention of 1922, the gang put through strong resolutions against every kind of political liberalism, and the superintendent of schools of Lewistown, who was chairman of the Resolutions Committee, denounced the suggestion that there should be a referendum to give the rank and file of the teachers the right to vote on any question.