LOTTIE: "I sho' do yo' hono'. We wuz jes singin'-we wuz sho' nuf, sah."

JUDGE: "Singing, Lottie? Why your neighbors here testify to the fact that you were making a great deal of noise so much that they could not sleep."

[1]Mrs. Hilles is the daughter of the late Thomas Bayard, formerly America's ambassador to Great Britain, and Secretary of State in President Cleveland's cabinet.

LOTTIE: "I tells yo' honor' we wuz jes singin' lak we allays do."

JUDGE : "What were you singing?"

LOTTIE: "Why, hymns, sah."

The judge smiles cynically.

A neatly-attired white man with a wizened face again takes the stand against Lottie. Hymns or no hymns he could not sleep. The judge pronounces a sentence of "six months in the workhouse," for Lottie.

And so it goes on.

The suffrage prisoners are the main business of the morning. Sixteen women come inside the railing which separates "tried" from "untried" and take their seats.

"Do the ladies wish the government to provide them with counsel?"

They do not.

"We shall speak in our own behalf. We feel that we can best represent ourselves," we announce. Miss Anne Martin and I act as attorneys for the group.

The same panting policemen who could not identify the people they had arrested give their stereotyped, false and illiterate testimony. The judge helps them over the hard places and so does the government's attorney. They stumble to an embarrassed finish and retire.

An aged government clerk, grown infirm in the service, takes the stand and the government attorney proves through him that there is a White House; that it has a side-walk in front of it, and a pavement, and a hundred other overwhelming facts. The pathetic clerk shakes his dusty frame and slinks off the stand. The prosecuting attorney now elaborately proves that we walked, that we carried banners, that we were arrested by the aforesaid officers while attempting to hold our banners at the White House gates.

Each woman speaks briefly in her own defense. She de- nounces the government's policy with hot defiance. The blame is placed squarely at the door of the Administration, and in unmistakable terms. Miss Anne Martin opens for the defense:

"This is what we are doing with our banners before the White House, petitioning the most powerful representative of the government, the President of the United States, for a redress of grievances; we are asking him to use his great power to secure the passage of the national suffrage amendment.

"As long as the government and the representatives of the government prefer to send women to jail on petty and technical charges, we will go to jail. Persecution has always advanced the cause of justice. The right of American women to work for democracy must be maintained . . . . We would hinder, not help, the whole cause of freedom for women, if we weakly submitted to persecution now. Our work for the passage of the amendment must go on. It will go on."