As a rule, we put through these little jobs without disagreeable publicity; but once in a while accidents happen. We may take the best of care in selecting our educators, but now and then a Bolshevik will creep in. Take, for example, the United States Bureau of Education; we have had some most eminent Bolshevik-hunters in charge of that organization, and had every right to feel safe about it. Who could have foreseen that when the United States Commissioner of Education selected a young lady by the name of Alice Barrows, whose ancestors went back two hundred and eighty years in our history—a niece of Thomas Brackett Reed, Republican party boss of the House of Representatives for a generation—who could possibly have foreseen that this hundred per cent respectable young lady would turn out to have sympathy for a labor union? Thereby hangs a story, full of tragedy for our merchants and manufacturers of woolen materials. In the course of the war we discovered a great many foreigners who didn’t speak English and didn’t know how to read and write. That seemed dangerous in war-time, so we started campaigns of “Americanization.” So after the war the Bureau of Education sent Miss Alice Barrows to Passaic, New Jersey, to make a study of the problem of adult education among the foreigners who work in the woolen mills. It so happened that only a few months ago there had been a big mass strike among these workers, and they had formed a union. We were quietly engaged in strangling this union, when Miss Barrows, entirely neglectful of her dignity as a government investigator, had the bad taste to go and consult with the president of the union about teaching the union workers to speak and read and write English. Of course, we merchants and manufacturers can’t hold down this foreign riff-raff without a great many spies to keep track of them. We have had to develop a whole industry of espionage, almost as elaborate as our school machine. We have scores of secret service agencies, some of which spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and have complete private armies of their own, cavalry, infantry and artillery. Naturally, we had spies in the office of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of Passaic, and one of these spies sent in a report concerning a “Mrs. Alice Borrows of the Educational Division of the United States Department of Labor.” There were a number of slips in that description, but we haven’t as yet been able to introduce courses on espionage in our schools, so our spies are not as highly cultured as we should like.