Will you, if it is within your power, attempt to have her recognized as a political prisoner, and relieve the severity of the treatment she is receiving for obeying this impulse born of her love of liberty and the dictates of her conscience? I have, Excellency, the honor to be, Respectfully, your countrywoman, (Signed) VERA SAMARODIN, Baltimore, Maryland. Another Russian, Maria Moravsky, author and poet, who had herself been imprisoned in Czarist Russia and who was touring America at the time of this controversy, expressed her surprise that our suffrage prisoners should be treated as common criminals. She wrote:[1] “I have been twice in the Russian prison; life in the solitary cell was not sweet; but I can assure you it was better than that which American women suffragists must bear. [1] Reprinted from The Suffragist, Feb. 8, 1919. “We were permitted to read and write; we wore our own clothes; we were not forced to mix with the criminals; we did no work. (Only a few women exiled to Siberia for extremely serious political crimes were compelled to work.) And our guardians and even judges respected us; they felt we were victims, because we struggled for liberty.” The Commissioners, who bad to bear the responsibility of an answer to these protests and to the demand of the prisoners, contended to all alike that political prisoners did not exist. “We shall be happy to establish a precedent,” said the women. “But in America,” stammered the Commissioners, “there is no need for such a thing as political prisoners.” “The very fact that we can be sentenced to such long terms for a political offense shows that there does exist, in fact, a group of people who have come into conflict with state power for dissenting from the prevailing political system,” our representatives answered. We cited definitions of political offenses by eminent criminologists, penologists, sociologists, statesmen and historians. We declared that all authorities on political crime sustained our contention and that we clearly came under the category of political, if any crime. We pointed as proof to James Bryce, George Sigerson, Maurice Parmelee and even to Clemenceau, who defined the distinction between political offenses and common law crimes thus: “ . . . theoretically a crime committed in the interest of the criminal is a common law crime, while an offense committed in the public interest is a political crime.”[1] [1] Speech before the French Chamber of Deputies May 16, 1876, advocating amnesty for those who participated in the Commune of 1871. From the Annales de la Chambre des Députés, 1876, v. 2, pp. 44-48. We called to their attention the established custom of special treatment of political prisoners in Russia, France, Italy and even Turkey.[2] [2] Those interested in the question of political prisoners and their treatment abroad may want to read Concerning Political Prisoners, Appendix 6.