PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN

...And equally must they be graven upon the heart of Alice Stone Blackwell, the devoted champion of many noble causes during the past forty years...

...A Mediator SECOND,—or was it first of Miss Blackwell's services to woman, was her work as a pacifier between the two sections of the movement which for years divided its ranks, with one-half of it always doing what aroused the wrath of the other half...

...Maud Wood Park, sitting as a young woman with Miss Blackwell on such occasions, wrote in The Woman Citizen of the emotions stirred in her, and she enthroned Miss Black-well as a supreme embodiment of the heroic, Joined to these high qualities was an acutely sensitive funnybone which makes her nonsense verses inimitable, and which made her delight in the jokes which it was her job to collect for the Woman's Journal...

...No one whose own feelings could get hurt nor who could shrink from speaking the word that might hurt others, could have performed this mediating task...

...PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN ALICE STONE BLACK WELL A CHAMPION OF THE DOWNTRODDEN By Elizabeth Glendower Evans P ROMINENT among those who stepped into the place of the pioneer champions of women's rights,— of Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and other such,—is Alice Stone Blackwell, the outstanding champion of women in Massachusetts during the last forty years...

...she is wont to ask on the 'phone, and in an incredibly short time she will call back and read a short letter which strikes the mark like a well aimed arrow...

...Should not someone say that, in the paper...

...Of the few who professed to identify them, two have since made affidavit that they lied...

...Had she felt free to make literary activities her vocation instead of her avocation, her writings would have been longer, but could scarce have been of higher quality...

...Alice Blackwell has held endless offices of honor...

...and when he died in 1909 she put her shoulder under the burden alone...

...True, they have later, under pressure, retracted these affidavits, and sworn that their second story was perjury and their first story the truth...

...And it is characteristic that it was cancelled without a word from her when lack of space ruled it out...

...She has likewise published a volume of translations of Armenian poetry, The Songs of Russia, The Songs of Grief and Gladness, (done from Hebrew and...

...In 1891, she joined the American Friends of Russian Freedom, organized by Julia Ward Howe...

...ALICE STONE BLACKWELL, Dorchester, Mass...

...Their only child, Alice, was born in 1857...

...Since then she has campaigned for La Foilette and Wheeler, she being then 67 years of age...

...The cause nearest her heart today is that of the workers o f her own land, downtrodden by those who ex-ploit the enormous power of their position, ant coming more and more to own the earth...

...These are all rendered from the foreign tongue into English, and give scope for Miss Black-well's fine command of words...

...The special causes which she has e d were passing incidents of time...

...There spoke the native pity of the child's heart...

...To it has been added a blazing sense of justice, as unerring, and as impersonal, too, as a lightning's flash...

...In all of this mediating work, Miss Blackwell's union of kindness with justice came into play...

...Finally, in 1889, the two organizations were brought to unite in the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, with headquarters in New York...

...And then she went into the Woman's Journal to help in the publication which at that time was her mother's life...

...The character which they wrought in her and which she gave back in service ranks her among the great ones of history...

...In college she eked out her living by sweeping and dusting in the ladies' boarding hall, for which she was paid the munificent sum of three cents an hour...

...Yiddish writers,) and has ready for publication still another volume of Mexican and South American poems...

...That publication gradually became Alice's own life too...

...I well remember the day she came to the League for Democratic Control office and asked to be enrolled as a member, saying that not until the vote was won had she felt free to join the other causes for freedom in which she believed...

...Her facility is unique...

...She graduated in 1881 from the Boston University...

...It gives me a sense of how tardily I came into liberal causes that I have to take on the say-so of other Lucy Stone's marvelous voice, sufficient, it is told, "to quell a mob...

...The house was made into a Lucy Stone Foundation, and is used for various charitable purposes...

...Years passed before the cause, so sacred to both of her parents, began to work in her own blood...

...An ardent advocate of anti-slavery, a price of $50,000 was placed upon his head in Memphis, Tennessee, because of the active part he had taken in the rescue of a slave girl...

...It Was a time of considerable excitement against "foreigners...

...She was the first Secretary of the Friends of Armenia, and from that day to this she has been the Godmother of I don't know how many Armenian children, whose parents she has helped in bygone years with money, with advice, or with generous sympathy...

...Nevertheless, by the time she was fourteen or fifteen, she took upon herself the task of passing the hat at her mother's meetings...

...She did this under the urge of affection and of loyalty, simply to help her mother...

...While others hesitate to speak the word that is certain to give offense, her voice is raised, without apparent emotion and indeed without a touch of self-conscious-ness of any kind...

...But persons who will swear one thing today and another tomorrow are not to be believed in a case involving men's lives...

...It could not go into the merits of the case...

...Her mother, Lucy Stone, was among the Very first to make a claim for Woman's Rights, and of necessity, the heroic figured large in her career...

...She was a shy little girl, and the torture of this performance must have been acute...

...And she is among the ardent champions of Sacco and Vanzetti...

...I cannot imagine the occurrence which she would not face as all in a day's work...

...The outcome of the original trial is look- ed upon as a great miscarriage of justice not only by all the Italian organizations the most conservative as well as the radi-cal, but by many Americans as well...

...In the days when Oberlin, Ohio, was the only college in the United States which was open to women, she made her way hither, sleeping upon the deck of the lake steamer in her journey, and bearing other hardships, which, however, were not too hard for a girl bred upon a bleak New England farm...

...In 1917, Miss Blackwell gave it over to the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, to become The Woman Citizen...

...What is there to be done...

...This is altogether to omit the endless leaflets which she was always tearing off...

...Conflict Opens for Alice ALICE'S first collision with the laws of the land occurred when she was an infant and her mother allowed her household goods, including the baby's cradle, to be seized and sold for the non-payment of taxes...

...The book is a thrilling story, and is a classic for all time...

...Toward the latter years of his wife's life, she was free to give her time to the cause for which she was born without troubling about financial remuneration...

...She, as her mother had been before her, was the President of the Massachusetts branch of the Collegiate Alumnae, now called the Association of University Women, For years she has been a trustee of her alma mater, Boston University...

...She is the author of Mme, Breshkovsky's life, under the title of "The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution...

...She never lets an injustice pass...

...would be her instinctive reaction, and this in spite of the fact that temperamentally she shrinks from every kind of conflict...

...Among the many who have felt ardently in the Sacco-Vanzetti cause, Miss Blackwell is the only one to have broken into the sealed-up press, and to have spoken the words which burn in many hearts...

...He was English born, of very noble presence, and of a most lovable personality...

...Most of these either failed to identify Sacco and Vanzetti, or swore positively that they were not the men...

...This care-free attitude toward money has descended upon their daugh-ter...

...It was Miss Black-well's part to act as go-between...

...Blackwell bought a delightful estate upon Popes Hill at Dorchester, from which they usually drove to and from the railroad station...

...Her Writings MISS BLACKWELL is a most accomplished writer...

...Champion of the Downtrodden ALTHOUGH Alice Blackwell has served home causes with an extraordinary devotion, her pity for the downtrodden overflowed into wider channels...

...It was called the second best funny column in the country...

...Under her editorship, as under that of her mother, the Woman's Journal was a capital organ of the special cause which it advocated...

...She succeeded Julia Ward Howe as the President of the Massachusetts Woman's Suffrage Association...

...With her baby upon her knee, Lucy Stone is said to have Written her protest against taxation without representation...

...She wrote: To the Editor of the Post: In dealing with the appeal in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the Supreme Court could consider only points of law...

...heard to exclaim, "Don't be afraid, little worm, you know I wouldn't hurt you...

...A series of atrocious crimes had been committed, and nobody caught, and the police were eager to convict somebody...

...she is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and, to bring her honors up to date, she was an elector in the La Follette-Wheeler Campaign...

...And here is one broad fact, which many of us think should alone have insured a new trial: The robbery and murder were committed In broad daylight...

...And he was likewise a man of excellent business abilities...

...It was considered unseemly for her to read her graduating thesis from the platform...

...She has always been a champion of the colored people...

...Her Life's Work MISS BLACKWELL confesses that as a child she was chiefly bored with the cause that formed the central interest of her home...

...But once graduated, she quickly found her way to public speaking, lecturing first on anti-slavery, and, gradually shifting, on woman's rights...

...The bandits were seen by many persons...

...Lucy Stone kept her own name, after her marriage...

...It was one of the six best sellers of the year...

...Then there is the courage and the loyalty, no less absolute, no less impersonal...

...Father Was Chivalrous ALICE'S FATHER, Henry Browne Black-well, was a man of the most splendid chivalry...

...Demand Upon Patience AND THERE was the endless demand upon patience which had to be met in suffrage work, when day after day its advocates must sit before committees and listen to the endless proofs that women were either more or less than human, with but a brief opportunity at the end for a rejoinder that met no human response...

...In 1870, Mr...

...After her mother's death in 1893, Alice and her father carried it together...

...He was an eloquent speaker and writer...

...For this cause was I conceived and for this cause I came into the world," was written of men and women in the olden time...

...and always her words reach the mark, It is the impersonal quality that makes her sense of justice so unique...

...The next incident which is told of Alice's early years was that, as a little tot of four or five when she was digging in her garden, she was...

...And never a Christmas nor an Easter comes round that she is not remembered by them with cards or by flowers...

...For twenty years she was recording secretary of the National Suffrage Association...

...The house still stands upon its wide lands, but after her father's death, Alice felt it to be too expensive a way of living for herself alone, and she hired an apartment in a more accessible part of Boston...

...Equally, must these words have been engraved upon the hearts of Lucy Stone and of Henry B. Blackwell and of others who were dedicated to the Woman's Cause...

...For This Cause Was I Born BUT, broad as are her interests today, it was not until the cause of Woman's suffrage was won that Miss Blackwell allowed herself to speak with entire freedom upon other controversial subjects...

...and it was a pity that has grown and deepened with her years...

...The following restrained article appeared in one of the Boston dailies immediately after the denial of the Supreme Court of the application for a new trial was made public...

...but no man and woman were ever more truly man and wife...

...She went to school like other girls, and, unlike girls of that day, she went to college...