The two cast their lot in with the pacifists, the anti-conscriptionists, and the factions whose chief aim was to interfere with America’s going to war. Emma began to lecture on the subject. On the night of May 18 she spoke to a meeting in the Harlem River Casino. After a preamble advising the audience that government agents were present and that violence would be out of order, she drew what she probably considered a logical conclusion from this advice and shouted: “And so, friends, we don’t care what people will say about us. We only care for one thing, and that is to demonstrate to-night, and to demonstrate as long as we can be able to speak, that when America went to war ostensibly to fight for democracy, it was a dastardly lie. It never went to war for democracy!... It is not a war of economic independence, it is a war for conquest. It is a war for military power. It is a war for money. It is a war for the purpose of trampling underfoot every vestige of liberty that you people have worked for, for the last forty or thirty or twenty-five years, and therefore we refuse to support such a war.... “We believe in violence and we will use violence.... How many people are going to refuse to conscript? I say there are enough. I could count fifty thousand, and there will be more.... They will not register! What are you going to do if there are 500,000? It will not be such an easy job, and it will compel the government to sit up and take notice, and therefore we are going to support, with all the money and publicity at our hands, all the men who will refuse to register and who will refuse to fight. “I hope this meeting is not going to be the last. As a matter of fact we are planning something else.... We will have a demonstration of all the people who will not be conscripted, and who will not register. We are going to have the largest demonstration this city has ever seen, and no power on earth will stop us.... If there is any man in this hall that despairs, let him look across at Russia ... and see the wonderful thing that revolution has done.... “What is your answer? Your answer to war must be a general strike, and then the governing class will have something on its hands....” She wound up her speech with an appeal for funds, and said that her paper, _Mother Earth_, was going to support the rebellion against the draft law which had been signed by the president that very day. _Mother Earth_ spoke, in her next issue, which appeared shortly before registration day, June 5, and spoke in fairly disapproving terms toward conscription. But the sun went down into New Jersey on registration day without having witnessed the greatest demonstration New York City ever saw, or any demonstration whatever save the quiet, cheerful enrollment of what later became a heroic national army.