You may recollect that in Los Angeles I criticized the bankers for their “thrift campaign” in the schools; and perhaps you wondered: did I object to thrift in the schools? And why could I not believe that the bankers might have a genuine interest in teaching thrift to the school children? Well, you may learn about this from what happened in Baltimore. At the Francis Scott Key School a beginning was made at a school bank, and the bankers objected. Here, as in Los Angeles, the children were learning thrift; but in Los Angeles the money was turned over to the bankers, while in Baltimore the money was kept for the school! So here is a laboratory test, proving that what the bankers want is not to teach the children thrift, but to get the children’s money. The biggest banker in Baltimore is Mr. Robert Garrett, whose palace on what we used to call “Charles Street Avenue” was one of the scenes of my childhood. Mr. Garrett is director in half a dozen great financial institutions, also of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; he is a graduate of Princeton and of Johns Hopkins, and was selected as the city’s most eminent financier to act as chairman of the Public Improvement Commission, and spend twenty-two million dollars of the people’s money for new school buildings. The work goes forward, under the very highest capitalistic auspices; and one of the great new high schools is nearly completed, when a group of independent citizens makes an investigation, and discovers and proves that all through this building the contractors have been substituting inferior materials—terra cotta pipe instead of cast-iron pipe, cement bricks instead of clay bricks, inferior floor materials, an inferior motor, etc. To cap the climax, the “panic bolts” on the doors, which were to have brass rods, have steel rods substituted; steel rusts, you understand, so when there is a fire, and the children try to fling the doors open in a hurry, they will find the bolts rusted fast, and the doors immovable. Does that dispose you to trust your schools to the tender care of your bankers? CHAPTER XLIV THE BREWER’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW