....The light and the eager interest in the faces of American women show that they are going somewhere; and when women have started for somewhere, they are harder to head off than a comet.... All roads for women lead to suffrage, even if they do not know it. We are Daughters of Evolution, and who can stop old Dame Evolution?... We must live up to our principles, or, as a nation, we are not going to live at all. Then it will be time for Liberty to throw down her torch, and go out of the enlightening business.... "Woman's sphere"—these are the two hardest-worked words in the dictionary.... They call in the mental and moral wreckage of foreign nations to help rule us. A man was asked, "How are you going to vote on the constitution?" He answered: "My constitution's mighty poorly; my mother was feeble before me." There is deep tragedy in giving such men control of the lives and property of American women.... There is not so much the matter with the U. S. Constitution as with the constitutions of some of our statesmen.... It is not an expansion of territory that we need so much as an expansion of justice to our own women.... American men have had a hard struggle for their own liberty, and some of them are afraid there will not be liberty enough to go around.... What relation is woman to the State? She is a very poor relation, yet her tax-money is demanded promptly.
Dr. Mary H. Barker Bates, of the Denver School Board, discussed Our Gains and Our Losses, and said in closing: "We have learned that in politics we must have a machine, only it should be used for good government, not for corruption. Make your machine as perfect as you can, without a flaw in it anywhere, and then use it for good ends." Mrs. Mary B. Clay (Ky.) gave a careful survey of conditions resulting from The Removal of Industries from the Home, which had forced woman to follow them and made her an industrial factor in the outside world. Miss Griffin being again called on told these anecdotes:
In my home in Alabama there are four educated women. My father has passed away. My sisters are widows and I am an old maid. We have as our gardener a negro boy twenty-three years old. When he came to us he said that he had been in the Second Reader for ten years, but on election day he goes over and votes to represent our family. If we complain of having no vote on the expenditure of our tax-money, we are told we must "influence" men; in other words, we must influence that gardener. But when we start to do so, and ask him how he means to vote, he says he doesn't know yet, because he hasn't seen "Uncle Peter," the colored minister.
In my section men are chivalric and say, "Don't you know that you shall have everything you ask as ladies? Don't you know that we are your natural protectors?" But what is a woman afraid of on a lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.
On the islands off our coast there was a large population that could not read or write. A missionary-spirited woman went there to help educate them. After awhile she was made a member of the school board, which consisted of a few white men and more negroes. The president of the board, a colored man, was disgusted at the elevation of a woman to that dignity, and when she was sworn in he resigned, saying, "Now you've swore her in, you've got to swear me out; I'm not going to sit on no board with no woman."
During the convention Miss Anthony made an earnest appeal for co-operation in the equal suffrage work, saying: "Why is it the duty of the little handful on this platform to be talking and working for the enfranchisement of women any more than that of all of you who sit here to-night? Every woman can do something for the cause. She who is true to it at her own fireside, who speaks the right word to her guests, to her children and her neighbors' children, does an educational work as valuable as that of the woman who speaks from the platform." She also urged a wider reading of the equal rights papers, the Woman's Journal, Tribune, Standard, Wisconsin Citizen, etc., and suffrage pamphlets and leaflets. She defended herself against the accusation of abusing the men, saying, "We have not been fighting the 'male' citizen anywhere but in the statute books."
Eighty-seven delegates representing twenty-two States were present at this convention. The treasurer reported the receipts of the past year to be $14,020. Mrs. Chapman Catt, chairman of the Organization Committee, related the work done by the suffrage organizations in behalf of the Spanish-American War. She described also the efforts made to obtain suffrage for women in the new constitution of Louisiana the preceding year, which resulted in securing the franchise for taxpaying women on all matters submitted to taxpayers. The work in different States and Territories, especially in Arizona and Oklahoma, was sketched in detail, and will be found in their respective chapters.
In concluding her report as chairman of the Legislative Committee, Mrs. Blake called attention to the more hopeful character of this record as compared to that of last year, and urged upon all State presidents the importance of having some one to represent the interests of women constantly at their capitals during the legislative sessions, not only to secure favorable legislation but to prevent that inimical to their interests, citing the case of New Mexico, where a law which infringes on the right of dower was recently passed without the knowledge of women.
Mrs. Elnora M. Babcock (N. Y.) was made chairman of National Press Work, with power to appoint a chairman in each State. The customary telegram of congratulation and appreciation was sent to the honorary president, Mrs. Stanton. Mrs. Eliza Wright Osborne (N. Y.) was appointed fraternal delegate to the International Council of Women to meet in London in June. Greetings were received through fraternal delegates, Mrs. Jessie R. Denney, from the Ancient Order of United Workingmen, and Mrs. Emma A. Wheeler from the Canadian W. C. T. U. The letter to Miss Anthony from its president, Mrs. Annie O. Rutherford, said: "A vigorous campaign is being carried on in every Province in favor of equal suffrage, with fair hope of success in most of them. We wish for your convention a most successful issue, and that your life, whose grand pioneer work has made it easy for those who follow after, may be spared many years yet to help broaden the path and uplift the cause of humanity." Many letters and telegrams were received from State suffrage associations and from individuals. Mrs. Belva A. Lockwood (D. C.) wrote: "As a delegate to the ninth annual convention of the International League of Press Clubs just held in Baltimore, I succeeded in gaining recognition on equal terms for women journalists in the space to be allotted to men journalists in the Exposition at Paris in 1900."
A lively discussion was caused by a resolution offered by Mrs. Lottie Wilson Jackson, a delegate from Michigan, so light-complexioned as hardly to suggest a tincture of African blood, that "colored women ought not be compelled to ride in smoking cars, and that suitable accommodations should be provided for them." It was finally tabled as being outside the province of the convention.118
The memorial resolutions were presented by the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who said: "These tributes are largely to older men and women with whom I was associated long ago and it is a pleasure to recall their noble services to humanity in times when they and their work were far more unpopular than to-day. There are twenty-five on my list, yet I think there was only one of the entire number who was not more than fifty years old, and most of them reached on toward the eighties and nineties. All were earnest advocates of equal suffrage, but there were kindred causes to which most of them were also devoted.... Laura P. Haviland spent seventy years of her life in Michigan, the last five here in Grand Rapids. At one time she assumed the care of nine orphan children; at another, during the Civil War she was the active agent who freed from prison a large number of Union soldiers held upon false charges. She labored for every good cause and was a simple Quaker in religion and life....
"Parker Pillsbury of New Hampshire, who died last year, aged 88, known as a life-long worker for the oppressed before the Civil War, gave much of his energy to the cause of anti-slavery. When that noble philanthropy was split in two throughout its whole length because one-half would not let women serve on committees with men or raise their voices publicly for those who were dumb and helpless, Parker Pillsbury stood by the side of Abby Kelly and the Grimké sisters. His terse, characteristic, uncompromising language, his cheerful braving of prejudice, his sympathetic claim for justice to womanhood, made him one of the noblest of men....
"In the long and many-sided history of the woman's cause, Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage made a deep and lasting mark. I recall her as she came first upon our platform at the Syracuse Woman's Rights Convention in 1852, a young mother of two children, yet with a heart also for a wider