Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/806

 would give a good majority against it the Legislature could be relied upon to defeat a genuine amendment for years.

The suffragists spent only $1,300 during the entire canvass. The Man Suffrage Association never made the sworn report of its receipts and expenditures which the law requires of every campaign committee, although even the papers opposed to suffrage exhorted it to do so and warned it that it was placing itself in a false position by refusing, but the treasurer published an unsworn statement, not of his receipts but of his general expenditures, by which it appeared that the association, during the six weeks of its existence, spent $3,576. In addition large sums were expended by the women's anti-suffrage association, which, not being a campaign committee but a permanent society, was under no legal obligation to file a statement.

The "mock referendum" was voted on at the State election, Nov. 5, 1895, receiving 108,974 yeas, 187,837 nays. Men cast 86,970 yeas, 186,115 nays; women cast 22,204 yeas, 861 nays. Forty-eight towns gave a majority for equal suffrage, two were a tie, and in several the adverse majority was only one or two votes, and yet in most of these towns no suffrage league existed, and in some of them no suffrage meeting ever had been held.

The number of men who voted in the affirmative was a general surprise. A leaflet by one of the leading remonstrants, circulated during the campaign, asserted that "not one citizen of sound judgment in a hundred is in favor of woman suffrage;" but nearly one-third of the male voters who expressed themselves declared for it. There was the smallest affirmative vote in the most disreputable wards of Boston. Nearly 2,000 more votes of men were cast for suffrage than had been cast for prohibition in 1889. The proportion of votes in favor was almost twice as large as in Rhode Island, the only other New England State in which the question had been submitted, although in that there was no anti-suffrage association in the field. Outside of Boston the largest negative vote by women was cast in Cambridge and Newton, which have the reputation of being remonstrant strongholds. In 238 of the 322 towns not one woman voted "No." In most of these the anti-suffrage association had no branches, and there is no reason to suppose that the women ever had heard