cess of a
party that ignores her political rights."[391]

The contest in Kansas was close and bitter. Kansas women carried on an
able campaign with the help of Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman
Catt. When Susan returned to the state in October, she not only found
that the Democrats had entered the fight with an anti-suffrage plank
but the Populists had noticeably lost ground since the Pullman strike
riots, the court injunction against the strikers, and the arrest of
Eugene V. Debs. Again this prairie state, from which she had hoped so
much, refused to extend suffrage to women. Impulsively she recommended
a little "Patrick Henryism" to the women of Kansas, suggesting that
they fold their hands and refuse to help men run the churches, the
charities, and the reform movements.[392]

* * * * *

California was the next state to demand Susan's attention. A
Republican legislature had submitted a woman suffrage amendment to be
voted on by the people in 1896, and the women of California asked for
her help. She toured the state in the spring of 1895 with Anna Howard
Shaw, and everywhere she won friends. The continuous travel and
speaking, however, taxed her far more than she realized, and soon
after her return to the East, she collapsed. As this news flashed over
the wires, letters poured in from her friends, begging her to spare
herself. Two of these letters were especially precious. One in bold
vigorous script was from her good comrade, Parker Pillsbury, now
eighty-six, who had been an unfailing help during the most difficult
years of her career and whom she probably trusted more completely than
any other man. The other from her dearest friend, Elizabeth Stanton,
read, "I never realized how desolate the world would be to me without
you until I heard of your sudden illness. Let me urge you with all the
strength I have, and all the love I bear you, to stay at home and rest
and save your precious self."[393]

She now realized that rest was imperative for a time, but it troubled
her that people thought of her as old and ill, and she wrote Clara
Colby never to mention anyone's illness in her _Woman's Tribune_,
adding, "It is so dreadful to get public thought centered on one as
ill--as I have had it the last two months."[394]

She had no intention of retiring from the field. She knew her own
strength and that her life must be one of action. "I am able to endure
the strain of daily traveling and l