We have no morality in the matter. We will be grateful for anything, providing it is provocative of the thrills and novelty we seek. And please do not consider any such insipidity as taking a hike to the country or a trip to Bear Mt. They are commonplaces, don’t you see? For instance, a séance with a medium would have been a glorious suggestion—or something more unusual. But this is only a sample of the many possible things that would lend color and individuality to our days. So we who are merely young, appeal to you, a little naively perhaps, but with stern sincerity, in the hope that you who have passed through our stage of evolution may sympathize with us and may be able to help us in the way that we wish to be helped. To me this letter is like a flashlight thrown suddenly upon the minds of the young people. Our whole problem of education is summed up in it; and I ask again: Would you know what to answer. I, for my part, would tell these lads to find one of the big strikes which are always going on, say in the clothing trades of New York, and attempt to read the Constitution and so come into contact with the realities of the class struggle. But, of course, a teacher who gave that advice would cease to be a teacher. Those who hold their jobs and get their promotions in the system are those who follow the mimeographed formulas, and see that the pupils read the required number of words per minute. The result is a newspaper item from the New York “Times” of May 26, 1922; I quote the first paragraph: Two school girls were found yesterday afternoon, clasped in each other’s arms, lying on the floor of a kitchen of an apartment in the tenement house at 75 Van Alst Avenue, Long Island City. The room was filled with gas and the discovery was made just in time to save them from death by asphyxiation. The girls were Dora Boylan, 15 years old, daughter of a widow who occupied the apartment, and who at the time was at work in a factory near by, and Agnes Dougherty, also 15, of 28 Hunterspoint Avenue, Long Island City. They had made up their minds to die rather than go to school. CHAPTER XX MELODRAMA IN CHICAGO Let us take next the school system of Chicago. Here is a city of three million people, with representatives of most of the races and nations and tribes of the world; a great port, a great railroad center, a meat packing and manufacturing and banking center. The owners of these industries contribute the necessary cash, and finance alternately two rival political machines; candidates are chosen who are satisfactory to the “invisible government,” and with the help of four or five great capitalist newspapers the candidates are elected. The purpose for which they are elected is to protect Big Business while it plunders the city; incidentally, and on the side, the political officials plunder all they can.