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These are a few out of scores of cases that were detailed to me. I was told of a Catholic who took an examination, and then was permitted to withdraw his papers and write up a new set at home. It is a matter of record that Mr. Somers, member of the board of education—a super-patriot, who called the Teachers’ Union treasonable—let off a clerk of the school board who had been proven guilty of misappropriating funds; also another who was charged with letting people get copies of examination papers in advance, and of selling information to candidates. Both these people, Catholics, got off with a fine of a few days’ pay, and both are still in the system.

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.