There was “the phonograph deal” of the Hiawatha Company, headed by State Commerce Commissioner P. H. Moynihan; “the six skinny cows” sent to the parental school, as milk producers for the three hundred little truants confined there; the stationery and school supply contracts between the board and Davis’ nephews; the tearing out of expensive plumbing in school buildings to “make work” for Metzger’s “steam heating and ventilating company”; the sale of coal in certain districts to the schools by certain firms who made contributions of 50 cents a ton to board officials; the “sale” of buildings on school property by Bither, the attorney for that board, and the “splitting” of the rents collected from tenants who continued to live in them for two years after they had sold them as additions to the Forrestville and Wendell Phillips schools. You will wish to know the outcome of this particular act of the continuous Chicago melodrama. William A. Bither, attorney for the school board, and Edwin S. Davis, president of the board, were tried for conspiracy and acquitted, together with thirteen others, including the boss of the gang. Some witnesses had disappeared; others had “forgotten” what they had sworn to before the grand jury; but most significant of all, this clever board had taken the precaution not to pass rules governing its own procedure—and the court instructed the jury that in the absence of rules, the business manager’s rules held good! It was not a crime for board members to sell to their own friends and relatives, nor to sell to companies in which they, the board members, owned stock! It was not a crime to buy supplies without bids! It was not a crime to make bad bargains in purchasing! To have these things proven in court cost the people of Chicago some two hundred thousand dollars—in addition to the millions already wasted. Chicago got a new mayor, who, by political subtlety too intricate to detail, got rid of the old school board, and of Dr. Robertson as president. The last word of the great medical educator was a letter to the new board, explaining the wonderful legacy he was leaving them, in the form of a commission to study the school housing question; and so, when I came back to Chicago in December, 1923, to read the proofs of this book, I found yet another act of the melodrama on, and the business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation in the midst of another whirlwind! This commission and its Big Business masters had set out to foist upon the people of Chicago the wonderful new “platoon system” of schools, as it is now working full blast in Detroit, the very latest wrinkle in Ford factory standardization applied to the minds of children.