s from
one end of the State to the other with huge placards bearing in
enormous letters the words, "Men and Women, Vote No!"

The main object of this association, however, was not to get an
expression of opinion from the women (which would weigh little either
way) but to influence the Legislature through a large negative vote
from the men. Mr. Saunders was reported in an interview in the Boston
_Herald_ as saying that the women who took the trouble to vote at all
would probably vote in favor ten to one (it proved to be twenty-five
to one), but that if the _men_ would give a good majority against it
the Legislature could be relied upon to defeat a genuine amendment for
years.

The suffragists spent only $1,300 during the entire canvass. The Man
Suffrage Association never made the sworn report of its receipts and
expenditures which the law requires of every campaign committee,
although even the papers opposed to suffrage exhorted it to do so and
warned it that it was placing itself in a false position by refusing,
but the treasurer published an unsworn statement, not of his receipts
but of his general expenditures, by which it appeared that the
association, during the six weeks of its existence, spent $3,576. In
addition large sums were expended by the women's anti-suffrage
association, which, not being a campaign committee but a permanent
society, was under no legal obligation to file a statement.

The "mock referendum" was voted on at the State election, Nov. 5,
1895, receiving 108,974 yeas, 187,837 nays. Men cast 86,970 yeas,
186,115 nays; women cast 22,204 yeas, 861 nays. Forty-eight towns gave
a majority for equal suffrage, two were a tie, and in several the
adverse majority was only one or two votes, and yet in most of these
towns no suffrage league existed, and in some of them no suffrage
meeting ever had been held.

The number of men who voted in the affirmative was a general surprise.
A leaflet by one of the leading remonstrants, circulated during the
campaign, asserted that "not one citizen of sound judgment in a
hundred is in favor of woman suffrage;" but nearly one-third of the
male voters who expressed themselves declared for it. There was the
smallest affirmative vote in the most disreputable wards of Boston.
Nearly 2,000 more votes of men were cast for suffrage than had been
cast for prohibition in 1889. The proportion of votes in favor was
almost twice as large as in Rhode Island, the only other New E