For three years the independent teachers of Los Angeles worked over a plan to reorganize the Southern section of the association, taking it out of the hands of the superintendents and putting it under the control of the class-room teachers. The project came up in December, 1920, at a convention whose chairman was Dr. E. C. Moore, director of the Southern branch of the University of California. We met this gentleman as superintendent of schools in Los Angeles seventeen years ago, getting himself into trouble by cutting out General Otis’s “open shop” propaganda from the program of the National Education Association. Since then Dr. Moore has learned discretion, and become a thoroughly tame servant of the Black Hand. At this convention he ruled out the report of the reorganization committee, on the technical ground that he had not had thirty days’ notice of the matter. Mind you, this committee was reporting according to orders given at the last year’s convention, where it had made a tentative report; Dr. Moore had known all about it at that time, but he now shut the committee off, and appointed a new committee to “work over” the constitution. This took another year, and resulted in a document under which the association is a closed corporation, entirely controlled by the supervising element in the schools. Simultaneously with all this, and practically duplicating it, was Mr. Chase’s experience with the State Council of Education, the executive body of all these California teachers’ associations. At its meeting in Oakland, April, 1918, Mr. Chase brought up a project to bring these associations under control of the classroom teachers. He had a detailed and carefully worked out program to reorganize the associations, and provide for their democratic control from the floor of the conventions. Mr. Chase swept the assemblage with this project, and was made chairman of a committee to perfect it. His ill health prevented his activity for two years; but finally the project was got into shape, and was brought before local bodies, and approved by every one that voted on it. In December, 1920, Mr. Chase took it to the state council; but the gang leaders, knowing what was coming, deliberately kept the convention busy all day, and called for “new business” late at night, when everybody had gone home except the administrative crowd. Out of thirty present, there was only one class-room teacher! They meant of course, to vote down the project, and then have the kept press flash the news over the state. So Mr. Chase forbore to introduce it; he never will introduce it now, because his story came to a sudden end. The Black Hand in Los Angeles succeeded in “getting” him, according to the formula suggested by Judge Bordwell some years earlier. The story is a complicated and rather ghastly one; suffice it to say that they put him in a position where he could not defend himself without dragging in some other people. As he