The president of the Denver school board is a young aristocrat by the name of Hallett, whose qualification for spending the money of the schools was described to me by one of his friends: “He never earned a dollar in his life.” His father was a millionaire federal judge, whose tyrannies and fearful temper made his name one of terror to labor unions and would-be reformers in Colorado. Young Mr. Hallett also is a socially prominent vestryman of the exclusive St. John’s Cathedral, and he helped to import the very expensive Dean Brown from the effete East. Mr. Hallett was in a delicate position—he was both vestryman of the cathedral and president of the school board, and the cathedral owned twenty-six lots which it wanted to sell to the city as a school site. It must have been hard for Mr. Hallett to make up his mind where his duty lay, but apparently he decided that all eternity meant more to him than his term as president of the school board; his vestry sold the lots to his school board for a hundred thousand dollars, which was two or three times what they were worth. In May, 1923, Mr. Hallett came up for re-election, together with Mr. Taylor, seventy-four-year-old vestryman of the cathedral, who serves the mining kings as an engineer; and Mr. Schenck, seventy-three years old, a former store-keeper at coal-mines for Mr. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. (The other board members are a lumber dealer, sixty-seven years old, a nice old lady of seventy, and an able-bodied contractor, active in politics.) There was an opposition ticket put up by the liberals, and a second put up by labor, and a third put up by the Denver “Post.” In order that you may appreciate this story, I explain that the “Post” is a wealthy and powerful newspaper, which began in the old “shirt-sleeve” days, when newspapers in mining camps lived by blackmail. The “Post” has seen no reason for mending either its morals or its manners; its two proprietors, Tammen and Bonfils, are former gamblers and saloon keepers, whom I have told about in “The Brass Check.” Tammen, a frank and delightful personality, tells at Chamber of Commerce meetings how he would toss a dollar in the air, and if it stuck to the ceiling it belonged to the boss, and if it came down again it belonged to him. The Chamber of Commerce whoops with delight at this anecdote.