Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/568

 of the campaigns of 1915 and 1916 had enabled the company to pay a three per cent. dividend but the entrance of the United States into the war, causing a general lessening of suffrage work, would create a deficit for the present year. For the New York campaign of 1917 the company furnished 10,081,267 pieces of literature, all promptly paid for. Miss Ogden gave an amusing account of how the company was "bankrupted" trying to supply "suffrage maps" up to date, for as soon as a lot was published another State would give Presidential or Municipal suffrage and then the demand would come for maps with the new State "white," and thousands of the others would have to be "scrapped."

The chairman of the Literature Committee, Mrs. Arthur L. Livermore, said that for the first time finances had been available for publishing a well-indexed catalogue with the publications grouped under more than twenty headings. These included efficiency booklets, suffrage arguments, answers to opponents, Federal Amendment literature, State reports, etc. Some of these publications were in book form, including Mrs. Catt's volume on the Federal Amendment, Mrs. Annie G. Porritt's Laws Affecting Women and Children and Miss Martha Stapler's Woman Suffrage Year Book. A number of pamphlets were printed in lots of 100,000, and 700,000 copies of the amendment speech of Senator John F. Shafroth of Colorado before the Senate.

The report of the Art Publicity Committee was made by its chairman, Mrs. Ernest Thompson Seton, and related principally to the poster competition, which closed with the exhibition at the national suffrage headquarters in January. About 100 posters were submitted and $500 in prizes awarded. Afterwards the prize winners and a selection from the others, about thirty in all, were sent to the Washington suffrage headquarters for display and then around to various cities which had asked for them.

One of the largest evening meetings was that devoted to American Women's War Service, with Mrs, Catt presiding. The first speaker was Secretary of War Newton G. Baker and a few detached paragraphs can give little idea of his eloquent address:

I sometimes ask myself what does this war mean to women? War always means to women sorrow and sacrifice and a mission of mercy but one of the large, redeeming hopes of this particular struggle