“It is the duty of a teacher who knows of anything wrong in the school system to complain to her superiors about it,” said the pious Dr. Tildsley; and there came a chorus from all over the room: “Yes, and lose her job!” Dr. Tildsley was pained by the suggestion that a teacher might encounter trouble as result of just complaints, made at the proper time and in the proper manner. As it happened, however, I had spent that morning in the home of Mr. James F. Berry, a teacher of mathematics at DeWitt Clinton High School, who had been for twenty-three years in the system, and took seriously the idea that a teacher has responsibility for teaching conditions. Mr. Berry made complaint against the grossest kind of evils in the school—cruelty to pupils, dishonesty, and acts of injustice by those in authority. As a result, his career in the system was one long misery. He was denied promotion to which he was justly entitled; and he put in my hands a little diary, in which he had kept the record of two decades of struggle for his rights. I glance through it and find entries such as this: Mr. Tildsley exemplified today his arbitrary and disagreeable way of dealing with those under him, by making a perfectly groundless accusation against me. It was easy to disprove, and then he virtually apologized, though with no sign of regretting his accusation. I have observed this practice of sweeping statements by him, and if they are not promptly disproved one feels that he takes them for granted as true and admitted, and such an impression does not make for good-will. I shall before long show you how at this same DeWitt Clinton High School there has been established with official sanction an elaborate system of espionage; a teacher drawing full salary devotes the greater part of his time to training pupils to spy upon other teachers, and when these pupils bring reports of unorthodox ideas and utterances, the pupils are praised for a meritorious service. But in the case of Mr. Berry I find that the disposition to report genuine evils is described by Dr. Tildsley as “a tendency to tale-bearing which lessens efficiency!”