As the last resolution was put, Mrs. Lucy Stone arose and paid very graceful and eloquent tributes to the memories of Lucretia Mott, Mrs. Child, and Mr. Nathaniel White.
Marshal Douglass was then introduced, and said he was not there to make a speech, but to show his sympathy with the cause. He was so entirely in love with it that he thought it deserved the highest eloquence and the profoundest earnestness it could command to advance it. He knew of no reason why a man should vote and a woman not. The republic needed the good qualities of its citizens to help it, and recognizing the intelligence and heart of women he was in favor of opening every avenue by which their moral worth could be utilized for the benefit of the country. It was an injury to keep any person in this country from the ballot when suffrage was universal. It was a degradation. If you want to keep a man out of the mud, black his boots. If you want to develop woman's best qualities, give her the ballot.
Mrs. Mary E. Haggart, of Indiana, followed with a bold and brilliant argument, presenting the claims of her sex to the ballot.
Mrs. Mary A. Livermore asked how it was that women to-day are exposed to a hotter fire than ever before. Women are not as much toasted at banquets or flattered with extravagant compliments as a few years ago. She warned her hearers that if woman continued to make of herself a peg to hang millinery goods on, she would be riddled with the shafts of ridicule. If she entered the sphere of man, and sought, by the cultivation of her intellect, to elevate both herself and man, she would equally expose herself to satire. The times were different now from the past. The question of woman suffrage in one form or another was constantly coming up everywhere.
Officers[1] were elected for the ensuing year.
Mrs. Livermore said, as this was a political meeting of men and women, she hoped it would be closed after the usual fashion, by singing the doxology. The whole audience rose and sang it, and the Convention adjourned.
A memorial, signed by the officers of the American Woman Suffrage Association, asking Congress to establish suffrage for women in the Territories, was presented to the Senate by Hon. George F. Hoar, and referred to the Committee on Territories, which was to give a hearing to a committee
from the Suffrage Association. But no quorum of the Senate Committee came together, and the opportunity was lost.
On Friday afternoon Mrs, Hayes received the members of the Suffrage
- ↑ President, Dr. Mary F. Thomas, of Indiana.
2. Resolved, That we advise our auxiliary State societies to petition their respective Legislatures to enact a law this winter conferring suffrage on women in Presidential elections under Section 2, Article 2, of the Federal Constitution. Whereas, Since the last annual meeting of the Association, three eminent advocates of the claim of women for equal political rights have passed away—Lucretia Mott, Lydia Maria Child, and Nathaniel White—therefore, 3. Resolved, That the American Woman Suffrage Association records its grateful appreciation of their invaluable service and its sense of irreparable loss, now that the eloquent voice is silent, the ready pen dropped, and the generous hand is cold in death. In the wealth of their matured character and great achievement they have left us the permanent inspiration of a noble example.
