[Illustration: THE PATROL WAGON WAITING THE ARRIVAL OF THE SUFFRAGE PICKETS. Photo Copr. Harris and Ewing, Washington, D. C.] An enlisting sergeant used often to make his way through the crowds saying, “Now you have shown your spirit, boys, come and enlist!” At all times, however, the people who annoyed, and later ill-treated the girls, were very young men—often in uniform. After a while there appeared men in plain clothes with groups of men in khaki, or yeomen, who were obviously in the crowd for the purpose of making trouble for the Suffragists. These people did not like cameras, and the moving picture people who, appreciating the news value of the situation, tried to get views of the crowd, did so at the risk of having their cameras smashed. Indeed, Helena Hill Weed once dispersed a crowd by pointing a camera at them. This was the worst element the pickets had to deal with—unthinking young men of a semi-brutalized type. Of course, boys took their cue from their elders, and snatched or destroyed banners where they could. After a demonstration, you would come across groups of them, marching with the tattered banners that they had managed to steal. “When is the shooting going to begin?” one little boy was heard to ask once. In the very midst of the riots, one would come across older men cutting up banners into small pieces which they gave away as souvenirs. Of course, there were chivalrous spirits who protested against the treatment of the pickets by the police—protested even after they were threatened with arrest. Some of them were actually arrested, and one of them fined. Often—very often indeed—the waiting crowds broke into spontaneous applause when group after group marched from Headquarters into the certainty of arrest. Those who were Anglo-Saxons inevitably admired the sporting quality of these women. Perhaps a negro street sweeper summed it up better than anybody else. He said: “I doan know what them women want, but I know they ain’t skeered!” The reader is probably asking by this time what was the effect of the picketing on the Woman’s Party itself. The first reaction was exactly what he would guess—that members resigned in large numbers. The second, however, was one which he might not expect—that new members joined in large numbers. In other words, the militant action which alienated some women brought others into the organization; women who were aroused by the simple and immediate demands of the Woman’s Party and by the courage and the forthrightness with which it pushed those demands; women who had become impatient at the _impasse_ to which the older generation of Suffrage workers had brought the Suffrage Amendment. The majority of the people who deserted came back later.