Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/11

 attention of Parliaments and Legislatures. In the United States conventions had multiplied and campaigns had increased in number; it had become a national issue with a center in every State and defeats and victories were of constant record.

To select from the mass of material, to preserve the most important, to condense, to verify, was an almost impossible task. A comparison will illustrate the difference between the work required on Volume IV and that on the present volumes. The Minutes of the national convention in 1901 filled 130 pages of large type; those of the convention of 1919 filled 320 pages, many of small type; reports of congressional hearings increased in proportion. Of the State chapters, describing all the work that had been done before 1901, 29 contained less than 8 pages, 18 of these less than 5 and 7 less than 3; only 6 had over 14 pages. For Volume VI not more than half a dozen State writers sent manuscript for less than 14 and the rest ranged from 20 to 95 pages. The report on Canada in Volume IV occupied 314 pages; in this volume it fills 18. The chapter on Woman Suffrage in Europe outside of Great Britain found plenty of room in 4 pages; in this one it requires 32.

The very full reports of the national suffrage conventions, the congressional documents, the files of the Woman's Journal and the Woman Citizen and the newspapers furnished a wealth of material on the general status of the question in the United States. It was, however, the evolution of the movement in the States that gave it national strength and compelled the action by Congress which always was the ultimate goal. The attempt to give the story of every State, in many of which no records had been kept or those which had were lost or destroyed; the difficulty in getting correct dates and proper names upset all calculations on the amount of material and length of time. As a result the time lengthened to three and a half years and the one volume expanded into two, with enough excellent matter eliminated to have made a third. In each of these chapters will be found a complete history of the effort to secure the franchise by means of the State constitution, also the part taken to obtain the Federal Amendment and the action of the Legislature in ratifying this amendment.