At N. E. A. conventions there would appear two kinds of active members. There would be those who had come from all parts of the country, and ninety per cent of these were from the employing class of the schools. These had the money to come, and made it their business to come; most of them had their expenses paid, either by the public, or by the organization to which they belonged. The other group was made up of members who lived in or near the city where the convention was held, and these would be ninety per cent classroom teachers. They were the only classroom teachers who could attend the convention without great expense, and they represented, and properly felt that they represented, the great mass of the teachers who could not attend, but who had a vital stake in education, and had needs to be voiced. So at N. E. A. conventions there was beginning to be noticed that major phenomenon of our time—the class struggle. Here were the high-up and prosperous and powerful superintendents and “great educators”; and here were the common riff-raff of the school proletariat. In any big city it would happen, inevitably, that the proletariat would be in the majority. They would have little idea what was going on, or how they should vote; but here would come a dozen or two of the New York and Chicago and Milwaukee “Bolsheviks,” who would get up in meeting and ask questions and explain matters to the classroom teachers, and induce them to vote for their own class—or shall we say for their own classes? This was the thing which the educational employers decided to change. They worked out the scheme at their midwinter convention of 1918—the Atlantic City meeting of the Department of Superintendence. Instead of the N. E. A. being governed by the democratic vote of its active members at the annual convention, the N. E. A. was to become a representative body, like the United States of America; the members in the various cities and towns and counties would elect delegates to the state bodies, and both local and the state bodies would elect delegates to the national convention. The gang, of course, would be on hand at every stage of these elections to pull wires and get its own politicians chosen. So, when the convention assembled in some big city, the classroom teachers of that city would no longer have votes as active members of the N. E. A.; instead of that, they would be represented by delegates on the floor, one delegate for every hundred teachers, and, in case they had more than five hundred members, one delegate for each five hundred members thereafter. So the classroom teachers of the convention, instead of having one vote per teacher, would have one-hundredth of one vote per teacher, or maybe one five-hundredths of one vote per teacher! And so the N. E. A. would be made safe for the superintendents!