auspices, sometimes under those of a bureau,
and herself arranging for unengaged nights."
In six years the work was done. On May 1,
1876, she wrote: "The (iay of juhile(> for nie
has come. I have paid the last dollar of the
Revolution debt!"
On November 5, 1S72, at an election held in the city of Rochester for a Rej^resentative in Congress, Susan B. Anthony and fourteen otlier women cast their ballots. This remarkable act was done untler the conviction that it was in accordance with the Constitution of the United States, as explained by Francis Minor, of St. Louis, Henry R. Selilen, of Rochester, and Albert G. Riddle, of A'ashington, all lead- ing members of the bar, who believed women had a right to vote under the Fourteenth Amend- ment. It was also intended as a test case. Many of the leading ])apers supported her, but the fifteen women of Rochester who voted were all arrested. Miss Anthony's trial took place in June, 1S73, at Canandaigua. Judge Selden testified that he advised her to vote, and in a masterly address argued her case from a legal, constitutional, and moral standpoint. The prosecuting attorney followed. Associate Justice Ward Hunt then delivered his opinion, and directed the jury to bring in a verdict of guilty. The next day he sentenced her to pay a fine of one hundred dollars and costs. "May it plea.se your honor," said she, "I will never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty," and she never did. Even by opponents of woman suf- frage the action of Judge Hunt was denounced as arbitrary and illegal. On May 15, 1869, women from nineteen States, who had come to New York as tlelegates to the third anniversary of the Ecjual Rights As- sociation, met and formed a new organization, to be called the "National Woman Suffrage Association, whose special object should be a sixteenth amendment to the Federal Con- stitution, securing the ballot to the women of the nation on etiual terms with men." Mrs. Stanton was elected president, Anna Dickinson one of the vice-[)residents, and Miss Anthony one of the executive committee. To the supe- rior business ability of Miss Anthony as planner and manager, occupying various ofhcial posi- tions, the success of the many annual conven- tions since held by the society has been largely due. In November, 1869, was formed the American Suffrage Association, numbering among its leading members Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Mary A. Livermore. The union of the two societies. National and American, pro- posed by the American in Deceml)er, 1887, was effected in February, 1890. For bringing about this result more credit is acknowledged to be due to Alice Stone Blackwell than to any other one person.
Of the new National-American Suffrage Asso- ciation Mrs. Stanton was the president in 1890 and 1891, when she asked to be relieved on account of age. Miss Anthony was made presi- dent in 1892, and held the office till 1900, when she declined re-election, and was made an honorary president for life. On resigning active leadership at the age of eighty, she said, "I expect to do more for woman suffrage in the next decade than ever before."
After fifty years of toilsome activity and heroic devotion to a principle, her cheerful testimony is, "I do not look back upon a hard life: I liave been continually at work because I enjoyed being busy." Conviction that her "cause was just and she was in good company" helped her over many hard places.
The .secret of her continuance and her suc- cess may be gathered from the remark of Charles Dudley W'arner after a suffrage con- vention at Hartford, Conn., in the sixties: " Susan Anthony is my favorite. . . . You could .see in every motion and in her very silence that the cause was all she cared for; self was utterly forgotten."
It was Mrs. Stanton, long-time intimate friend of Mi.ss Anthony, who wrote of her, " I can truly say she is the most upright, coura- geous, self-sacrificing, magnanimous human being I have ever known."
Work on the History of Woman Suffrage, planned by Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton, and Mrs. Oage, and which they expected would be a pamphlet of a few hundretl pages, was begim on the first of August, 1870, at the home of Mrs. Stanton. As material for the history, Miss Anthony had collected and preserved, during the quarter of a century preceding.
