The truth is, Pullman, you were right when you gave these women protection. That is what the police are for. When there are riots they are supposed to quell them, not by quelling the “proximate cause,” but by quelling the rioters. I know your police officers now quite well and I find that they are most happy when they are permitted to do their duty. They did not like that dirty business of permitting a lot of sailors and street riffraff to rough the girls.... It is not my opinion alone when I say that the women were entitled to police protection, not arrest. President Wilson has stated repeatedly that these women were entirely within their legal and constitutional rights, and that they should not have been molested. Three reputable men, two of them holding office in this Administration, have told me what the President said, and I have no reason to doubt their word. If the President has changed his mind he has not changed the law or the Constitution, and what he said three weeks ago is just as true today. In excusing what you have done, you say that the women have carried banners with “offensive” inscriptions on them. You refer to the fact that they have addressed the President as “Kaiser Wilson.” As a matter of fact, not an arrest you have made—and the arrests now number more than sixty—has been for carrying one of those “offensive” banners. The women were carrying merely the Suffrage colors or quotations from President Wilson’s writings. But suppose the banners were offensive? Who made you censor of banners? The law gives you no such power. Even when you go through the farce of a police court trial, the charge is “obstructing traffic,” _which shows conclusively that you are not willing to go into court on the real issue_. No. As chief of police you have no more right to complain of the sentiments on a banner than you have of the sentiments in an editorial in the _Washington Post_, and you have no more right to arrest the banner bearers than you have to arrest the owner of the _Washington Post_. So long as the law against obscenity and profanity is observed, you have no business with the words on the banners. Congress refused to pass a press censorship law. There are certain lingering traditions to the effect that a people’s _liberties are closely bound up with the right to talk things out and those who are enlightened know that the only proper answer to words is words._ During the entire afternoon of that day—August 17—the day that Major Pullman called on Alice Paul—the sentinels stood at their posts. One of the banners read: ENGLAND AND RUSSIA ARE ENFRANCHISING WOMEN IN WAR TIME; Another: THE GOVERNMENT ORDERS OUR BANNERS DESTROYED BECAUSE THEY TELL THE TRUTH.