As the crowd grew more dense, the police temporarily retired from the attack. When their activities had summoned a sufficiently large and infuriated mob, they would rest. And so the passions of the mob continued unchecked upon these irrepressible women, and from day to day the Administration gave its orders.
Finding that riots and mob attacks had not terrorized the pickets, the Administration decided again to arrest the women in the hope of ending the agitation. Having lost public sympathy through workhouse sentences, having won it back by pardoning the women, the Administration felt it could afford to risk losing it again, or rather felt that it had supplied itself with an appropriate amount of stage-setting.
And so on the third day of the riotous attacks, when it was clear that the pickets would persist, the Chief of Police called at headquarters to announce to Miss Paul that “orders have been changed and henceforth women carrying banners will be arrested”
Meanwhile the pickets heard officers shout to civilian friends as they passed—“Come back at four o’clock.”
Members of the daily mob announced at the noon hour in various nearby restaurants that “the suffs will be arrested to-day at 4 o’clock.”
Four o’clock is the hour the Government clerks begin to swarm homewards. The choice of this hour by the police to arrest the women would enable them to have a large crowd passing the White House gates to lend color to the fiction that “pickets were blocking the traffic.”
Throughout the earlier part of the afternoon the silent sentinels stood unmolested, carrying these mottoes:
ENGLAND AND RUSSIA ARE ENFRANCHISING WOMEN IN WAR-TIME.
HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOB LIBERTY?
THE GOVERNMENT ORDERS OUR BANNERS DESTROYED BECAUSE THEY TELL THE TRUTH.