ecretary:

... Add to the correspondence incident to the circulation of our
great petition, the sending out of nearly 5,000 blank
petition-books and instructions to insure the work's being properly
done, literature for free distribution, the planning and arranging
for sixty mass meetings in as many counties, and we have a task
before which Hercules himself might well stand aghast. To
accomplish this work has taken not only the entire time of your
corresponding secretary, but that of our president, Mrs.
Greenleaf, for a full year. Hundreds of women over all the State
worked as never before, petitions in hand, travelling from house to
house in all sorts of weather to secure the names of people who
believe in the right of women to a voice in the government under
which they live.

[Illustration: Mary S. Anthony (Signed: "Your Sister Mary S. Anthony")]

It has so often been asserted by those in power that when any
considerable number of women wanted to vote, there would be perfect
freedom for them to do so, that it was now decided thoroughly to
test the truth of such assertion. Over 332,000 individual names,
more than half being those of women, were thus actually obtained,
neatly put up in book form and presented to the Constitutional
Convention with a feeling that such a showing could not, by any
possible means, fail to make the men of that convention and of the
State clearly understand that _women do want to vote_.[91]

[Illustration: Autograph: "Lillie Devereux Blake"]

The entire management of New York City was put in charge of Lillie
Devereux Blake, and Brooklyn in that of Mariana W. Chapman. While the
petition work was going forward a great series of mass meetings was in
progress, for which Miss Anthony, who knew every foot of New York State
as well as her own dooryard, mapped out the routes. The management of
these was placed in the hands of Harriet May Mills and Mary G. Hay, who
proved remarkably efficient. Rev. Anna Shaw spoke at over forty of these
meetings and Mary Seymour Howell at a large number. Several speakers
from outside the State came in at different times and rendered excellent
service. Carrie Chapman Catt made nearly forty speeches in New York,
Brooklyn and vicinity. Miss Anthony herself, at the age of seventy-four,
spoke in every one of the sixty counties of the State, beginning at
Albion,