Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/263

 The memorial service, which was of unusual impressiveness, opened with the reading by Miss Anthony of Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's tribute to the distinguished dead of the past year who advocated equality of rights for women—George William Curtis, John Greenleaf Whittier, Ernestine L. Rose, Abby Hutchinson Patton and others. Of Mr. Curtis she said:

If the success of our cause could be assured by the high character of the men who from the beginning have identified themselves with it, woman would have been emancipated long ago. A reform advocated by Garrison, Phillips, Emerson, Alcott, Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, Samuel J. May and George William Curtis must be worthy the consideration of statesmen and bishops.

For more than one generation Mr. Curtis maintained a brave attitude on this question. As editor of Harper's Magazine, and as a popular lecturer on the lyceum platform, he was ever true to his convictions. Before the war his lecture on Fair Play for Women aroused much thought among the literary and fashionable classes. In the New York Constitutional Convention in 1867, a most conservative body, Mr. Curtis, though a young man and aware that he had but little sympathy among his compeers, bravely demanded that the word "male" should be stricken from the suffrage article of the proposed constitution. His speech on that occasion, in fact, philosophy, rhetoric and argument never has been surpassed in the English language. From the beginning of his public life to its close Mr. Curtis was steadfast on this question. Harper's Magazine for June, 1892, contains his last plea for woman and for a higher standard for political parties.

Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, exiled from Poland on account of her religious faith, married an Englishman and came to America, where she was one of the first and most eloquent of the women who spoke on the public platform. In 1836 she circulated petitions for the property rights of married women, in company with Mrs. Paulina Wright (Davis), and presented them to the New York Legislature. For forty years she was among the ablest advocates of the rights of women, lecturing also on religion, government and other subjects. Mrs. Abby Hutchinson Patton was lovingly referred to, the last but one of that family who had sung so many years for freedom, not only for the negro but for woman. Whittier, the uncompromising advocate of liberty for woman as well as for man, was eulogized in fitting terms.