Let us move farther south to Baltimore, another old and slow-moving city, with a dynasty of long-established merchant princes. For forty years, to my knowledge, their political gang has run the city and pocketed the proceeds. It is a community in which you can lose yourself in miles of brick houses, all exactly alike—little two-story brick houses for the working class and larger three and four-story brick houses for their “betters.” I was born in one of these larger brick houses, and spent my childhood playing on the cobble-stoned streets of “Ballamaw”—as we called it. I never went to school there, because in my childhood the family doctor thought I was learning too fast, and did not realize that to send me to school might be the quickest way to stop me. In Baltimore, as in Philadelphia, the children of the rich have beautiful private schools, and leave the children of the poor to the politicians. As one teacher said to me: “The people take it for granted that the school system is working, like the water system under the pavement.” After I had looked a little farther into school matters, I wanted to substitute for the “water system” the “sewers.” It is the old story of the business partnership between God and Mammon. The Catholics are strong in Baltimore, and are doing everything in their power to choke the public schools; at the same time the merchant princes are holding down taxes, and their politicians are leaving the old buildings out of repair, without fire escapes, without proper heat—in some cases even without books. The salaries of the teachers are inadequate; but if ever there were two of them who had the courage to start a union, they kept it so quiet that I was unable to find them. Baltimore is an old-fashioned city, and the middle-class respectabilities hold it immovable. I was invited to the home of a lady and gentleman who were interested in education, and there I found a large company assembled. I asked them what was the economic control of their schools, and found that in an audience of twenty-seven educators there was apparently only one who knew what I meant by the phrase. They were not conscious of any such thing, they said. I wanted to point out to them that a horse never feels the rein until he starts to travel in an undesired direction; but having been brought up in Baltimore, I knew what politeness required.