Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/307

 dense became the crowd that the doors were ordered closed and people were refused admission even before the services began. After the doors were closed the disappointed ones stood on the stairs and many of them remained in the streets. The vast congregation was made up of all classes of citizens. Every chair that could be found in the theatre had been either placed in the aisles or on the stage, and then boxes and benches were pressed into service. Many of the most prominent professional and business men were standing on the stage and in different parts of the house.

Miss Shaw gave her great sermon The Heavenly Vision. She told of the visions of the man which it depended upon himself to make reality; of the visions of the woman which were forever placed beyond her reach by the church, by society and by the laws, and closed with these words: "We ask for nothing which God can not give us. God created nature, and if our demands are contrary to nature, trust nature to take care of itself without the aid of man. It is better to be true to what you believe, though that be wrong, than to be false to what you believe, even if that belief is correct.";

Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby (D. C.) preached to more than a thousand people at the Bethel (colored) Church; Mrs. Meriwether at the Unitarian Church; Miss Yates and Miss Emily Howland (N. Y.) also occupied pulpits.

The evening programs with their formal addresses naturally attracted the largest audiences and occupied the most space in the newspapers, but the morning and afternoon sessions, devoted to State and committee reports and the business of the association, were really the life and soul of this as of all the conventions. Among the most interesting of the excellent State reports presented to the Atlanta meeting were those of New York and Kansas, because during the previous year suffrage campaigns had been carried on in those States. The former, presented by Mrs. Jean Brooks Greenleaf, State president, said in part:

The New York Constitutional Convention before whom we hopefully carried our cause—'"so old, so new, so ever true"—is a thing of the past. We presented our petition, asking that the word "male" be eliminated from the organic law, with the endorsement of over half a million citizens of the State. We laid before the convention statistics showing that outside the city of New York the property on which women pay taxes is assessed at $348,177,107; the number of women taxed, 146,806 in 571 cities and towns; not reported, 389.