"Enforce the Law!"

The Women's National Law Enforcement Committee, with a membership of 1,000, Mrs. Herbert Hoover* as its chairman, allegedly representing 10,000,000 clubwomen in the U. S., held a two days' session in Washington./-

The convention opened with maiden speeches by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, and Secretary of the Navy Curtis Dwight Wilbur. There also spoke Prohibition Commissioner Roy Asa Haynes, Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt (Assistant U. S. Attorney General), and Novelist Kathleen Norris.

A message from Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., contained this paragraph: "As a member of the National Board of the Young Women's Christian Association, the welfare of the girlhood of this country is very near to my heart, and as the mother of six children, confronted as they are with the present laxity, I am impelled to join with those who are working to make these United States a proper place for the protection as well as the development of our young men and women."

Said General Stone: "Some men think the Volstead Act and the Eighteenth Amendment are jokes, but they are laughing at the Stars and Stripes!"

Said Commissioner Haynes: "I ask your help . . . in a great campaign of preaching . . . a program of promptly assuming the responsibilities of citizenship . . . meeting nullification propaganda. . . . If mobilized . . . into great forces interested in law enforcement and law observance, nothing can withstand you. . . ."

This aphorism was followed by a tense talk from Mrs. Willebrandt. She complained that "women play bridge at their clubs instead of studying the qualifications of candidates for public office. They dodge indorsements and decisions on public questions for fear dissension will rupture their social group and they will be accused of being 'political.' They are dodging a clear duty. . . . Corruption in high places is revolting, but the condition that will prove fatal to this country is lethargy in local government; deterioration and graft in the police force of your city; leniency and political pull in state and county courts, and indifference and lack of personal possessory pride on the part of each citizen in the affairs of his local government."

Novelist Norris entitled her speech "New Fashions in Morals." She said that, while working for woman suffrage, she often thought that it was much ado about nothing, and that she was inclined to think so still.

Representatives of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, Federation of Women's Foreign Mission Societies, Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations, National Council of Women, National League of Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, Women's Christian Temperance Association, and the Young Women's Christian Association, arose, one after the other, and pledged their 10,000,000 membership to the movement.

The W. C. T. U. delegation attacked the 20 New York Congressmen who introduced beer bills in the House of Representatives. Mrs. Ella A. Boole, President of the New York State W. C. T. U., declared that women with prohibition sympathies would "never, never" vote for Alfred Smith.

The avengers of the slandered Prohibition Laws marched to the White House, were addressed by the President. With dignity the President pronounced: "Mrs. Hoover and members of the association.

"You are an association, as I understand it, gathered together for the better enforcement of the law. Now just what is it we mean by the law? . . . It is very easy to enact legislation. We have State Legislatures and the National Congress, that each year put upon the statute books of our country thousands upon thousands of different enactments undertaking to regulate and control our conduct. . . . I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement. It is a maxim of our institutions that the Government does not make the people, but the people make the Government."

Among the women that gave ear to the President's gentle rebuke were the wives of three Presidents: Mrs. Coolidge, Mrs. Harding, Mrs. Thomas J. Preston, Jr. (widow of Grover Cleveland). Mrs. Woodrow Wilson was not there. Mrs. William H. Taft was in Spain.

*Miss Lou Henry, of Monterey, Calif., went through Leland Stanford, Jr., University at the same time Herbert Hoover did. He became a mining engineer, and she, as his wife, went with him everywhere. Together they helped defend Tientsin in 1900 (Boxer Rebellion), living for six weeks behind a barricade of sugar barrels and rice bags. Though in constant danger, she enjoyed the sugar--ever at hand for tea. Once she read her own obituary in a Peking newspaper. Said she: "There were three columns of it, too! I was never so proud." She excelled in geology while at college, and later, with her husband, translated from medieval Latin the first work ever written on mining and metals, entitled Agricola, by George Bauer. For this, they received a gold medal from the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America, in 1914.

With their two sons, Herbert and Allan, the Hoovers lived for several years in England. Their house in Kensington was a rendezvous for interesting Americans. She was active in Belgian relief work, was President of the Girl Scouts in 1923, and is vitally interested in all educational enterprises. More talkative than her husband, she once said: "If you want to get the gloomiest view of any subject on earth, ask Bert about it."

/-The object of the Committee is "to work for enforcement of all law, with special stress at present on the Prohibition Law--the front today where the battle against lawlessness is being fought."