Today -100: March 2, 1913: Of starving militants, amnesties, nickels, and square eggs

Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the non-militant British suffragists (the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies), tells the NYT, “If the militants want to starve themselves in prison let them do so.” She doesn’t want hunger-striking prisoners released, because “the law must be vindicated at all costs,” but she opposes forcible feeding as “essentially cruel”. Militancy, she says, is harming the suffrage cause, both by alienating the general public and by giving “the Government opportunity for an exhibition of moral cowardice by allowing it to point to these outrages as a reason for refusing to carry out its pledges.” But militancy is “one of those hysterical outbursts which is eventually bound to consume itself”.

She adds that American suffragists kind of suck in comparison to British ones.

Headline of the Day -100: “Peace Is Near, But Nations Arm.”

Russia plans to issue an amnesty for prisoners, including (some) political prisoners, as part of the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov Dynasty.

The new buffalo/Indian head nickel is out, replacing the Liberty Head nickel, and the NYT is not impressed. The lettering is too small, the art is uninteresting, the buffalo too deeply indented, and the Indian is “uncommonly unprepossessing”.

A special dispatch to the LA Times reports that a farmer in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, says his hen lays square eggs.

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