I never at any time or place or in any way misrepresented that organization.  When asked what concerted action had been taken by churches and great moral agencies in America to put down Lynch Law, I was compelled in truth to say that no such action had occurred, that pulpit, press and moral agencies in the main were silent and for reasons known to themselves, ignored the awful conditions which to the English people appeared so abhorent.  Then the question was asked what the great moral reformers like Miss Frances Willard and Mr. Moody had done to suppress Lynch Law and again I answered nothing.  That Mr. Moody had never said a word against lynching in any of his trips to the South, or in the North either, so far as was known, and that Miss Willard’s only public utterance on the situation had condoned lynching and other unjust practices of the South against the Negro.  When proof of these statements was demanded, I sent a letter containing a copy of the New York Voice, Oct. 23,1890, in which appeared Miss Willard’s own words of wholesale slander against the colored race and condonation of Southern white people’s outrages against us.  My letter in part reads as follows: 

But Miss Willard, the great temperance leader, went even further in putting the seal of her approval upon the southerners’ method of dealing with the Negro.  In October, 1890, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union held its national meeting at Atlanta, Georgia.  It was the first time in the history of the organization that it had gone south for a national meeting, and met the southerners in their own homes.  They were welcomed with open arms.  The governor of the state and the legislature gave special audiences in the halls of state legislation to the temperance workers.  They set out to capture the northerners to their way of seeing things, and without troubling to hear the Negro side of the question, these temperance people accepted the white man’s story of the problem with which he had to deal.  State organizers were appointed that year, who had gone through the southern states since then, but in obedience to southern prejudices have confined their work to white persons only.  It is only after Negroes are in prison for crimes that efforts of these temperance women are exerted without regard to “race, color, or previous condition.”  No “ounce of prevention” is used in their case; they are black, and if these women went among the Negroes for this work, the whites would not receive them.  Except here and there, are found no temperance workers of the Negro race; “the great dark-faced mobs” are left the easy prey of the saloonkeepers.

There was pending in the National Congress at this time a Federal Election Bill, the object being to give the National Government control of the national elections in the several states.  Had this bill become a law, the Negro, whose vote has been systematically suppressed since 1875 in the southern states, would have had the protection