What this means to the teachers was set forth to me by the victims. One was teaching a class of children on a dark stone staircase. Another was teaching in a room on a level with the elevated railroad, with trains coming and going on four tracks; she would have to stand in the middle of the room and shout in order to be heard by all the pupils; and this in a new school, just built! An inspector of some sort came along and entered on his report, “room noisy”; the teacher was denied promotion, for some reason which could not be explained, and it was over a year before she could get the matter straightened out—the words “room noisy” had been taken to mean that she did not maintain discipline! Another woman was teaching physical culture in a dark basement, with water always on the floor. She had seven classes every day, with fifty children in each class; and the gas lights were so feeble that she could not see the children she was supposed to be teaching. She said to one boy: “Stand with your feet together.” He answered: “There’s a puddle of water under me.” And when the physical culture classes got through with this hole, it became a play-ground for the other children! I am reluctant to introduce into this book any statements which may add to the income of the Grand Imperial Kleagles of the Ku Klux Klan; nevertheless, it is impossible to discuss school conditions in such cities as New York, Boston, St. Louis and San Francisco without mentioning the fact that we have in our country some ten or fifteen million people, held by fear of eternal torment in subjection to a priestly system, which repudiates democracy, repudiates freedom of opinion and of teaching, repudiates everything we know as Americanism. The Catholic church denies the power of the state over marriage and divorce, and above all things else, it denies the right of the state to educate the child. I am going to prove that in detail before I finish; for the present I merely point out that in city after city we shall encounter this influence.