In about half an hour we were taken from our cells and brought before the Lieutenant, who now announced, “Well, you ladies may go now,—I have just received a telephone order to release you.” We accepted the news and jubilantly left the station house, returning at once to our comrades. There the battle was still going on, and as we joined them we were again dragged and cuffed about the streets by the police and their aids, but there were no more arrests. Elsie Hill succeeded in speaking from a balcony above the heads of the crowd: “Did you men turn back when you saw the Germans coming? What would you have thought of any one who did? Did you expect us to turn back? We never turn back, either—and we won’t until democracy is won! Who rolled bandages for you when you were suffering abroad? Who bound your wounds in your fight for democracy? Who spent long hours of the night and the day knitting you warm garments? There are women here to-night attempting to hold banners to remind the President that democracy is not won at home; who have given their sons and husbands for your fight abroad. What would they say if they could see you, their comrades in the fight over there, attacking their mothers, their sisters, their wives over here? Aren’t you ashamed that you have not enough sporting blood to allow us to make our fight in our own way? Aren’t you ashamed that you accepted the help of women in your fight, and now to-night brutally attack them?” And they did listen until the police, in formation—looking now like wooden toys—advanced from both sides of the street and succeeded in entirely cutting off the crowd from Miss Hill. The meeting thus broken up, we abandoned a further attempt that night. As our little, bannerless procession filed slowly back to headquarters, hoodlums followed us. The police of course gave us no protection and just as we were entering the door of our own building a rowdy struck me on the side of the head with a heavy banner pole. The blow knocked me senseless against the stone building; my hat was snatched from my head, and burned in the street. We entered the building to find that soldiers and sailors had been periodically rushing it in our absence, dragging out bundles of our banners, amounting to many hundreds of dollars, and burning them in the street, without any protest from the police. One does not undergo such an experience without arriving at some inescapable truths, a discussion of which would interest me deeply but which would be irrelevant in this narrative.