Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/267

 because they are not strong enough. They do not get churches that can afford to send them to Europe on a three months' vacation once a year. Miss Oliver was not only the minister and the minister's wife, but she started at least a dozen reforms and undertook to carry them all out. She was attacked by that influential Methodist paper, the Christian Advocate, edited by the Rev. Dr. James M. Buckley, who declared that he would destroy her influence in the church, and so with that great organ behind him he attacked her. She had that to fight, the world to fight and the devil to fight, and she broke down in health. She went abroad to recover, but came home only to die.

The death of those less widely known was touchingly referred to by women of the different States. Miss Anthony closed the services by saying: "I am just informed that we must add to this list the revered name of Abby Hopper Gibbons, of four-score-and-ten, who with her father, Isaac T. Hopper, formed the Women's Prison Association, and who has stood for more than the allotted years of man the sentinel on the watch-tower to guard unfortunate women and help them back into womanly living."

At the first evening session Miss Anthony, in her president's address, answered the question, "What has been gained by the forty years' work?" She called attention to the woman who had preached the day before, ordained by an orthodox denomination; to the women alternate delegates to the late National Republican Convention; to the recommendation of Gov. Roswell P. Flower that women should be delegates to the approaching New York Constitutional Convention. She pointed out rapidly many other straws showing the direction of the wind, saying: "Wendell Phillips said what he wanted to do on the abolition question was to turn Congress into an anti-slavery debating society. That is what we have done with every educational, industrial, religious and political body—we have turned them all into debating societies on the woman question."

U. S. Senator Joseph M. Carey (Wy.) sent a letter reaffirming his conviction that the granting of full political rights to women would be for the best interests of the country. Mr. Blackwell sketched the successive extensions of suffrage to women, and set forth the special importance of their trying to secure the Municipal and the Presidential franchises, both of