their movement becoming purely political. They wanted to keep it a
non-partisan benevolent and social affair.

[Illustration: SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING]

Somehow, in what mysterious manner no one can precisely tell, the
reserve of the club women towards the suffrage question began some years
ago to break down. At the St. Louis Biennial of 1904 part of a morning
session was given up to the suffrage organizations. Several remarkable
speeches in favor of the suffrage were made, and there is no doubt that
a very deep impression was made, even upon those women openly opposed to
the movement. Six years later, at the biennial meeting held in
Cincinnati, Ohio, in June, 1910, an entire evening was given up to an
exhaustive discussion of both sides of the question.

Dating from that evening a stranger visiting the convention might almost
have thought that the sole object of the gathering was a discussion of
the right of women to the ballot. Women floated through the corridors of
the hotel talking suffrage. They talked suffrage in little groups in the
dining-room, they discussed it in the street cars going to and from the
convention.

The local suffrage clubs had planned a banquet to the visiting
suffragists and had calculated a maximum of one hundred and fifty
applications for tickets.

Three days before the banquet they had had nearly three hundred
applications, and when the hour for the banquet arrived every available
seat, the room's limit of three hundred and seventy-five, was occupied.
Outside were women offering ten dollars a plate and clamoring for the