Catherine Flanagan says that on August 16 when the four o’clock shift of the picket line started out, Lucy Burns pointed to rolls of banners done up in various receptacles and said, “Take out as many of these as you can carry and keep them concealed until it is necessary to use them.” The eight pickets distributed the banners in different parts of their clothes, and approaching the White House by various routes, suddenly lined themselves against the White House fence, each unfurling a Kaiser banner at the word of command. They were faced by forty policemen, policewomen, and secret service men. Instantly the police were on them. The pickets held the banners as long as it was physically possible—it took three policemen to remove each banner. The policemen heaved sighs of relief, as though their work for the day was done, turned, and moved to the edge of the pavement. Instantly, eight more banners appeared and as instantly they fell on the pickets again. This happened seven times. As often as the police turned with captured banners in their hands, reinforcing pickets in the crowd handed fresh banners to the pickets at the gates. Fifty-six Kaiser banners were captured this day. When the Kaiser banners were exhausted, the eight pickets returned to Headquarters and soon emerged bearing the tri-color. The tactics of the police changed then. They did not, themselves, attack the pickets, but they permitted the crowds to do so. In all, one hundred and forty-eight flags were destroyed. * * * * * On August 17, Major Pullman, police head of Washington, called upon Alice Paul, and warned her that young women carrying banners would be arrested. Alice Paul replied, “The picketing will go on as usual.” In a letter to his friend, Major Pullman, quoted in the _Suffragist_ of August 25, Gilson Gardner put the case concisely and decisively.... You must see, Pullman, that you cannot be right in what you have done in this matter. You have given the pickets adequate protection; you have arrested them and had them sent to jail and the workhouse, you have permitted the crowds to mob them, and then you have had your officers do much the same thing by forcibly taking their banners from them. In some of these actions, you must have been wrong. If it was right to give them protection and let them stand at the White House for five months, both before and after the war, it was not right to do what you did later. You say it was not right and that you were “lenient,” when you gave them protection. You cannot mean that. The rightness or wrongness must be a matter of law, not of personal discretion, and for you to attempt to substitute your discretion is to set up a little autocracy in place of the settled laws of the land. That would justify a charge of “Kaiserism” right here in our Capitol city.