NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1907
201
This year I took for my motto those splendid words: "Truth loses many battles but always wins its war." We did not win save as these who fight for the truth are always the people who win. There never was, there never will be greater defeat in any human life than the victory which comes to the man or woman who is fighting against the truth, and there never can be a greater victory to any human soul than the fact that it is fighting for the truth, whether it wins or not.... This has been a year of victory in that more women have been enfranchised than in any preceding year. We have the largest membership that we have ever had. We come together in hope and in the firm determination that we will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer and all the summers of our life, and then the battle will not be finished. unless the victory is absolutely won for all women.... While we have cause to rejoice we have also cause for sorrow. As an organization it has been the saddest year we have known or ever can know, for there has gone out from among us the visible presence of her who was our leader for over fifty years, and I have just come with others directly from the home in Rochester where we attended the funeral services of the dear sister Mary, who was the first of the two to enter the movement and was always the faithful co-worker and home-maker. Both have folded their hands in rest since our last convention. Each gave her whole life to the cause of woman and each in passing away left all she had to this cause. The sorrow is ours, the peace and the triumphal reward of loving service are theirs. I hope we shall spend no time in mourning and turning to the past but with our faces toward the future. strengthened by the inspiration we have received from our great leader, go on fighting her battle and God's battle until the complete victory is won.
With two exceptions this was the only national convention during the thirty-nine years that had not been animated by the presence of Miss Anthony and the second day—February 15, her 87th birthday—was largely devoted to her[1] There were three reports on Memorials. One was presented by Mrs. May Wright Sewall (Ind.) for the Executive Committee of the National Council of Women and contemplated a bust to be executed in marble by the sculptor, Adelaide Johnson, who had made the one in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. A second was presented by Mrs. Mary T. Lewis Gannett of Rochester, N. Y., for an Anthony Memorial Building for the women students of the
- ↑ Miss Anthony helped arrange for the first National Woman Suffrage Convention and it was held in Washington in January, 1869. From that time to 1906 she missed but two of these annual meetings, when she was speaking in the far West under the auspices of a lecture bureau, and each time she sent the proceeds of a week's lectures as her contribution.
