advocates a change in anything, who expresses discontent with the system of legalized plunder and repression. Six or seven years ago Mrs. Pankhurst came from England in the interest of militant suffrage. The American people had read about Mrs. Pankhurst, and wanted to know what she looked like, and what she was going to do in America. A New York paper came out with a report to the effect that Mrs. Pankhurst, before being allowed to land in New York, had been required by the Federal authorities to give a pledge that she would not engage in militancy in America. This report was cabled to London, where it was hailed with glee by Mrs. Pankhurst's opponents; Lloyd George made a speech about it, and this speech was cabled to America by the Associated Press, and thus widely spread in the American papers. Mrs. Pankhurst stated to me personally that she had been asked for no such pledge, and had given no such pledge, and that all her efforts to have this false report corrected by the New York newspapers and by the Associated Press had been in vain.
Such was the treatment of a "militant" leader. You say, perhaps, "Well, nobody cares about those militants." If so, let us hear one of those who vehemently opposed "militancy." I write to Mrs. Alice Stone Blackwell, and she replies:
For many years, the news carried by the great press agencies on
the subject of woman suffrage was habitually twisted, and the twist
was almost always unfavorable to suffrage. As editor for a long
time of the "Woman's Journal," and later as one of the editors of
the "Woman Citizen," I had constant occasion to observe this, and I
commented upon it repeatedly. The thing happened so often as to
make it impossible to explain it as accident or coincidence.
As an extreme instance, take the following: Every time that the woman suffrage bill was defeated in the British House of Commons, the fact was promptly cabled to this country; but when the bill finally passed—an event which both friends and opponents of suffrage were awaiting with great interest—not one of the papers in the United States that are served by the Associated Press gave the news!
In my suffrage work, I learned beyond question that the news coming through the great press agencies was colored and distorted; and if this has been done on one subject, it has doubtless been done on others. A good many women, I think, learned a wholesome distrust of press reports during the suffrage struggle.
And now let us hear some radicals of the male sex. Hiram
Johnson of California is a radical. In "Everybody's Magazine"
during 1908 there appeared an interview which had been
submitted to him and printed with his corrections. Sixteen
