Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/451

Rh friendship, of the inspiration she has been to those on our platform, of the bond of union to hold us together, of the innumerable conventions over which she has presided, of the many long journeys both North and South to carry the glad tidings of justice, liberty, and equality to all.) A missionary who always traveled at her own expense, giving her best thoughts freely, asking nothing in return, neither money, praise, nor honor; for misrepresentation and cruel persecution were the only return she had for years. Both in religion and reform hers was a free gospel to the multitude.

As division has been the law in politics, religion, and reform, woman suffrage proved no exception. But Lucretia Mott and her noble sister, Martha C. Wright, remained steadfast with those who had taken the initiative steps in calling the first Convention, and with the larger and more radical division their sympathies remained, both being prominent officers of the National Woman Suffrage Association at the time of their death. They fully endorsed the great lesson of the war, National protection for United States citizens, applied to woman as well as to the African race, the doctrine the association to which they belonged has so successfully advocated at Washington for twelve years.

Reading the numerous complimentary obituary notices of our long loved friend, so fair, so tender, so full of praise, we have exclaimed, what changes the passing years have wrought in the popular estimate of a woman once considered so dangerous an innovator in the social and religious world; and yet the Lucretia Mott of today is only the perfected, well-rounded character of half a century ago. But the slowly moving masses that feared her then as an infidel, a fanatic, an unsexed woman, have followed her footsteps until a broader outlook has expanded their moral vision. The "vagaries" of the anti-slavery struggle, in which she took a leading part, have been coined into law; and the "wild fantasies" of the Abolitionists are now the XIII, XIV., and XV. Amendments to the National Constitution. The prolonged and bitter schisms in the Society of Friends have shed new light on the tyranny of creeds and scriptures. The infidel Hicksite principles that shocked Christendom, are now the corner-stones of the liberal religious movement in this country. The demand for woman's social, civil, and political equality — in which she was foremost — laughed at from the Atlantic to the Pacific, has been recognized in a measure by courts and legislatures, in Great Britain and the United States. The old Blackstone code for woman has received its death-blow, and the colleges, trades, and professions have been opened for her admission.