from a letter of Miss Anthony's, written at this time to the league, shows that then, as now, the radical woman workers for Prohibition were nothing if not political. She says: "And it is for woman now, in the present presidential campaign, to say to her father, husband, or brother, 'If you vote for any candidate for any office whatever, who is not pledged to total abstinence and the Maine law, we shall hold you alike guilty with the rum-seller.'" In January, 1853, a great mass-meeting was held in Albany of all the State temperance organizations. The Woman's society met in a Baptist church, which was crowded at every session. Miss Anthony presided. Twenty-eight thousand women had signed petitions for prohibitory legislation. The rules of the House were suspended, and the women were invited to present them at the speaker's desk. They were then invited to New York, and, in Metropolitan Hall, addressed a large audience, as well as in the Broadway Tabernacle and Knickerbocker Hall, Brooklyn. In the next two months they made successful tours of many cities of the State. But, like Mr. Garrison, and Stephen Foster, and H. C. Wright, the women thought that if they were not attacking and being attacked there could be no "progress" or "reform." They demanded divorce for drunkenness, they denounced wine at private tables, and called on the women to leave all church organizations where "clergymen and bishops, liquor-dealers, and wine-bibbers, were dignified and honored as deacons and elders." They denounced the church for its "apathy," and the clergy for their "hostility to the public action of women," and they soon began to turn the kindly feeling that was endeavoring to work with them into enmity, and were of course denounced in their turn. The Society decided to invite men into their organization, but not to allow them to hold office or to vote. This they did for a year, after which men were admitted to full membership. The first annual meeting of the Woman's State Temperance Society was held in Rochester, June 1, 1853, Mrs. Stanton presiding, and the attendance was larger than they had had at any time. In the course of the meetings a heated debate on the subject of divorce took place. Mrs. Stanton and Lucy Stone took the ground that it was "not only woman's right, but her duty, to withdraw from all such unholy relations," and Mrs. Nichols and Antoinette Brown opposed them.