Unlike Miss Paul, however, her force is not nonresistant. Once in the combat she takes delight in it; she is by nature a rebel. She is an ideal leader for the stormy and courageous attack—reckless and yet never to the point of unwisdom.
From the time Miss Burns and Miss Paul met for the first time in Cannon Row Police Station, London, they have been constant co- workers in suffrage. Both were students abroad at the time they met. They were among the hundred women arrested for attempting to present petitions for suffrage to Parliament. This was the first time either of them had participated in a demonstration. But from then on they worked together in England and Scotland organizing, speaking, heckling members of the government, campaigning at bye- elections; going to Holloway Prison together, where they joined the Englishwomen on hunger strike. Miss Burns remained organizing in Scotland while Miss Paul was obliged to return to America after serious illness following a thirty day period of imprisonment, during all of which time she was forcibly fed.
Miss Burns and she did not meet again until 1913—three years having intervened—when they undertook the national work on Congress. Throughout the entire campaign Miss Burns and Miss Paul counseled with one another on every point of any importance. This combination of the cool strategist and passionate rebel—each sharing some of the attributes of the other-has been a complete and unsurpassed leadership.
You have now been introduced, most inadequately, to Lucy Burns, who was to start the fight inside the prison.
She had no sooner begun to organize her comrades for protest than the officials sensed a “plot,” and removed her at once to solitary confinement. But they were too late. Taking the leader only hastened the rebellion. A forlorn piece of paper was discovered, on which was written their initial demand, It was then passed from prisoner to prisoner through holes in the wall surrounding leaden pipes, until a finished document had been perfected and signed by all the prisoners.
This historic document-historic because it represents the first organized group action ever made in America to establish the status of political prisoners—said:
To the Commissioners of the Distinct of Columbia:
As political prisoners, we, the undersigned, refuse to work while in prison. We have taken this stand as a matter of principle after careful consideration, and from it we shall not recede.
This action is a necessary protest against an unjust sentence. In reminding President Wilson of his pre-election promises toward woman suffrage we were exercising the right of peaceful petition, guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, which declares peaceful picketing is legal in the District of Columbia. That we are unjustly sentenced has been well recognized—when President Wilson pardoned the first group of suffragists who had been given sixty days in the workhouse, and again when Judge Mullowny suspended sentence for the last group of picketers. We wish to point out the inconsistency and injustice of our sentences—some of us have been given sixty days, a later group thirty days, and another group given a suspended sentence for exactly the same action.
Conscious, therefore, of having acted in accordance with the highest standards of citizenship, we ask the Commissioners of the District to grant us the rights due political prisoners. We ask that we no longer be segregated and confined under locks and bars in small groups, but permitted to see each other, and that Miss Lucy Burns, who is in full sympathy with this letter, be released from solitary confinement in another building and given back to us.