The business gang had run our national capital for so long that they had forgotten the possibility of anything else. But President Wilson appointed two or three men of liberal sympathies to the District Commission, and also to the District Supreme Court; so for the first time some attention was paid to the public clamor concerning the run-down state of the schools. Probably seventy-five per cent of the buildings were old and unsanitary, and the overcrowding was unendurable, especially in the high schools and the schools for Negroes; many of the pupils had to do their work by artificial light. The way toward school progress was blocked by entanglements of “red tape”; there was, and still is, a triple control of school construction—recommendations for new building sites are made by the board of education to the District Commission, and from there go to the Appropriation Committee of the House of Representatives. The movement for a new deal in school affairs came to a head in 1916. A Universalist clergyman, Dr. John Van Schaick, Jr., was appointed to the school board, and shortly afterwards became its president. He secured an assistant for his church, paying this assistant out of his church salary, while Dr. Van Schaick gave most of his time, without salary, to the service of the Washington schools. He was a man of culture and broad vision, a liberal of the finest type; and what the gang thought of him was revealed three years later, when he was nominated for the District Commission, and a congressional hearing was held. The first witness to take the stand was a Washington business man, who set forth that Dr. Van Schaick was neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but “a man who has been handling a few dollars in a church,” whereas “we want a man who has been in our city here, who has made a success of life.” Reading this, I could not help thinking of a story I was told, about a former president of this board of education who had made such a success. He remarked to a friend that he had sold for a school site a lot so steep that it had to be measured perpendicularly!