Next, the state superintendents and the state boards, which are the same thing upon a bigger scale. The state machine has more money, the state superintendent gets a higher salary, and so he is a politician of more skill and subtlety. He stands in with the state gang, and his office is a “hang-out” for idle functionaries smoking numerous big cigars. He works with the land grafters and the book companies, the bankers and merchants and manufacturers; he is their man, and gives the people their kind of education. As a rule, the people are satisfied with that—there being no other kind of education in sight, and no other kind conceivable. The devout peasants of America have been taught to sing a hymn about “the old-time religion,” which was good for their fathers and is good enough for them; in exactly the same way their children get the old-time education from the old-time gang. The average American has been taught to believe in the public schools as next to the church in sacredness, and he takes it for granted that public educators must be noble-minded and disinterested men. There are frequently disputes between the educational politicians and the political politicians; but if you examine these, you will generally find that they are disputes over the division of the public funds. The educational politicians are naturally fighting for the educational machine; they want it to grow big, they want to be able to promote their subordinates, and to carry on their propaganda, and to build up their prestige. Here in my state of California, as I write, the state superintendent is in the midst of a dispute with the newly elected governor of the Black Hand. The governor cut down appropriations for the state school machine to almost nothing—it was part of his program of “economy,” and the state simply must have a new penitentiary if the “criminal syndicalism” law is to be saved. The state superintendent of schools carried the issue to the legislature, and the legislature voted him the money, and the governor vetoed the bill. So now in the Los Angeles “Times” you learn that the state superintendent is guilty of “political activities”; he is using the power of his office to appeal to the people against the governor. In such a dispute the sympathies of the local educational machines throughout the state will be with the superintendent; they too want funds, and they have to fight the forces which cut off their funds. But they will all be careful not to overstep a certain limit in their activities; the ultimate arbiter is Big Business, and both parties appeal thereto.