rous foe. The
following letter, signed by the wholesale liquor firms of San Francisco,
was sent to the saloon-keepers, hotel proprietors, druggists and grocers
throughout the State:

At the election to be held on November 3, Constitutional Amendment
No. Six, which gives the right to vote to women, will be voted on.

It is to your interest and ours to vote against this amendment. We
request and urge you to vote and work against it and do all you can
to defeat it.

See your neighbor in the same line of business as yourself, and
have him be with you in this matter.

The men in the slums of San Francisco were taken in squads and, with
sample ballots, were taught how to put the cross against the suffrage
amendment and assured that if it carried there never would be another
glass of beer sold in the city. When the chairman of the press committee
went to a prominent editor, who was opposed to woman suffrage and knew
that these things were being done, and asked if there were no way by
which some suffrage literature could be given to those men so that they
might see there was no ground for these threats, he said: "Most of them
can not read and if they could the whiskey men would never allow a page
of it to get into their hands." In what way the liquor dealers worked
upon the political parties, it is not necessary to speculate. The
methods were not new and are pretty well understood. They control tens
of thousands of votes not only in California but in every State, which
they can deliver to either of the great parties that does their bidding
and regards their interests.

It is absurd, however, to attribute the defeat of the suffrage amendment
wholly to the liquor dealers, or to the densely ignorant, or to the
foreigners. In the wealthiest and most aristocratic wards of San
Francisco and Oakland, where there were none of these, the proportion of
votes against the amendment was just as great as it was in the slum
wards of the two cities. Those respectable, law-abiding citizens who
cast their ballots against the amendment, thereby voted to continue the
power of the above mentioned classes.

For weeks before the election, the most frantic efforts were made by the
politicians to register new voters and colonize them in the wards where
they would be most needed.[123] Columns of appeals were issued in all
the newspapers to get the vast numbers of lately arrived immigrants to
come to the city hal