k the ratification in Nashville. In the short time that I spent
in the capital I was more maligned, more lied about, than in the
thirty previous years I worked for suffrage. I was flooded with
anonymous letters, vulgar, ignorant, insane. Strange men and groups of
men sprang up, men we had never met before in the battle. Who were
they? We were told, this is the railroad lobby, this is the steel
lobby, these are the manufacturers' lobbyists, this is the remnant of
the old whiskey ring. Even tricksters from the U. S. Revenue Service
were there operating against us, until the President of the United
States called them off.... They appropriated our telegrams, tapped our
telephones, listened outside our windows and transoms. They attacked
our private and public lives. I had heard of the 'invisible
government.' Well, I have seen it work and I have seen it sent into
oblivion."

[176] Burn's vote so angered the opposition that they attempted to
fasten a charge of bribery on him. On a point of personal privilege he
made a statement to the House which was spread upon the Journal. After
indignantly denying the charge he said: "I changed my vote in favor of
ratification because I believe in full suffrage as a right; I believe
we had a moral and legal right to ratify; I know that a mother's
advice is always safest for her boy to follow and my mother wanted me
to vote for ratification. I appreciated the fact that an opportunity
such as seldom comes to mortal man--to free 17,000,000 women from
political slavery--was mine. I desired that my party in both State and
Nation might say it was a Republican from the mountains of East
Tennessee, purest Anglo-Saxon section in the world, who made woman
suffrage possible, not for any personal glory but for the glory of his
party."

[Lack of space prevents giving the names of the immortal 49, which
were sent with the chapter.]

CHAPTER XLII.

TEXAS.[177]

For many reasons Texas was slow in entering the movement for woman
suffrage. There was some agitation of the subject from about 1885 and
some organization in 1893-6 but the work done was chiefly through the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union. In February, 1903, a meeting was
called at Houston by Miss Annette Finnigan, a Texas girl and a
graduate of Wellesley College. Here, with the help of her sisters,
Elizabeth and Katharine Finnigan Anderson, an Equal Suffrage League
was formed with Annette as president. The following month Mrs. C