I make this Baltimore chapter the basis of a special word to those people who read my books and write me that I am too bitter, that I refuse to believe anything good about the rich. The story of Mrs. Bauernschmidt gives me the chance to show that I like rich people exactly as well as poor. All I ask of the rich is that they turn traitor to their class and serve the general welfare. Not one in a hundred can conceive of doing this, and not one in a thousand has the courage to act on the idea; but at least I give them the chance. In every city, town and village of the United States there is room for a woman of wealth who will turn out and fight for the schools—not merely to get more money from the tax-payers, and to keep the grafters from stealing it, but to make the schools places of freedom, with windows open to the new doctrines which are blowing over the world. In free inquiry and free discussion lies the salvation of America; and it may be my misfortune, but nevertheless it is a fact, that after having spent a year and a half making inquiries, I am unable to name a single public school in the United States in which the policy of free inquiry and free discussion is consistently and boldly followed. CHAPTER XLV AN AUTOCRACY OF POLITICIANS Next comes our national capital; and here we have a unique situation, owing to the fact that the people of the District of Columbia have no votes, but are governed by an autocracy of politicians. The school board was formerly appointed by the District Commission; now it is appointed by the District Supreme Court. The invisible government of the city is made up of the traction interests and the real estate speculators, who work hand in glove with the political machine, quite regardless of whether this machine happens to be Democratic or Republican. There are innumerable ways in which the public may be plundered, and innumerable forms of “honest graft,” whereby it may be made worth while to congressmen and senators to stand in with the plunderers. During the war the population of Washington jumped from 300,000 to 450,000 in three months; real estate values leaped to the skies, and rents beyond them, so there was a harvest for every kind of speculator.