down the liquor traffic.  You never can talk down or sing down or pray down an institution which is voted into existence.  You never will be able to lessen this evil until you have votes.  Frederick Douglass used to tell how, when he was a Maryland slave and a good Methodist, he would go into the farthest corner of the tobacco field and pray God to bring him liberty; but God never answered his prayers until he prayed with his heels.  And so, dear friends, He never will answer yours for the suppression of the liquor traffic until you are able to pray with your ballots.[80]

Miss Anthony’s sentiments on this question are further expressed in a letter to her brother Daniel R., editor Leavenworth Times: 

I like the Times’ article on the women’s whiskey war.  Emerson says, “God answers only such prayers as men themselves answer.”  After ignorant and helpless mothers have transmitted to their children the drunkard’s appetite, God can not answer their prayers to prevent them from gratifying it.  But this crusade will educate the women who engage in it to use the one and only means of regulating or prohibiting the traffic in liquor—­that of the ballot.  As soon as they find this crusade experiment a failure, which they certainly will, because all spasmodic, sensational religious efforts are transient and fleeting, they will realize the enduring strength and usefulness of the franchise.  However little that is permanent may come of this movement, it is good in itself because anything is better for women than tame submission to the evils around them; and when they find kind words, entreaties and tears avail nothing, they will surely try the virtue of stones (votes) to bring down the great demon that desolates their homes.

An entry in the journal made soon afterward says:  “I dropped into the Industrial Congress today and was invited to speak.  I told the men that the degraded labor of women made them quite as heavy a millstone round the necks of working-men as is the Heathen Chinese.”  And a few days later:  “Dr. Dio Lewis called today, and I went to hear him speak this evening.  Same old story—­men make and break the laws, and women by love and persuasion must soften their hearts to abandon their wickedness.  Never a hint that women should have anything to do with the making and enforcing of the laws.  They must only coax.”

The diary shows over one hundred letters written by Miss Anthony’s own hand in arranging for the May Anniversary in New York, while she sat at the bedside of her mother, who was very ill.  Many cordial answers were received, among them one from Josephine E. Butler, of England.  Mary L. Booth thus closed her reply:  “Pray believe that I always hold you in affectionate remembrance as one of the most sincere, earnest and disinterested women whom it has ever been my fortune to meet, and whom I shall always be glad to hear from or to see.”  Mrs. Stanton sent an extract from a letter of Martha C. Wright, saying:  “Our only hope is in the gradual accession of thinking men and women, and in our indomitable Susan.”