aid of that admirable paper, the Baltimore American, are largely due the success of our meetings. We feel all the more bound to notice this frank and generous treatment of a new and unpopular movement[Pg 821] by the press of Maryland because we have felt it our duty to condemn the striking contrast exhibited in other quarters. In Baltimore competent reporters made a conscientious abstract of the speeches they professed to report. When this is done in New York and Washington, the woman suffrage cause will have less difficulty in enlisting public attention.
We were also exceedingly gratified to find that the laws of Maryland for wives, mothers, and widows, though still far from equitable, are greatly in advance of those of Massachusetts and of most Northern States. We are promised by one of the most eminent lawyers of Baltimore a full statement of the legal status of married women in Maryland. We shall publish it in the Woman's Journal, as an evidence that equity and liberality are not bounded by "Mason and Dixon" or any other geographical line.
A mass convention of the American Woman Suffrage Association at Apollo Hall, New York, on the 9th of May, 1872, was an interesting and successful meeting. Mrs. Lucy Stone presided, and made the opening address. Rev. James Freeman Clarke, Charlotte B. Wilbour, Mary F. Eastman, Rev. Edward Eggleston, Helen M. Jenkins, Henry B. Blackwell, Amanda Deyo, and others addressed the Convention.
Some disappointment was felt at the unavoidable absence of Mr. Garrison, Mrs. Bowles, and Mrs. Livermore, the two former being detained by severe indisposition. In consequence of an error of dates on the part of the proprietors of Steinway Hall, the meeting was held at an unusual place; nevertheless, the number of persons in attendance at the three sessions averaged seven hundred, and was composed, for the most part, of substantial, reliable friends of the movement. The notices of the Press were brief, but respectful. The Convention declined to take any separate political action, arraigned the so-called "Liberal Republicans" for their illiberal exclusion of women, and appealed to the approaching National Conventions at Philadelphia and Baltimore for a recognition of the rightful claims of woman to legal and political equality.
The American Woman Suffrage Association held in 1872 its fourth annual meeting, and celebrated its third anniversary at St. Louis.
Dr. Stone, of Michigan, said: Friends of the cause of universal suffrage—We live in an era of common sense. Sir William Hamilton, who was a great philosopher, and who investigated all the systems of philosophy from Aristotle down to Descartes and Kant, who went to the lowest depths of philosophy, dived deep for pearls, sometimes bringing up also mud and clams, declared after all his survey of the various schools of philosophy, that the great regulating power of the human mind was common sense; that of all the faculties, that which controlled all others was common sense. That was the basis of his system of philosophy. Now it is just as appropriate as friends of social and political reform, that we should rely upon common sense, as it was for this great philosopher, and it is this on which we purpose to rely. Wherever there is a battle to be fought, they who make the best use and most continued exercise of common sense are sure to win. This is not only true in moral contests, in the strife of mind with mind, but it is true in those material contests such as we have recently had. It was true in the great contest between Germany and France. It was this the crusaders lacked, and the reason why they spent so many ages in doing nothing was that they did not exercise their common sense. When the Jews, by their follies, by their obduracy, had destroyed themselves, and the Almighty wished to