To the Editor of The Intelligencer:

Sir:--Owing to the injustice that is being done to the suffrage cause as a whole by the picketings and other incidents at Washington for which a small minority of suffragists are responsible, and owing to the misleading editorial comments which have been published as a result of these incidents, publicity through your paper is solicited for the following official statement of the leaders of the national organization. Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National Woman Suffrage association, a member of the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defence, gave out a statement, saying, in part:

“Millions of women in the United States fell humiliation over the fact that our allies, Russia, Great Britain and Canada have either liberated their women or promised to liberate them from the political disabilities under which women have rested the world around. We feel that our men in Congress should not wait another minute to submit to the legislatures the federal amendment for woman suffrage.

“Nevertheless, we are not in the least in sympathy with the method that has been used by the White House pickets to announce our huminiation [sic] to our visitors from over the sea. We consider it unwise, unpatriotic and most unprofitable to the cause of suffrage.”

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, honorary president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, who is also chairman of the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense, issued a statement, saying, in part:

“I cannot understand how any suffragists can carry on a line of agitation which is so obviously injur[i]ous to the suffrage cause. I cons[i]der the picketing of the White House during the past winter, and particularly at the present time, the greatest obstacle now existing to the passage of the federal woman suffrage amendment in Congress.

“The statement on the banner which was so roughly handled was in itself misleading—as misleading as the statement of Mr. Root, if he is correctly reported, in regard to universal suffrage in this country. That the president is the chief opponent to the national enfranchisement of women is not true. President Wilson has done more for the enfranchisement of women in this country than all other presidents put together. He has assisted us in many ways which have won the gratitude of the National Suffrage Association. That he does not accept the method of securing suffrage through the federal amendment is, undoubtedly true, but to state, on that account, that he is the chief opponent of our enfranchisement, is untrue.”

Thanking you, we are,

THE OHIO COUNTY EQUAL SUFFRAG[E] LEAGUE.
MRS. EDWARD HAZLETT, Pres.
MRS. E. S. ROMINE, Rec. Sec.
MRS. J. B. TANEY, JR., Cor. Sec.

(The Intelligencer was careful in its editorial comments to exonerate the National Woman’s Suffrage Association from any complicity in or sympathy with the actions of the Congressional Union, which precipitated the scenes of disorder in Washington.—Ed.)