Senator Culberson of Texas, Democrat, offered a bill authorizing President Wilson at any time to prohibit any person from approaching or entering any place in short blanket authority granting the President or his officials limitless power over the actions of human beings. Realizing that this could be used to prohibit picketing the White House we appeared before a committee hearing on the bill and spoke against it. The committee did not have the boldness to report such a bill.

Senator Myers of Montana, an influential member of the Democratic majority, introduced into the Senate a few days later a resolution making it illegal to picket the White House. The shamelessness of admitting to the world that acts for which women had been repeatedly sentenced to jail, and for which women were at that moment lying in prison, were so legal as to make necessary a special act of Congress against them, was appalling. The Administration policy seemed to be "Let us put women in jail first-let us enact a law to keep them there afterwards,"

This tilt between Senator Brandegee, of Connecticut, antisuffrage Republican, and Senator Myers, suffrage Democrat, took place when Mr. Myer's presented his bill:

MR. BRANDEGEE: . . . Was there any defect in the legal proceedings by which these trouble makers were sentenced and put in jail a few weeks ago?

MR. MYERS: None that I know of. I am not in a position to pass upon that. I do not believe any was claimed . . . .

MR. BRANDEGEE: Inasmuch as the law was sufficient to land them in jail . . . I fail to see why additional legislation is necessary on the subject.

MR. MYERS: There seems to be a doubt in the mind of some whether the present law is sufficient and I think it ought to be put beyond doubt. I think . . . the laws are not stringent or severe enough . . . .

MR. BRANDEGEE : They were stringent enough to land the malefactors in jail . . . .

In spite of Senator Myers' impassioned appeal to his colleagues, be was unable to command any support for his bill. I quote this from his speech in the Senate August 18, 1917:

MR. MYERS: Mr. President, I wish to say a few words about the bill I have just introduced. It is intended for the enactment of better and more adequate legislation to prevent the infamous, outrageous, scandalous, and, I think, almost treasonable actions that have been going on around the White House for months past, which President of the United States have been a gross insult to the and to the people of the United States; I mean the so-called picketing of the White House. . . These disgusting proceedings have been going on for months, and if there is no adequate law to stop them, I think there ought to be.

"I believe the President, in the generosity of his heart, erred when he pardoned some of the women who have been conducting these proceedings, after they had been sentenced to