The Torch Bearer | Page 2

to the manager of the paper either to get contributions to meet the deficit each year or to borrow. On October 1, 1912, Miss Blackwell contributed $2,000; on January 31, 1914, she again gave the paper $2,000.
With the exception of these $4,000, I have raised or borrowed each year the necessary money, over and above receipts, to keep the paper going. With the beginning of 1915 Miss Blackwell began to feel that she could not continue indefinitely to make up a deficit, and she began seriously to consider cutting the size of the paper to four pages or making it a monthly.
The 1915 campaigns particularly needed all the aid that the Journal could give, and feeling keenly that the proposed changes would greatly reduce its power of usefulness, the following points were made by Mr. Stevens and myself in further consideration of the matter with Miss Blackwell and a few warm friends of the Journal:
With the single exception of the _Irish Citizen_, the Woman's Journal is the only suffrage paper in existence which has no organization back of it. Jus Suffragii has the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. The Woman Voter has the New York Woman Suffrage Party. Votes for Women in England has the United Suffragists. The Suffragette had the Woman's Social and Political Union of England. The Suffragist has the Congressional Union. The Headquarters News Letter has the National Suffrage Association.
Now, while the Journal has had no organization with large membership and resources to make it a power, it has shown great vitality as witnessed by the fact that it is the oldest surviving suffrage periodical in the world. Furthermore, it has shown such remarkable growth during the past few years, with no capital put up to promote it and build it up as other businesses are built up, that it seemed apparent that all it needed to make it strong and self-supporting was a reasonable amount of capital, a reasonable amount of time and the wholehearted co-operation of suffragists in general which has been growing in an encouraging degree. It seemed a time for faith and not for fear.
It was accordingly decided to retain the eight-page size, to continue the paper as a weekly and to borrow the money necessary to meet the deficit, believing that the great body of readers of the Journal would approve and sustain this decision when it was brought to their knowledge. They would feel that a backward step should be impossible.
At the present time and covering the indebtedness of the Journal from October, 1912, to January, 1916, the figures are as follows:
Borrowed in 1915....................... $10,500
Owed E.L. Grimes Company for printing, paper stock, mailing, approximately .. 9,000 ________ $19,500
The assets of the Journal at the time of the last stockholders' meeting (January 28) included the following:
Subscriptions in arrears .................$4,968 Sales accounts ........................... 45 Advertising accounts ..................... 460 Legacy of Miss Caroline F. Hollis......... 3,000 Legacy of Mrs. Mary E.C. Orne............. 4,000 Legacy of Mrs. Hollingsworth ............. 1,000 ______ $13,473
The amount to be raised, therefore, to meet the indebtedness of the three years and three months from October 1, 1912, to January 1, 1916, is $6,027.
From these figures it will be seen that we have to count upon collecting nearly $5,000 in subscriptions in arrears, upon legacies to be paid within the year, to meet the expenses of furnishing a paper to the cause, and that even then we must have over $5,000 additional to be out of debt for 1915.
[Illustration: Alice Stone Blackwell Editor of the Woman's Journal]
While the Journal has always had a few gifts each year and an occasional legacy, both gifts and legacies have, in their very nature, been uncertain quantities and not to be relied upon. It has, therefore, followed that from 1870 to 1910, as well as in the period above referred to (1912 to 1915), for forty-three years, the Stone-Blackwell family has borne the brunt of the burden of the support of the paper on which the whole suffrage movement has depended so completely for nearly half a century. As Mrs. Chapman Catt says, "The Woman's Journal has always been the organ of the suffrage movement, and no suffragist, private or official, can be well informed unless she is a constant reader of it. It is impossible to imagine the suffrage movement without the Woman's Journal." That is the way suffragists feel about the paper from the Atlantic to the Pacific and abroad,--and yet there is no organized, systematic effort made for its support and maintenance.
There is, moreover, no suffragist but will say at once that this paper, which is for the advancement of all women, should be supported by all suffragists in an organized way rather than by a few--out of their own pockets. I am working to bring this to pass. I believe one of