A form of “honest graft” which has been widely developed under this Tammany regime is the writing of text-books by school officials. Many of the text-books in use in the public schools of New York bear the names of people in the system; in many cases they were written by teachers, but officials have put their names upon them, and get the greater part of the profits. The principals recommend these books for use, and the board of superintendents adopts them. Former Superintendent Maxwell had a large income from books published by the American Book Company which he himself had not written; and a number of the district superintendents get their share. The New York “Globe,” discussing the case of Maxwell, showed how in his position he had the power to increase the sales of his own books; and this same power is possessed by all the gang. I was told of one head of a department with a book to sell, who got himself transferred three times to different parts of the city—starting in the High School of Commerce in Manhattan, from there to the Commercial High School of Brooklyn, and then to Long Island—and in each place he took with him his commercial arithmetic. The teachers did not want it, but in every school the other texts were thrown out and the new one introduced. All over New York—and all over America, as we shall find—there are school basements and cupboards filled with discarded text-books, or new text-books which are so bad that the teachers will not use them. Needless to say, many of the Tammany superintendents and principals are ignorant men, utterly unfitted for scholastic duties. I look back on my own days in the College of the City of New York, and recall the comical old boys whom the Tammany machine appointed to teach me literature and philosophy and Latin, and other high-brow subjects. Therefore, I was not surprised to be told of a superintendent who talks about “algebray,” and who says: “As I was a-saying,” etc. The French teachers find amusement in the efforts of superintendents to pretend that they know French. I talked with a charming lady of Spanish birth, who attempted to get by one of these examiners, but he reported her French as “very bad”; she “ran all her words together.” Anyone who has listened to a Frenchman talk will appreciate the humor of this comment; one might say that the first qualification for speaking good French is to run your words together to the utmost possible extent. This lady went to see Professor Cohn, head of the department of French of Columbia University, and one of our leading French scholars. He reported that she spoke French “like a native,” and took occasion to add that he knew the examiner in question, and knew him to be ignorant of French.