Jailed for Freedom | Page 7

be aroused to greater action if he is
not allowed to remain silent upon something in which he does not
believe. It will make it easier for us to campaign against him when the
time comes."

And another time a friend of the cause would suggest, "Would it not
have been better not to have tried for planks in party platforms, since
we got such weak ones?"
"Not at all. We can draw the support of women with greater ease from
a party which shows a weak hand on suffrage, than from one which
hides its opposition behind silence."
She had always to combat the fear of the more timid ones who felt sure
with each new wave of disapproval that we would be submerged. "Now,
I have been a supporter of yours every step of the way," a "fearful" one
would say, "but this is really going a little too far. I was in the Senate
gallery to-day when two suffrage. senators in speeches denounced the
pickets and their suffrage banners. They said that we were setting
suffrage back and that something ought to be done about it."
"Exactly so," would come the ready answer from Miss Paul. "And they
will do something about it only if we continue
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to make them uncomfortable enough. Of course even suffrage senators
will object to our pickets and our banners because they do not want
attention called to their failure to compel the Administration to act.
They know that as friends of the measure their responsibility is
greater." And the "fearful" one was usually convinced and made
stronger.
I remember so well when the situation was approaching its final climax
in Washington. Men and women, both, came to Miss Paul with, "This
is terrible! Seven months' sentence is impossible. You must stop! You
cannot keep this up!"
With an unmistakable note of triumph in her voice Miss Paul would
answer, "Yes, it is terrible for us, but not nearly so terrible as for the
government. The Administration has fired its heaviest gun. From now
on we shall win and they will lose."

Most of the doubters had by this time banished their fears and had
come to believe with something akin to superstition that she could
never be wrong, so swiftly and surely, did they see her policies and her
predictions on every point vindicated before their eyes.
She has been a master at concentration, a master strategist-a great
general. With passionate beliefs on all important social questions, she
resolutely set herself against being seduced into other paths. Far from
being naturally an ascetic, she has disciplined herself into denials and
deprivations, cultural and recreational, to pursue her objective with the
least possible waste of energy. Not that she did not want above all else
to do this thing. She did. But doing it she had to abandon the easy life
of a scholar and the aristocratic environment of a cultured, prosperous,
Quaker family, of Moorestown, New Jersey, for the rigors of a
ceaseless drudgery and frequent imprisonment. A flaming idealist,
conducting the fight with the sternest kind of realism, a mind attracted
by facts, not fancies, she has led fearlessly and with magnificent
ruthlessness. Think-
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ing, thinking day and night of her objective and never retarding her
pace a moment until its accomplishment, I know no modern woman
leader with whom to compare her. I think she must possess many of the
same qualities that Lenin does, according to authentic portraits of
him-cool, practical, rational, sitting quietly at a desk and counting the
consequences, planning the next move before the first one is finished.
And if she has demanded the ultimate of her followers, she has given it
herself. Her ability to get women to work and never to let them stop is
second only to her own unprecedented capacity for work.
Alice Paul came to leadership still in her twenties, but with a broad
cultural equipment. Degrees from Swarthmore, the University of
Pennsylvania, and special study abroad in English universities had
given her a scholarly background in history, politics, and sociology. In
these studies she had specialized, writing her doctor's thesis on the
status of women. She also did factory work in English industries and
there acquired first hand knowledge of the industrial position of women.

In the midst of this work the English militant movement caught her
imagination and she abandoned her studies temporarily to join that
movement and go to prison with the English suffragists.
Convinced that the English women were fighting the battle for the
women of the world, she returned to America fresh from their struggle,
to arouse American women to action. She came bringing her gifts and
concentration to this one struggle. She came with that inestimable asset,
youth, and, born of youth, indomitable courage to