her when those expressions were calculated to do such harm. I waited for
an honest an unequivocal retraction of her statements based on "hearsay."
Not a word of retraction or explanation was said in the convention and I
remained misrepresented before that body through her connivance and
consent.

The editorial notes in the _Union Signal_, Dec. 6, 1894, however, contains
the following:

In her repudiation of the charges brought by Miss Ida Wells against
white women as having taken the initiative in nameless crimes between
the races, Miss Willard said in her annual address that this statement
"put an unjust imputation upon half the white race." But as this
expression has been misunderstood she desires to declare that she did
not intend a literal interpretation to be given to the language used,
but employed it to express a tendency that might ensue in public thought
as a result of utterances so sweeping as some that have been made by
Miss Wells.

Because this explanation is as unjust as the original offense, I am forced
in self-defense to submit this account of differences. I desire no quarrel
with the W.C.T.U., but my love for the truth is greater than my regard for
an alleged friend who, through ignorance or design misrepresents in the
most harmful way the cause of a long suffering race, and then unable to
maintain the truth of her attack excuses herself as it were by the wave of
the hand, declaring that "she did not intend a literal interpretation to
be given to the language used." When the lives of men, women and children
are at stake, when the inhuman butchers of innocents attempt to justify
their barbarism by fastening upon a whole race the obloque of the most
infamous of crimes, it is little less than criminal to apologize for the