Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/255

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Lucy Stone's Kansas Letters.
235

principle here as I expected to find. Each man goes for himself, and "the devil take the hindmost." The women here are grand, and it will be a shame past all expression if they don't get the right to vote. One woman in Wyandotte said she carried petitions all through the town for female suffrage, and not one woman in ten refused to sign. Another in Lawrence said they sent up two large petitions from there. So they have been at the Legislature, like the heroes they really are, and it is not possible for the husbands of such women to back out, though they have sad lack of principle and a terrible desire for office.

Yours,L. S.
Junction City, Kansas, April 20.

Dear Mrs. Stanton:

We have had one letter from you, and have written you twice. To-day I inclose an article by Col. Wood, which is so capital that it ought to be printed. I wish you would take it to Tilton (not Oliver), and if he says he will publish it, let him have it; but if he hesitates, send it at once to the Chicago Republic, and ask them to mark the article in some of their exchanges. Perhaps the Northern Methodist, The Banner of Light, and the Liberal Christian would insert it. I shall not be back to the May meeting; indeed, it would be better if we could stay till June 1st, and go all along the Northern tier of counties. I think this State will be right at the fall election. The Independent is taken in many families here, and they are getting right on the question of impartial suffrage. But there will have to be a great deal of work to carry the State. We have large, good meetings everywhere. If the Independent would take up this question, and every week write for it, as it does for the negro, that paper alone could save this State; and with this, all the others.

What a pity it does not see the path that would leave it with more than Revolutionary honors! I am thankful beyond expression for what it does, but I am pained for what it might do. With its 75,000 subscribers, and five times that number of readers, what can the poor little Standard do for us, compared with that? I shall try and write a letter to the convention. May strike the true note! I hope not a man will be asked to speak at the convention. If they volunteer very well, but I have been for the last time on my knees to Phillips or Higginson, or any of them. If they help now, they should ask us, and not we them. Is Susan with you?

L. S.

Junction City, Kansas, April 21, 1867.

Dear Friends, E. C. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony:

You will be glad to know that Lucy and I are going over the length and breadth of this State speaking every day, and sometimes twice, journeying from twenty-five to forty miles daily, sometimes in a carriage and sometimes in an open wagon, with or without springs. We climb hills and dash down ravines, ford creeks, and ferry over rivers, rattle across limestone ledges, struggle through muddy bottoms, fight the high winds on the high rolling upland prairies, and address the most astonishing (and astonished) audiences in the most extraordinary places. To-night it may be a log school house, to-morrow a stone church; next day a store with planks for seats, and in one place, if it had not rained, we should have held forth in an unfinished court house, with only four stone walls but no roof whatever.

The people are a queer mixture of roughness and intelligence, reck-