r of betrayal on their part." Mrs. Livermore, Lucy Stone
and Huldah B. Loud took part in the canvass, and agents employed by
the Massachusetts Association were instructed to speak for the
Republican party.[124] Women writers furnished articles for the
newspapers and the Republican women did as much effective work
during the campaign as if each one had been a "man and a voter."
They did everything but vote. All this agitation was a benefit to
the Republican party, but not to woman suffrage, because for a time
it arrayed other political parties against the movement and caused
it to be thought merely a party issue, while it is too broad a
question for such limitation.

General Grant was reelected and the campaign was over. When the
legislature met and the suffrage question came up for discussion,
that body, composed in large majority of Republicans, showed the
women of Massachusetts the difference between "saying what you mean
and meaning what you say," the Woman Suffrage bill being defeated
by a large majority. The women learned by this experience that
nothing is to be expected of a political party while it is in
power. To close the subject of suffrage resolutions in the platform
of the Republican party, it may be said that they continued to be
put in and seemed to mean something until after 1875, when they
became only "glittering generalities," and were as devoid of real
meaning or intention as any that were ever passed by the old Whig
party on the subject of abolition. Yet from 1870 to 1874 the
Republican party had the power to fulfill its promises on this
question. Since then, it has been too busy trying to keep breath in
its own body to lend a helping hand to any struggling reform. At
the Republican convention, held in Worcester in 1880, an attempt
was made by Mr. Blackwell to introduce a resolution endorsing the
right conferred upon women in the law allowing them to vote for
school committees, passed by the legislature of 1879. This
resolution was rejected by the committee, and when offered in
convention as an amendment, it was voted down without a single
voice, except that of the mover, being raised in its support. Yet
this resolution only asked a Republican convention to endorse an
existing right, conferred on the women of the State by a Republican
legislature! A political party as a party of freedom must be very
far spent when it refuses at its annual convention to endorse an
act passed by a legislature the majo