Miss Anthony had a number of urgent invitations to spend the hot months of July, August and September at various charming summer homes in the mountains and at the seaside, but she declined all and resolutely continued at work. The hardest for her to resist had been a triumphant call from the women of Colorado to come and help them celebrate the Fourth of July. It was to be the jubilee of their political emancipation, the first since their enfranchisement. The State president, Mrs. Mary C. C. Bradford, wrote: "The women of Colorado feel that their precious holiday will be less precious if the beloved suffrage leader and the suffrage flag are not present." At first she sent an acceptance, but later, affairs in New York became so pressing that she was obliged, most reluctantly, to recall it. After filling an engagement to lecture before the alumnæ of the Girls' Normal School in Philadelphia, October 13, she started on the 16th for the final struggle in Kansas.
FOOTNOTES:
[89] In November of this year Miss Anthony called at the office of the New York Sun and had an interview with Mr. Dana, who always had maintained that when any considerable number of women expressed a desire for the ballot, the men would grant it. She asked him how many names would suffice and he replied: "If you can get a petition of 100,000 women it will be amply sufficient to compel the convention to submit the amendment." Although more than twice this number signed the petition, Mr. Dana's very first editorial after the convention had refused to submit the amendment, declared the reason was that not enough women had asked for it!
[90] A salary was voted to Mary Anthony which she declined to accept; Mrs. Almy received $50 a month; the clerks either donated their services or gave them for a mere trifle.
[91] The president's report pays this tribute:
"The corresponding secretary, Miss Mary S. Anthony, ostensibly had charge of the department of distribution and State correspondence, but all this was only a small fraction of the labor performed by her. Being president of the local club of Rochester, she had charge of the canvass of that city; and it is enough to say that no city or town equalled hers in the work done or results obtained. As our chieftain was leading our hosts through the State, the housekeeping, too, fell to the said secretary's charge and, it being convenient for the speakers and managers to stay at headquarters when in town, her family was seldom a small one; and all this gratuitously, be it understood. I can not hope to tell the story in full, but I trust I have said enough to cause you all, when you say, "God bless Susan B. Anthony," to add "and her sister Mary, also."
[92] During this time Miss Anthony gave ten days to the national convention in Washington; and the day after the last of the mass meetings she started for Kansas; stopped in Cincinnati for the Ohio convention, speaking each of the three days; opened the Kansas campaign May 4, spoke in that State every day for two weeks; and on May 21 presented herself, fresh and cheerful, at the Constitutional Convention in Albany, N. Y.
[93] As has been noted, Miss Anthony spoke at Ann Arbor, Mich., January 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17; at Toledo the 19th, and was ready to open the New York campaign the 22d.
[94] In December Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton had issued an address calling upon the women of New York to unite in this grand effort for political freedom. During the entire campaign Mrs. Stanton contributed to the New York Sun masterly arguments for woman suffrage, which were widely copied by the press of the State.
[95] Mrs. Jane Marsh Parker, a newspaper woman of Rochester, attempted to organize a club there and secure a petition in opposition to the amendment. Her efforts evidently did not meet with marked success for, in a letter to the New York Evening Post, she says, "In offering the 'protest' for signatures, quality rather than quantity has been considered." That prince of editors, Joseph O'Connor, at that time in charge of the Rochester Post-Express, gave the lady a delicious dressing down in an editorial beginning: "What is 'quality'?" and ending: "Probably she means no more by the offensive words 'quality' and 'quantity' than this—that she has secured to the protest only the signatures of a few representative women, no better and no worse than many of their opponents. Such an interpretation saves the statement from being insulting; but unhappily very many women in Rochester give it a different interpretation."