amity. Jim had scarcely entered when Con Bonner addressed the chair. “Mr. Prisidint,” said he, “we have wid us t’night, a young man who nades no introduction to an audience in this place, Mr. Jim Irwin. He thinks we’re bullheaded mules, and that all the schools are bad. At the proper time I shall move that we hire him f’r teacher; and pinding that motion, I move that he be given the floor. Ye’ve all heared of Mr. Irwin’s ability as a white hope, and I know he’ll be listened to wid respect!” Much laughter from the board and the spectators, as Jim arose. He looked upon it as ridicule of himself, while Con Bonner regarded it as a tribute to his successful speech. “Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Board,” said Jim, “I’m not going to tell you anything that you don’t know about yourselves. You 31 are simply making a farce of the matter of hiring a teacher for this school. It is not as if any of you had a theory that the teaching methods of one of these teachers would be any better than or much different from those of the others. You know, and I know, that whichever is finally engaged, or even if your silly deadlock is broken by employing a new candidate, the school will be the same old story. It will still be the school it was when I came into it a little ragged boy”—here Jim’s voice grew a little husky—“and when I left it, a bigger boy, but still as ragged as ever.” 31 There was a slight sensation in the audience, as if, as Con Bonner said about the knockdown, they hadn’t thought Jim Irwin could do it. “Well,” said Con, “you’ve done well to hold your own.” “In all the years I attended this school,” Jim went on, “I never did a bit of work in school which was economically useful. It was all dry stuff copied from the city schools. No other pupil ever did any real work of the sort farmers’ boys and girls should do. We copied city 32 schools—and the schools we copied are poor schools. We made bad copies of them, too. If any of you three men were making a fight for what Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission called a ‘new kind of rural school,’ I’d say fight. But you aren’t. You’re just making individual fights for your favorite teachers.” 32 Jim Irwin made a somewhat lengthy speech after the awkwardness wore off, so long that his audience was nodding and yawning by the time he reached his peroration, in which he abjured Bronson, Bonner
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