subscriber that her money and order have been received. If, however, as so often happens, one person sends a subscription for another, two additional processes must be carried out: We must acknowledge the order and money to the person who sends it, and we must tell the other person (if the subscription is a gift) that the paper is being sent to her with the compliments of her friend, or by an anonymous person, as the case may be: but at any rate, that the subscription is for a certain time and that she will not be billed for it. This takes two letters and two stamps. When a subscription is sent in by some suffragist who is acting as agent in forwarding subscriptions for other people, we acknowledge the order only to the sender, thinking that receipt of the paper by the subscriber is sufficient acknowledgment. In this connection, one of our worst problems is to learn from those who mail us subscription orders whether they are simply forwarding for other people or are sending the paper at their expense in the hope of making a convert or of introducing it to someone, with the hope that she will want to continue the subscription. The trouble comes in the question of knowing whom to ask to renew. Sometimes the sender means to renew for the person, and sometimes she means to have us ask the person to renew for herself. We have no means of knowing unless the sender tells us. We have found that whichever way we do, some of our friends do not like it. We have, therefore, adopted the system of asking the person who has been receiving the paper to renew for herself unless we have been definitely instructed not to do this. Some people tell us to discontinue the subscription when the time has expired. We do not think this a fair thing to ask, for the obvious reason that everyone ought to have a chance to renew for herself in case the giver does not want to renew for her.

The third step in receiving a subscription is to write the name in the proper place on the subscription lists that go to the mailing company every Tuesday night. The states in these lists are arranged alphabetically, the towns and cities are arranged alphabetically and the names of subscribers are arranged in the same way. In addition to this the books have to be arranged in districts that correspond to the mail routing of the United States post office. This is an arbitrary dividing, and it increases the work of finding the proper place for entering a subscription. In this a post office chart has to be used constantly.

After an entry has been made in the mailing books, the subscription order, before it is filed, goes to the subscription cards. There the clerks must see whether the name is already on the books, or, if not, if it has ever been on our books (In the latter case we revise the former card instead of making a new one). The subscription cards look like the one reproduced below.

[Illustration: Subscription Card]

Some letters that bring subscription orders contain many other items that must be attended to before the order or letter is filed. For instance, a letter may contain a new subscription, a renewal, a remittance or a request to send a bill, an order for sample copies, for papers to sell at a meeting, for literature, a request for information and an item or poem or article for the columns of the paper. Each matter mentioned in the letter must, of course, be attended to before the letter can go to the files. To avoid having a letter filed before all of its orders or requests have been attended to, we stamp each piece of mail with a little rubber stamp that looks like the following:

A.S.B…..Bill

A.E.R…..Fin.

H.B.S…..Advt.

Date Received

Ackg……Sub.

Papers….Lit.

Circ……Amt. & page.

Every piece of first-class mail that reaches the office is stamped with these abbreviations and is at once checked for the different stages through which it must go before it is filed. The clerk filing must see that every check on the stamp has a sign after the check to show that the particular matter indicated has been attended to.

Of course, another part of the subscription work is in making changes of address, changing dates of expiration and removing names of those who do not want to continue to receive the paper, such as the anti-suffragists, who do not want to be converted, to whom some relative or friend or acquaintance has been sending the paper out of her own pocket.

Then there is the work involved in getting subscribers to renew. When the subscription list contained only twenty-four hundred names and when there were few letters to write, it was possible to know the names and perhaps something of the history of every subscriber, especially since only a few were put on the books in a week. But with a circulation of nearly thirty thousand it is obviously impossible for any one person to give the whole list personal attention.

The result is that the business policy of the paper has had to be changed a number of times to meet the changing needs. In the earlier days of the paper it was thought that subscribers would watch the expiration date on the wrapper of their paper and would send in the renewal price without any kind of reminder. In those days Miss Wilde and her assistant would go over the books twice a year and send a reminder to all who had not renewed. As the list grew larger, this plan seemed unsatisfactory to both the subscriber and the paper. Since people were at liberty to start a subscription at any time in the year, it was plain that a year's subscription would run out at the same time the following year, and since this was going on twelve months in the year, we began sending out bills each month to those subscribers whose subscriptions were about to expire. That system was in operation from 1910 through 1915.

During 1915, it was made possible for us to have enough helpers in the office to make a study of the Circulation Department with a view to seeing where improvements could be made, what leakages could be stopped, and what kind of circulation work was paying. The result was that we decided that along with our efforts to get new subscriptions we must carry on a new kind of work to keep those already obtained on our books. We found that it was not sufficient simply to send the paper to a person for a certain time and then ask her to renew. We found that we needed to study the source of the subscription, the motive for subscribing, and how best to appeal to the subscriber to renew. We found that since we had been keeping the record (1910 through 1915), about 26,000 persons have been on our books and for some reason or other are no longer there. A careful study and a long one showed that those whose papers had been discontinued in that period fell into the following classifications:

1. Those who had died.

2. Unconverted antis.

3. Those who had not paid after we had sent three bills.

4. Those who had moved without giving us their change of address.

5. Those whom the post office reported as "not found."

6. Those who asked to be discontinued without giving a reason.

7. Those who said they could not afford it.

8. Those who said they were too busy to read it.

9. Those who said they were converted and did not need it.

10. Those who disapproved of our policy in some way.