Permit me to introduce you to Lynn Thompson, plain American carpenter, organizer for the Trades and Labor Assembly of Minneapolis, and for thirteen years an active Socialist soap-boxer. Recently it became his duty to call a strike against the Wonderland Theatre; some judge issued an injunction against the strike, and Comrade Thompson gave me the text thereof, containing many paragraphs, and covering everything a human being could do in connection with a theater and its proprietor. Said Comrade Thompson: “I would violate that injunction if I were to wake up in the middle of the night and dislike him.” Nevertheless, he posted the theatre as unfair, and he and four other men were sentenced to pay two hundred and fifty dollars each. Refusing to pay, they were sent to jail on a six months’ sentence, and actually served sixtyfive days of it—a period of great relief for the representatives of Big Business on the school board! We are told that we must elect business men to office, because they alone know about business. Here in Minneapolis was a school board composed of business men exclusively, and the schools were reported to be three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt, and there was no money for current expenses. The newly elected carpenter asked these business men, and they didn’t know how matters stood; neither did the board’s employes know. For years the board had been spending the money of the schools on guess-work. They got their appropriations at one time of the year, and figured their expenses at another time, and never could tell how much they needed or how much they had. Professor Swenson, of the state university, who happened to be on the school board, had to go before the legislature and make a guess as to what amount of bond issue was necessary to cover the deficit; he guessed half a million, and came out pretty near right. To make perfect the humor of this situation, an association of business men had got the legislature to pass a strenuous law, providing jail sentences for public officials who allowed overdrafts of public funds. They knew at the time that the board of education was “in the hole,” as were several other departments; and they made no provision to cover the deficits. They went ahead and passed a law, which they knew must be broken every day, if the government were to go on! A carpenter is not supposed to know much about school-books, but Comrade Thompson, with his colleague Mrs. Kinney, wife of a railroad conductor, did what he could to find out. There had been no system in the book-rooms, and it was often not possible for the principals to know what books were stored in the schools; some of them followed the plan of ordering new books every term, and burning the surplus stock of old books. That was fine for the book companies, which naturally resented Comrade Thompson’s “butting in.”