Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/469

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HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

NEW YORK 453 of town and escorted them to the town hall, which was crowded, and they were obliged also to hold street meetings for hours. They reached Philadelphia at 7 o'clock Sunday evening, where the streets had been packed for hours awaiting them, and it was only by holding street corner meetings on the way that they could get to the hotel. The Princeton University students had been roaming around all the afternoon waiting for them, as there were a number of young college boys and girls with them, and the speakers held the crowd of boys for several hours. The next day a delegation of students walked with them for miles. At all of the other university towns they were received with the same enthusiasm. At the University of Pennsylvania they were detained hours for speeches in the grounds. At Baltimore they were received by Cardinal Gibbons in his mansion, an extraordinary courtesy, as they were not Catholics. The "hikers" reached Hyattsville, four miles from Washington, the evening of February 27 and spent the night there. The next morning, escorted by a delegation of suffragists from the city, they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. The streets had been thronged for several hours with a cosmopolitan crowd, from the highest to the lowest. At the headquarters of the Congressional Committee of the National American Suffrage Association, across from the Treas- ury building, "General" Jones was presented with flowers and dis- banded her army. Fourteen had walked the entire distance from New York 295 miles with some detours and two had walked from Philadelphia. 1 A message to President Taft, similar to the one which had been sent by the New York officers to Governor Sulzer, had been entrusted by the board of the National Suffrage Association to the pilgrims, who expected to march in a body to the White House to deliver it. re they reached Washington they were notified that the board it -df would present it to the incoming President Wilson at a later Miss Florence Allen, the well known Ohio lawyer, who had marching for several days, returned to New York, to try to obtain the recall of this decision but was unsuccessful. Afterwards the hoard informed "General" Jones that they would go together tn the White House but all had separated, the psychological moment had ; nd the message was never presented. LEGISLATIVE ACTION. The legislature of New York meets annually and from 1854 to 1917 a woman suffrage measure was nted only to be rejected, with two exceptions. The first was in 1880, when the Legislature undertook to give women the right to vote at school meetings, but the law was ineffective and this 1 privilege was confined to women in villages and country 1 From New York: Misses Jones. Craft, Klatschken, Constance Leupp, Phoebe Hawn, a Crowell, Am. Mrs. George Wend and her son, id. Mrs. (; Norman Sprrrr, F.rncut Sfrvm* and A. C. Lemmon. From Philadelphia: Miss Virginia Pmtsche and Mrs. George Williams.