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 the results that will follow the heavy expenditures made by the Journal in 1915 will be organized support of the paper.

Since the Woman’s Journal is the organ of the movement, since it gives the news of the movement, voices the wrongs of women, and furnishes data as well as inspiration with which to work, it is important that it reach the largest number of women possible each week with its message, and so far as is possible for a paper, convert them into efficient, consecrated workers, possessed with the ideal of equality and justice for women.  It is, therefore, obvious that, however good the editorial output, it counts for comparatively little if it goes to only a small number of people.

From 1870 to 1907, there is no record of the number of subscribers to the paper, for the price of the paper was changed from $3 to $2.50 to $1.50.  The price is now $1 per year.  The last change was made in 1910 because it was becoming clear that a lower price would mean a larger circulation, while a higher price made it prohibitive to many.  Furthermore, the lower price was in harmony with the growing tendency to remove the membership fee in suffrage organizations because it had proved a handicap in having a large backing of women for the cause.  So many women of humble means, or no independent means, wanted to take the paper and could not!

Bearing in mind, then, that the aim of the Journal, both from a propaganda and business viewpoint, is to reach large numbers, that is, to have a large circulation, I have had two charts drawn which will show that, although the cost of publishing is heavy, the cost of production is not advancing as rapidly as is the increase in circulation.  In other words, the circulation of the paper has multiplied over eleven times in the last eight years, while the cost of publishing for the same period has multiplied less than eight times.  The following charts show this graphically.