You must see, Pullman, that you cannot be right in what you have done in this matter. You have given the pickets adequate protection; but you have arrested them and had them sent to jail and the workhouse; you have permitted the crowd to mob them, and then you have had your officers do much the same thing by forcibly taking their banners from them. In some of the actions you must have been wrong. If it was right to give them protection and let them stand at the White House for five months, both before and after the war, it was not right to do what you did later.

You say that it was not right when you were "lenient" and gave them protection. You cannot mean that. The rightness or wrongness must be a matter of law, not of personal discretion, and for you to attempt to substitute your discretion is to set up a little autocracy m place of the settled laws of the land. This would justify a charge of "Kaiserism" right here in our capital city.

The truth is, Pullman, you were right when you gave these women protection. That is what the police are for. When

[1]The distinguished journalist who went to Africa to meet Theodore Roosevelt and accompanied him on his return journey to America. there are riots they are supposed to quell them, not by quelling the "proximate cause," but by quelling the rioters.

I know your police officers now quite well and know that they are most happy when they are permitted to do their duty. They did not like the dirty business of permitting a lot of sailors and street rifraff to rough the girls. All that went against the grain, but when you let them protect the pickets, as you did March third, when a thousand women marched around and around the White House, the officers were as contented as they were efficient.

Washington has a good police force and there has never been a minute when they could not have scattered any group gathered at the White House gates and given perfect protection to the women standing there.

You know why they did not do their duty.

In excusing what you have done, you say that the women carried banners with "offensive" inscriptions on them. You refer to the fact that they have addressed the President as "Kaiser Wilson." As a matter of fact not an arrest you have made-and the arrests now number more than sixty-has been for carrying one of those "offensive" banners. The women were carrying merely the suffrage colors or quotations from President Wilson's writings.

But, suppose the banners were offensive. Who made you censor of banners? The law gives you no such power. Even when you go through the farce of a police court trial the charge is "obstructing traffic"; which shows conclusively that you are not willing to go into court on the real issue.