Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/336

 hard mental laborers, but on the whole she did not look all her years, though older than most of her hearers had expected to see her. But those beaming, earnest eyes, taking in her whole audience as she talked, told of a nature tenacious of purpose and not to be daunted by any obstacle—the qualities which in her many years' work in the cause Miss Anthony has so many times manifested.

The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw devoted the most of her report as vice-president-at-large to the California campaign, as she had spent the greater part of the past year in that State. She closed by saying: "Our reception by the Californians was such as to make them forever dear to us. I wish you could have seen Miss Anthony for once walking ankle-deep in roses. It showed that the sentiment for suffrage had reached the point where its advocates not only were tolerated but honored. I used to like to see her sitting in a chair.all adorned with flowers and with a laurel crown suspended over her head, and to feel that it was woman suffrage that was crowned. The work was hard, but we all came back from California better in health and stronger in hope."

On Wednesday evening the crowd was so great it became necessary to hold an overflow meeting, which was attended by five hundred persons. Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, who was introduced as "one of Iowa's own daughters," was received with great applause. She said in part:

I have a deep and tender love for Iowa. When I cross her boundary, I always feel that I am coming home. In my travels through the West I meet many men and women who give me a warmer hand-shake because they too are from Iowa. But this State no longer occupies the first place in my heart. There are four that I love better, and every woman here feels the same. The first is Wyoming. Many pass through that State and see only a barren plain covered with sage brush, but when I cross her border, I feel a thrill as sacred as ever the crusaders felt in visiting the Holy Land. The second State is Colorado, the third Utah, and the fourth Idaho. All of us Iowa women will love these States better than our own until it shall arouse and place its laws and institutions on an equality for women and men.

We ask suffrage in order to make womanhood broader and motherhood nobler. Men and women are inextricably bound together. If we are to have a great race, we must have a great motherhood. Do you ask why people can not see this? In all history no class has been enfranchised without some selfish motive underlying. If to-day we could prove to Republicans or Democrats that every woman would vote for their party, we should be enfranchised.