href="#ulink_a5f7f312-6f49-582a-b38e-8713597beb1a">67 There were also individual letters from Mrs. Priscilla Bright McLaren and many other foreigners.68
Dr. Elizabeth C. Sargent and eight other women physicians of San Francisco sent cordial good wishes. Congratulations were received from many Americans,69 and a cablegram from Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, of England.
Miss Anthony then presented the foreign delegates: England, Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant, Mrs. Alice Scatcherd, Mrs. Ashton Dilke, Madame Zadel B. Gustafson; Ireland, Mrs. Margaret Moore; France, Madame Isabella Bogelot; Finland, Baroness Alexandra Gripenberg; Denmark, Madame Ada M. Frederiksen; Norway, Madame Sophie Magelsson Groth; Italy, Madame Fanny Zampini Salazar; India, Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati; Canada, Mrs. Bessie Starr Keefer.
After all had acknowledged the introduction with brief remarks, Miss Anthony presented, amid much applause, Lucy Stone, Frances E. Willard, Julia Ward Howe, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Clara Barton—the most eminent galaxy of women ever assembled upon one platform. Frederick Douglass and Robert Purvis were introduced as pioneers in the movement for woman suffrage.
It would be impossible within the limits of one chapter to give even the briefest synopsis of the addresses which swept through the week like a grand procession. The program only could convey an idea of the value of this intellectual entertainment which called together, day after day and night after night, audiences that taxed the capacity of the largest opera house in Washington.70
On the second Sunday afternoon, Easter Day, the services consisted of a symposium conducted by sixteen women, of all religious faiths and of none. In the evening, when as in the morning a vast and interested audience was present, brief farewells were spoken by a number of the foreign delegates. The leading address was by Mrs. Zerelda G. Wallace on the Moral Power of the Ballot. Mrs. Stanton closed the meeting with a great speech, and the following resolution was adopted:
It is the unanimous voice of this International Council that all institutions of learning and of professional instruction, including schools of theology, law and medicine, should, in the interests of humanity, be as freely opened to women as to men, and that opportunities for industrial training should be as generally and as liberally provided for one sex as for the other. The representatives of organized womanhood in this Council will steadily demand that in all avocations in which both men and women engage, equal wages shall be paid for equal work; and they declare that an enlightened society should demand, as the only adequate expression of the high civilization which it is its office to establish and maintain, an identical standard of personal purity and morality for men and women.
During the month of preparation for this International Council, the idea came many times to Mrs. Sewall that it should result in a permanent organization. The other members gave a cordial assent to this proposition, and the necessary committees were appointed. Before the delegates left Washington both a National and International Council of Women were formed.71
Immediately following the Council the National Woman Suffrage Association held its Twentieth annual convention in the Church of Our Father, April 3, 4, 1888. As there had been eight days of continuous speech-making this meeting was devoted principally to the presenting of State reports and transacting of necessary business. There were, however, a number of addresses from the distinguished women who remained after the Council to attend this convention.
The Committee on National Enrollment, Mrs. Louisa Southworth of Ohio, chairman, reported 40,000 names of adult citizens who favored equal suffrage; 9,000 of these were from Ohio and 9,000 from Nebraska. Women were urged to send petitions to members of Congress from their respective States. Mrs. Stanton was requested to prepare a memorial to be presented to each of the national political conventions to be held during the year, and committees were appointed to visit each for the purpose of securing in their platforms a recognition of woman suffrage.
The most interesting feature was the hearing before the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage, which took place April 2.72 Mrs. Stanton made the opening address, in which she took up the provisions of the Federal Constitution, one by one, and showed how they had been violated in their application to women, saying:
Even the preamble of the Constitution is an argument for self-government—"We, the people." You recognize women as people, for you count them in the basis of representation. Half our Congressmen hold their seats to-day as representatives of women. We help to swell the figures by which you are here, and too many of you, alas, are only figurative representatives, paying little heed to our rights as citizens.
"No bill of attainder shall be passed." "No title of nobility granted." So says the Constitution; and yet you have passed bills of attainder in every State of the Union making sex a disqualification for the franchise. You have granted titles of nobility to every male voter, making all men rulers, governors, sovereigns over all women.
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a republican form of government." And yet you have not a republican form of government in a single State. One-half the people have never consented to one law under which they live. They have rulers placed over them in whom they have no choice. They are taxed without representation, tried in our courts by men for the violation of laws made by men, with no appeal except to men, and for some crimes over which men should have no jurisdiction....
Landing in New York one week ago, I saw 400 steerage passengers leave the vessel. Dull-eyed, heavy-visaged, stooping with huge burdens and the oppressions endured in the Old World, they stood in painful contrast with the group of brilliant women on their way to the International Council here in Washington. I thought, as this long line passed by, of the speedy transformation the genial influences of equality would effect in the appearance of these men, of the new dignity they would acquire with a voice in the laws under which they live, and I rejoiced for them; but bitter reflections filled my mind when I thought that these men are the future rulers of our daughters; these will interpret the civil and criminal codes by which they will be governed; these will be our future judges and jurors to try young girls in our courts, for trial by a jury of her peers has never yet been vouchsafed to woman. Here is a right so ancient that it is difficult to trace its origin in history, a right so sacred that the humblest criminal may choose his juror. But alas for the daughters of the people, their judges, advocates, jurors, must be men, and for them there is no appeal. But this is only one wrong among many inevitable for a disfranchised class. It is impossible for you, gentlemen, to appreciate the humiliations women suffer at every turn....
You have now the power to settle this question by wise legislation. But if you can not be aroused to its serious consideration, like every other step in progress, it will eventually be settled by violence. The wild enthusiasm of woman can be used for evil as well as good. To-day you have the power to guide and direct it into channels of true patriotism, but in the future, with all the elements of discontent now gathering from foreign countries, you will have the scenes of the French Commune repeated in our land. What women, exasperated with a sense of injustice, have done in dire extremities in the nations of the Old World, they will do here....
I will leave it to your imagination to picture to yourselves how you would feel if you had had a case in court, a bill before some legislative body or a political aspiration for nearly half a century, with a continual succession of adverse decisions, while law and common justice were wholly on your side. Such, honorable gentlemen, is our case....
In the history of the race there has been no struggle for liberty like this. Whenever the interest of the ruling classes has induced them to confer new rights on a subject class it has been done with no effort on the part of the latter. Neither the American slave nor the English laborer demanded the right of suffrage. It was given in both cases to strengthen the Liberal party. The philanthropy of the few may have entered into those reforms, but political expediency carried both measures. Women, on the contrary, have fought their own