Dr. Van Schaick’s successor as president of the board of education was a Catholic gentleman by the name of Edwards, prominent in the Chamber of Commerce, and therefore an undoubted “success.” His intellectual qualifications you may judge when I tell you that he was president of the Columbia Correspondence School, and when I explain to you this amusing product of American public life. Great numbers of newly fledged statesmen come to Washington, where they have to compose political speeches and felicitous after-dinner addresses, letters to the newspapers and to their constituents—all kinds of literary efforts for which they lack the necessary knowledge of grammar. They cannot all have private secretaries to write their speeches for them, as did the late President Harding; so comes the Columbia Correspondence School, filling a long-felt want. President Edwards would write you an essay or a speech on any subject, at prices ranging from fifty cents up. If you used it only once, he would charge you two dollars. It was all strictly confidential—that is, until President Edwards was put upon the witness-stand at a congressional hearing. Then he was asked: Did they sell essays to school children? He answered, Yes, they would sell essays to people in any part of the country, asking no questions. He was asked: “What would you do if a teacher reprimanded a pupil for passing in one of your essays as his own?” He answered that he was not sure what he would do, but he could see nothing wrong with that. This disclosure raised such a row that the new president of the school board was forced to resign; no one could ever find out which one of the judges of the District Supreme Court had recommended him, but they all united in getting rid of him! Under this autocracy of politicians the fate of the Washington school teachers has been the same as we have seen in other cities. Their wages in 1917 were on a starvation basis; the minimum was five hundred dollars for assistant kindergartners, and the next was six hundred. Both the high school teachers and the grade teachers formed unions, and the politicians did not dare to stop them. The unions carried the agitation to Congress, and got an increase of salary during the war. The gang tried to corral them into the National Education Association. They have a local “institute” and of course the teachers have little to do with selecting the speakers.