Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/409

Rh While ever and anon during the last forty years Mrs. Swisshelm has seized some of these dilettante literary women with her metaphysical tweezers, and held them up to scorn for their ridicule of the woman suffrage conventions, yet in her own recently published work in her mature years, she vouchsafes no words of approval for those who have inaugurated the greatest movement of the centuries. She complains that in some of the woman suffrage conventions she attended, there was not a strict observance of parliamentary rules, and that the resolutions and speeches were unworthy the occasion. Yet the only time Mrs. Swisshelm ever honored our platform at a National Convention, her speech was far below the level of most of the others, and the resolutions she offered were so verbose and [sic]irrevelant, that the Committee declined to present them to the Convention.

It is quite evident from her last pronunciamento that she has no just appreciation of the importance and dignity of our demand for justice and equality. A soldier without a leg is a fact so much more readily understood, than all women without ballots, and his loss so much more readily comprehended and supplied, that we can hardly blame any one for doing the work of the hour, rather than struggling a life-time for an idea. Hence it is not a matter of surprise that most women are more readily enlisted in the suppression of evils in the concrete, than in advocating the principles that underlie them in the abstract, and thus ultimately doing the broader and more lasting work. On this ground we can excuse the author of "Half a Century" for giving the reader one hundred and twenty-five pages of her own work in hospitals and three to the Woman Suffrage movement, but considering the tone of the three pages, the advocates of the measure should be thankful she gave no more.

Mrs. Swisshelm's contempt is only surpassed by Mrs. Hale's "Jeremiad" over the infidelity of the noble leader of our movement. For a woman so thoroughly politic and time-serving, who, unlike the great master she professed to follow, never identified herself with one of the unpopular reforms of her day, whose pen never by any chance slipped outside the prescribed literary line of safety, to cheer the martyrs to truth in her own generation; lamentations from such a source over Lucretia Mott, are presumptuous and profane. If such a life of self-sacrifice and devotion to the best interests of humanity; such courage to stand alone, to do and say the right, 'mid persecution, violence and mobs; such charity and faithfulness in every relation of life, as daughter, sister, wife, mother, and friend; such calm declining years and peaceful death could all be realized without a