and protection from butchery by brutal mobs. Accustomed as we are to the
indifference and apathy of Christian people, we would bear this instance
of ill fortune in silence, had not Miss Willard gone out of her way to
antagonize the cause so dear to our hearts by including in her Annual
Address to the W.C.T.U. Convention at Cleveland, November 5, 1894, a
studied, unjust and wholly unwarranted attack upon our work.

In her address Miss Willard said:

The zeal for her race of Miss Ida B. Wells, a bright young colored
woman, has, it seems to me, clouded her perception as to who were her
friends and well-wishers in all high-minded and legitimate efforts to
banish the abomination of lynching and torture from the land of the free
and the home of the brave. It is my firm belief that in the statements
made by Miss Wells concerning white women having taken the initiative
in nameless acts between the races she has put an imputation upon half
the white race in this country that is unjust, and, save in the rarest
exceptional instances, wholly without foundation. This is the unanimous
opinion of the most disinterested and observant leaders of opinion whom
I have consulted on the subject, and I do not fear to say that the
laudable efforts she is making are greatly handicapped by statements of
this kind, nor to urge her as a friend and well-wisher to banish from
her vocabulary all such allusions as a source of weakness to the cause
she has at heart.

This paragraph, brief as it is, contains two statements which have not the
slightest foundation in fact. At no time, nor in any place, have I made
statements "concerning white women having taken the initiative in nameless
acts between the races." Further, at no time, or place nor under any
circumstance, have I directly or inferentially "put an imputation upon