Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/292

 The last address of the convention was made by the Rev. Ida C. Hultin, on the Crowning Race, whose men and women should be equally free. Gov. Davis H. Waite of Colorado sent a letter in relation to the enfranchising of women the previous year, in which he said:

The Populists more than any other political party in Colorado favored equal suffrage, but many Republicans and Democrats also voted for it, and in my opinion the result may be considered as due to the enlightened public sentiment of the common people of the State. The more I consider the matter the more it grows upon me in importance, and the more I realize the fact that all the patriotism, all the intelligence and all the virtue of the commonwealth are necessary to preserve it from the corrupt and mercenary attacks made upon it from all points by corporate trusts and monopolies. Equal suffrage can not fail to encourage purity in both private and public life, and to elevate the official standard of fitness.

A letter from Mrs. May Wright Sewall, regretting her enforced absence, closed by saying:

Many of you know that the last few months I have spent in editing the papers presented at the World's Congress of Representative Women, held in Chicago last May. It is a remarkable and to me quite an unexpected fact that the papers upon the subject of Civil and Political-Reform are hardly more earnest appeals for political equality than are the addresses to be found in every other chapter. Hereafter if one asserts that the interest in the woman suffrage movement is not growing, let him be cited to this galaxy of witnesses, whose testimony is all the more valuable because in the large majority of instances it proceeds from women who never have identified themselves with it, and are not at all known as advocates of political equality. The meaning of the entire report is equality, co-operation, organization; that is, the demand made by the National Suffrage Association is the demand borne to us by the echoes of that great congress.

Among the committee reports that of Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery, Chairman of Columbian Exposition Work, attracted especial attention and was in part as follows:

There is a most valuable and interesting bit of unpublished history which seems to me to form an integral part of your committee's report. It concerns the origin of the Board of Lady Managers, and this association should be proud to be able to feel that to our president is largely due the recognition of women in official capacity at the World's Fair. The fact that women were not officially recognized during the Centennial Exposition in 1876 was a great disappointment to all interested in the advancement of woman-