Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/828

792 we are too "delicate" to come to their assistance! These may be daughters of good people, and may once have been good and pure as any. They might be your daughters or mine. Brothers, they might be your sisters or your daughters! Oh! change the laws that bear so hard on women. Give us such laws as will allow your wives and mothers—those in whom you have confidence and whom you love—to come, with a mother's heart, and help rescue these deserted and fallen and miserable ones.

here read a letter of regret from William Lloyd Garrison, in which he stated that he was ill and confined to his bed, and therefore unable to be present. She read, also, a letter from Mrs. Haskell, of California, expressing earnest and hearty sympathy in all that is done at the East for woman suffrage, and the assurance that on the Pacific slope the good work is becoming daily stronger and more hopeful.

Mrs. gave an interesting account of some of the Indian tribes in Mexico and California, who, she thought, had in one sense a higher idea of the capacity of woman than their more civilized brethren. The Navajos, on one occasion, when a United States Commission composed of General Sherman, General Terry, and other officers of the army, went to them to treat with them on behalf of the Government, refused to enter the officer's quarters for the purpose of discussion or decision of their difficulties, unless their squaws were permitted to participate in the deliberations, and the officers were obliged to allow the women to come in.

The evening session of the convention was called to order by. Steinway Hall was filled with an earnest and interested assembly, numbering about a thousand persons.

Mrs., of Providence, R. I., was the first speaker. She spoke at some length, and asserted the undoubted right of women to the suffrage. She referred to the fear which men entertained, or pretended to entertain, of women neglecting every other duty attaching to them simply because they should get suffrage. Men do not find voting so exceedingly incompatible with the other duties of life that they should have such fear of woman suffrage. Women are not asking for bon-bons in this matter. They are demanding that which belongs to them. They are not children, nor idiots, and they ought to have the same right of action as is accorded to sane men.

The address of Mrs. Howe was as follows: This mighty edifice of the ideal society has many mansions, whose doors open one after the other in the ruins of the ages. When Providence has removed the mysterious seal from one of these doors those who know the signs of the times gladly enter. And soon the halt and the lame and the blind hear of the new refuge, the new benefaction, and make haste to crowd its halls and parlors. America itself was at first such a refuge. The derided Puritans rode there nobly across the highway of the ocean. By and by it leaked out that civil and religious liberty had made a good thing of it, and then the Old World began to sneak over into the spacious domain of the New. And now it comes with such a tide that we can scarcely build cities and railroads fast enough for its accommodation. America is to the nations a house of God—a divinely appointed city of refuge. Poorly have we administered that house of God, because we ourselves were undivine. But we have im