There are at the present time a hundred and twenty-five thousand members of the N. E. A., and they pay dues at the rate of two dollars per member. More than eighty per cent of them are the plain, ordinary, humble, rank and file classroom teachers, whose function is that of the day laborer in the great corporation—to produce the wealth, while their superiors spend it. You will be told that the N. E. A. is a “democratic” organization, and you will understand what this means when I tell you that Tammany Hall also is a “democratic” organization. New members are welcome, in fact, they are eagerly sought-“drives” are carried on, and the prestige of schools is established by the fact that they have one hundred per cent membership in the N. E. A. Some school systems are even going so far as to make membership in the N. E. A. compulsory to all applicants for teachers’ positions. The Journal of the National Education Association for September, 1922, triumphantly quotes the superintendent of schools at Onaway, Michigan, as stating that “teachers’ contracts in Onaway, Michigan, will in future require teachers to become members of state and national educational associations.” And in the case of St. Joseph, Missouri, the blanks to be filled out by applicants for teaching positions contain the following two questions: “Are you a member of the N. E. A.? If not, will you be a member this year?” Now the classroom teachers are the real educators in America. They do the actual work of teaching your children; they are the ones who know your children, they spend some twenty-five hours with them every week, and they are not seduced from the job of understanding children by prominence and applause, nor by high salaries, nor by any other lure. The classroom teachers are the ones we must depend upon if education is to be improved. The classroom teachers represent democracy in the school world, and the test of democracy in the N. E. A. is what happens to this rank and file. So I begin my study of this great organization with its Department of Classroom Teachers. Until a year or two ago the Department of Classroom Teachers of the N. E. A. was nothing but a name. The way it leaped into sudden life is an amusing story. The school superintendents of the N. E. A. decided that they would have an exclusive organization, and hold meetings uncontaminated by the presence of the school proletariat. At their mid-winter convention of 1920 they reorganized themselves into an autonomous body, called the Department of Superintendence. After they had done this, the embarrassing discovery was made that they had violated the by-laws of the N. E. A.; but, of course, at the next convention of the N. E. A. special amendments were passed, so as to legalize what the superintendents had done. Being a superintendent in the N. E. A. is like being a millionaire in a police-court.