before did candidates consider the
question of sufficient importance to have any opinion upon it. Never
before did the newspaper interviewer put to every possible
personage--politician or preacher, writer or speaker, inventor or
explorer, captain of industry, social worker, actor, prize-fighter,
maid, matron, widow--the burning query, 'What about votes for women?'"
She told of about 30,000 letters having been sent out and an average
of nearly 1,000 pieces of literature a day, as many in the first half
of the present year as in all of 1908. The Book Department, in charge
of Miss Caroline I. Reilly, reported that the sales of the Life and
Work of Susan B. Anthony had amounted to $800; 200 sets of the History
of Woman Suffrage had been placed in the libraries of the leading
colleges and universities; 100 copies of the Reports of the last two
national conventions had been put into the libraries which keep the
file.

The delegates to the presidential nominating conventions had been
appealed to by letter for a suffrage plank in the platform but without
result. The Independence Party convention in Chicago voted it down.
The usual work had been done in international and national conventions
and many had adopted favorable resolutions, among them those of the
International Bricklayers' and Stone Masons' Union meeting in Detroit;
the International Cotton Spinners' Union in Boston and the Woman's
National Trade Union League in that city: the National Council of
Women and the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association. The United Mine
Workers of America, meeting at Indianapolis, passed the woman suffrage
resolution by unanimous vote and sent to the headquarters 500 copies
of it, which were promptly mailed to members of Congress. The American
Federation of Labor, representing 2,000,000 members, at its convention
in Denver, followed its long established custom of passing this
resolution. Dr. Shaw attended the National Conference of Charities and
Corrections: Mrs. Julia Ward Howe was received as a fraternal delegate
from the National American Suffrage Association by the General
Federation of Women's Clubs at its biennial in Boston; Mrs. Stockwell
by the convention of the American Library Association; Mrs. Sperry and
Mrs. Alice L. Park of California, by the Nurses Associated Alumnae of
the United States; Mrs. Coryell by the American Baptist Home
Missionary Society, and the association had representatives at many
other conventions. "To summarize,