onverts
by their expositions of the exceedingly favorable labor laws of
Australia and New Zealand, where women vote.

[Illustration: MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER.]

Unquestionably the mighty battle which is waging in England made a deep
impression on American women of all classes. The visits made in this
country by Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. Borrman Wells, Mrs. Philip
Snowden, and, most of all, Mrs. Pankhurst, leader of the militant
English Suffragists, aroused tremendous enthusiasm from one end of the
country to the other. Never, until these women appeared, telling, with
rare eloquence, their stories of struggle, of arrest and imprisonment,
had the vote appeared such an incomparable treasure. Never before,
except among a few enthusiasts, had there existed any feeling that the
suffrage was a thing to fight for, suffer for, even to die for.

Up to this time the suffrage was a theory, an academic question of right
and justice. After the visits of the English women, American suffragists
everywhere began to view their cause in the light of a political
movement. They began to adopt political methods. Instead of private
meetings where suffrage was discussed before a select audience of the
already convinced, the women began to mount soap boxes on street corners
and to talk suffrage to the man in the street.

The first suffrage demonstration was held in New York in February, 1908.
The members of a small but enthusiastic Equal Suffrage Club announced
their intention of having a parade. Most of the women being wage earners
they planned to have their parade on a Sunday. When they applied at
Police Headquarters for the necessary permit they found to their disgust
that Sunday parades were forbidden by law.

"Not unless you are a funeral procession," said the stern captain of the
police.

The woman replied that they were anything but a funeral procession, and
threatened darkly to hold their parade in spite of police regulations.
They got plenty of newspaper publicity in the succeeding days, and on
the following Sunday a huge crowd of men, a sprinkling of women, a
generous number of plain clothes men, and New York's famous "camera
squad" assembled in Union Square, where all incendiary things happen.
The dauntless seven who made up the suffrage club were there, and at the
psychological moment one of the women ran up the steps of a park
pavilion and spoke in a ringing voice, yet so quietly that the police
made no move