Yesterday was a bad day for me in feeding. I was vomiting continually during the process. The tube has developed an irritation somewhere that is painful....
I fainted again last night. I just fell flop over in the bathroom where I was washing my hands, and was led to bed, when I recovered, by a nurse. I lost consciousness just as I got there again. I felt horribly faint until twelve o’clock, then fell asleep for awhile....
The same doctor feeds us both.... Don’t let them tell you we take this well. Miss Paul vomits much. I do, too, except when I’m not nervous, as I have been every time but one. The feeding always gives me a severe headache. My throat aches afterward, and I always weep and sob, to my great disgust, quite against my will. I try to be less feeble-minded.
The final barbarity, however, in the treatment of the pickets came out in the experience of Alice Paul. Of course, the Administration felt that in jailing Alice Paul, they had the “ringleader.” That was true. What they did not realize, however, was that they had also jailed the inspired reformer, the martyr-type, who dies for a principle, but never bends or breaks. Miss Paul was arrested, it will be remembered, on October 20. The banner that she carried had, in the light of later events, a grim significance. It bore President Wilson’s own words:
THE TIME HAS COME TO CONQUER OR SUBMIT. FOR US THERE
CAN BE BUT ONE CHOICE. WE HAVE MADE IT.
Her sentence was seven months.
“I am being imprisoned,” said Miss Paul as she was taken from the District Police Court to the patrol wagon that carried her to jail, “not because I obstructed traffic, but because I pointed out to President Wilson the fact that he is obstructing the progress of justice and democracy at home while Americans fight for it abroad.”
When Alice Paul reached the jail, she found ten other Suffragists who had been brought there four days before from Occoquan. The air of this jail was stifling. There were about seventy-five women prisoners locked in three tiers of cells, and no window had been opened. The first appeal of the Suffragists to Alice Paul was for air.
Alice Paul, not committed to her cell yet, looked about her. High up she saw a little, round window with a rope hanging from it. She asked the matron why they did not open the window. “If we started opening windows, we should have to give the colored women more clothes,” the matron told her.