All that these haughty magnates, the Lee-Higginsons and Kidder-Peabodys and Lowell-Cabot-Lodges ask of the schools is that taxes be kept down. To this end they have entered into alliance with the Catholic hierarchy—the old firm of God, Mammon & Company operating on the shores of Boston Bay, as we have seen it on the shores of San Francisco Bay and the Mississippi River. For some time the arrangement was that the school board consisted of two Catholics, two Protestants, and a Jew; but when I was in Boston last year the line-up was four Catholics out of five members. As usual, the entire program of the Catholic element can be summed up in one sentence, to starve the public schools so that the parochial schools may thrive. The hierarchy never ceases to denounce from its pulpits those Catholics who fail to send their children to the church schools. They have advised Catholic women not to join the National Education Association, because this organization has endorsed the Shepard-Towner Bill, providing national subsidies for education. It was offered to exclude the Catholic schools from federal inspection, but that made no difference—the Catholic authorities do not want the public schools improved, they do not want the competition of good schools. They are tireless in their efforts to keep control. They have blocked the movement for a “Greater Boston,” because this would bring in the suburbs, which are Protestant. At a meeting at the Notre Dame Cathedral one speaker after another stressed the importance of getting Catholic teachers into the schools. “The Irish are always for the Irish,” testifies ex-President Eliot of Harvard; and there have been some funny illustrations in Boston education. Two or three years ago there was an uproar in the city, it having been discovered that the schools were using a work of anti-Irish propaganda, the Century Dictionary! Someone had looked up the word “brutal,” and discovered that in illustrating its use the dictionary employed a sentence from Emerson’s “English Traits,” dealing with the great famine: “In Irish districts, men deteriorated in size and shape, the nose sunk, the gums were exposed, with diminished brain and brutal form.” So the school board solemnly resolved as follows: “Ordered: That the use of the Century Dictionary in the Boston Public Schools is hereby discontinued until such time as a discriminating, unfair, and untrue reference to the Irish race is eliminated.” And the Board of Superintendents ordered the passage blacked out from all copies in the school libraries! I suggest to the publishers of the Century Dictionary that when they are getting ready their next edition for Boston, St. Louis, San Francisco, and other Catholic cities, they look a little farther in Emerson’s “English Traits,” and quote the following: “The English uncultured are a brutal nation.... The brutality of the manners in the lower class appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, love of executions, and in the