What are those kinds of business? To be able to pick the location of handsome new schools is worth a fortune to real estate interests; and that this is regularly done in New York is not my charge, but that of the comptroller of the city. To be able to determine the placing of contracts for school buildings and supplies is worth a fortune to any member of a political machine; and I talked with a former clerk of the school board, who told me he had seen so much graft that he had run away from the sight. I do not mean that this Tammany school board personally carries off the money, as it did in the days of Tweed; the method now is “honest graft”—that is, the placing of school contracts with companies in which your wife’s relatives and the members of your gang are interested. The amount to be expended in New York amounts to a hundred million dollars a year, and Tammany gets it all. At least four of the members of the board are “dummies,” having no function save to vote as the machine directs. All of them are Democrats, and the majority are Catholics; that is to say, the educating of a million American children is in the hands of people who teach that public education is a crime against God. So it comes about that the principal indictment of this Tammany regime is not the money it spends, but the money it withholds. New York is the wealthiest city in the world; the masters of the city have money for palatial town houses, for country estates many square miles in extent, with homes as big as summer hotels; they have money for private yachts as big as ocean liners, and for luxurious motor cars by the tens of thousands; but they have no money to provide a decent education for the children of the poor. While their own children go to elegant private schools, the children of the poor are herded into dark, insanitary fire-traps, some of them seventy-five years of age; and even of these there is an insufficiency! Ever since my boyhood the refusal of New York City to accommodate the children who clamor for an education has been the blackest crime of the Tammany ruffians. At present one-third of the children are on “part time”; that is, they are turned out of school after two or three hours, to make room for another relay. The rest of the day they pick up the vices of the streets; and if they are made into young criminals, the city is ready and able to build whatever jails may be necessary.