Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/192

 makes but little change in the relative status of woman to the selfconstituted governing classes, so long as subordination in all countries is the rule of her being. Through suffering we have learned the open sesame to the hearts of each other. With the spirit forever in bondage, it is the same whether housed in golden cages with every want supplied, or wandering in the dreary deserts of life, friendless and forsaken. Long ago we of America heard the deep yearnings of the souls of women in foreign lands for freedom responsive to our own. Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Stael, Madam Roland, George Sand, Frederica Bremer, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frances Wright and George Eliot alike have pictured the wrongs of woman in poetry and prose. Though divided by vast mountain ranges, oceans and plains, yet the psalms of our lives have been in the same strain—too long, alas, in the minor key—for hopes deferred have made the bravest hearts sometimes despairing. But the same great over-soul has been our faith and inspiration. The steps of progress already achieved in many countries should encourage us to tune our harps anew to songs of victory.

I think most of us have come to feel that a voice in the laws is indispensable to achieve success; that these great moral struggles for higher education, temperance, peace, the rights of labor, international arbitration, religious freedom, are all questions to be finally adjusted by the action of government and thus, without a direct voice in legislation, woman's influence will be entirely lost.

Experience has fully proved that sympathy as a civil agent is vague and powerless until caught and chained in logical propositions and coined into law. When every prayer and tear represents a ballot, the mothers of the race will no longer weep in vain over the miseries of their children. The active interest women are taking inall the great questions of the day is in strong contrast with the apathy and indifference in which we found them half a century ago, and the contrast in their condition between now and then is equally marked. Those who inaugurated the movement for woman's enfranchisement, who for long years endured the merciless storm of ridicule and persecution, mourned over by friends, ostracized in social life, scandalized by enemies, denounced by the pulpit, scarified and caricatured by the press, may well congratulate themselves on the marked change in public sentiment which this magnificent gathering of educated women from both hemispheres so triumphantly illustrates.

We, who like the children of Israel, have been wandering in the wilderness of prejudice and ridicule for forty years feel a peculiar tenderness for the young women on whose shoulders we are about to leave our burdens. Although we have opened a pathway to the promised land and cleared up much of the underbrush of false sentiment, logic and rhetoric intertwisted with law and custom, which blocked all avenues in starting, yet there are still many obstacles to be encountered before the rough journey is ended. The younger women are starting with great advantages over us. They have the results of our experience; they have superior opportunities for edu-