“We believe in fighting to the last for our national existence,” cried Mrs. John A. Logan, waving her hand, whereupon hundreds of women patriots, Daughters of the American Revolution, suffrage and anti-suffrage leaders, members of the Navy League, Red Cross workers, sprang to their feet and screamed their enthusiasm for righteous war.
Among these I recognised Mrs. John A. Logan, Miss Mabel Boardman, Mrs. Lindon Bates, Mrs. Mary S. Lockwood, Mrs. Seymour L. Cromwell, Miss Alice Hill Chittenden, Mrs. Oliver Herford, Mrs. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, Mrs. John Temple Graves, Mrs. Edwin Gould, Mrs. George Dewey, Mrs. William Cumming Story, Mrs. George Harvey, Mrs. Thomas A. Edison, Mrs. William C. Potter, Miss Marie Van Vorst, Mrs. Arthur M. Dodge, Mrs. George J. Gould, Mrs. T. J. Oakley Rhinelander, Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, Mrs. John Jacob Astor, Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, Mrs. M. Orme Wilson, Mrs. Simon Baruch, Mrs. Oliver Herford, Mrs. Wm. Reynolds Brown, and Mrs. Douglas Robinson.
When this storm had subsided, Henry Ford rose to renew the pacifist attack.
“It shocks and grieves me,” he began, “to find American women openly advocating the killing of human beings.”
“Where would your business be,” yelled a voice in the gallery, “if George Washington hadn’t fought the War of the Revolution?”
This sally called forth such frantic cheers that Mr. Ford was unable to make himself heard and sat down in confusion.
Other speakers were Jane Addams, Hudson Maxim, Bernard Ridder and William Jennings Bryan. The audience sat listless as the old arguments and recriminations, the old facts and fallacies, were laid before them. Like the nation, they seemed plunged in a stupor of indifference. They were asleep.
Then suddenly fell the bomb from heaven. It was during the mild applause following Mr. Bryan’s pacifist appeal, that I had a premonition of some momentous happening. I was in the press gallery quite near to Theodore Roosevelt, the next speaker, who was seated at the end of the platform, busy with his notes, when a messenger came out from behind the stage and handed the Colonel a telegram. As he read it I saw a startling change. Roosevelt put aside his notes and a strange tense look came into his eyes and, presently, when he rose to speak, I saw that his usually ruddy face was ashen grey.
As Roosevelt rose, another messenger thrust a wet, ink-stained newspaper into his hand.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, and in his first words there was a sense of impending danger, “for reasons of the utmost importance I shall not deliver the speech that I have prepared. I have a brief message, a very grave message, that will reach your hearts more surely than any words of mine. The deliberations of this great gathering have been taken out of our hands. We have nothing more to discuss, for Almighty God has spoken!