Ladies, I had not been apprised that you were coming here to make any representation that would issue an appeal to me. I had been told that you were coming to present memorial resolutions with regard to the very remarkable woman whom your cause has lost. I therefore am not prepared to say anything further than I have said on previous occasions of this sort. I do not need to tell you where my own convictions and my own personal purpose lie, and I need not tell you by what circumscriptions I am bound as leader of a Party. As the leader of a Party, my commands come from that Party, and not from private personal convictions. My personal action as a citizen, of course, comes from no source, but my own conviction, and there my position has been so frequently defined, and I hope so candidly defined, and it is so impossible for me until the orders of my Party are changed, to do anything other than I am doing as a Party leader that I think nothing more is necessary to be said. I do want to say this: I do not see how anybody can fail to observe from the utterance of the last campaign that the Democratic Party is more inclined than the opposition Party to assist in this great cause, and it has been a matter of surprise to me, and a matter of very great regret, that so many of those who are heart and soul for this cause seem so greatly to misunderstand and misinterpret the attitudes of Parties. In this country, as in every other self-governing country, it is really through the instrumentality of Parties that things can be accomplished. They are not accomplished by the individual voice, but by concentrated action, and that action must come only so fast as you can concert it. I have done my best, and shall continue to do my best to concert it in the interest of a cause in which I personally believe. In Maud Younger’s delightful _Revelations of a Woman Lobbyist_, in _McCall’s Magazine_, she thus describes that scene: The doors opened, and, surrounded by Secret Service men, President Wilson entered. He came quickly forward, smiling as he shook my hand. Contrary to the general impression, President Wilson has a very human, sympathetic personality. He is not the aloof, academic type one expects of a man who, avoiding people, gets much of his knowledge from books and reports. Though he appears to the general public as in a mist on a mountain top, like the gods of old, he is really a man of decided emotional reactions. I answered his greeting briefly, giving him the resolutions I held, and presented Mrs. John Winters Brannan, who handed him the New York memorial without speaking at all. We were saving time for his declaration. Then came Sara—small, delicate Sara Bard Field, a woman of rare spirituality and humor—whom we had chosen to speak for us.