Mrs. Dorsey is a very devout church member, and the churches are strong in her support; so when a woman teacher came to her, complaining of having been seduced by the principal of her school, Mrs. Dorsey was greatly incensed. When the teacher’s story was substantiated by the wife of the principal, Mrs. Dorsey—so I am informed by Dr. Lickley—summoned the man to her office and demanded his resignation. But she had been led in her excitement to overlook the realities of politics in her school system. This principal had a powerful friend, an ex-judge who was high in the councils of the Black Hand. He called on Mrs. Dorsey and presumably explained to her the concrete facts about the administration of schools. Anyhow, the matter was suddenly dropped; and Mrs. Dorsey has just been presented with a reappointment for four years, with a salary raise from eight thousand to ten thousand a year. The thing for which I indict this elderly lady superintendent is her pitiable subservience to the power of wealth, and the glorifying of commercialism in her school system. She has made the schools a “boosting” agency for reaction; it would be no exaggeration to say that she has handed them over to the bankers to be used as a collection agency to get the children’s money. One teacher tells me how her principal came back in great excitement from a meeting of principals summoned by Mrs. Dorsey, at which the details of a “thrift campaign” had been explained. All the children must start savings banks at once; the Chamber of Commerce was furnishing the banks, also posters, which must be put up in every schoolroom. Some time later the principal came into a room much disturbed; there was no poster up in that room, and what was the matter? The teacher explained that the wind had blown it down; it had been up for two months. The principal fussed about, and would not leave until it had been tacked up again. The children were hounded to start their bank accounts; some were taken out and paraded around the block, with banners reporting the percentages of bank accounts in each class. The teachers also were hounded; you were a failure if your children did not reach a certain percentage. A man from the bankers’ association came around to make a speech: “The principal is going to give you a bank; the superintendent expects that every one of you will have a dollar saved up.” And every month there was a bulletin from Mrs. Dorsey. Meantime the bankers’ association, in the literature it sent out, was explaining that it was spending more than one dollar per child upon this school campaign, but it would pay well, because the children would get the bank habit.