Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/482

 and proprietor of the Commonwealth, did good service to the woman suffrage cause in 1867 in the Topeka Record. Mr. McLennan, of the Journal, is also with us.

The whole convention was interspersed with ringing reminiscences of the heroic early history of Kansas. Mrs. S. N. Wood, who in the Border Ruffian days went through the enemy's lines and at great personal peril brought into beleaguered Lawrence the ammunition which enabled it to defend itself, came to the platform to add her good word for equal suffrage. It was a great pleasure to the officers of the association to meet her and the other early Kansas workers, many of whom, like Mrs. J. H. Slocum, of Emporia, were old personal friends.

Mrs. Anna C. Wait, president of the Kansas W. S. A. and editor of the Lincoln Beacon, gave the address of welcome in behalf of the suffragists. Referring to the first campaign for a woman suffrage amendment in 1867, when Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell spoke in forty-two counties of Kansas, Mrs. Wait said: "Nineteen years ago when you came to Kansas you found no suffrage societies and even seven years ago you would have found none. To-day, in behalf of the State W. S. A. and its many flourishing auxiliaries, I welcome these dear friends who come to us from the rock-ribbed shores of the Atlantic, from the coast of the Pacific, from the lakes of the North and from the sunny South, a veritable gathering of the clans of freedom."

Major Hudson, in his address of welcome in behalf of the city, reviewed the history of woman suffrage in Kansas, paid a tribute to the work of the pioneer suffragists, and said:

We welcome you to Kansas, because it has been good battleground for the right.We place the ballot in the hands of the foreigner who can not read or speak our language, and who knows nothing of our government; we enfranchised a slave race, most of whom can not read; and yet we deny to the women of America the ballot, which in their hands would be the strongest protection of this republic against the ignorance and vice of the great centers of our population. Give to woman the ballot, and you give her equal pay with men for the same work; you break down prejudice and open to her every vocation in which she is competent to engage; you do more—you give her an individuality, and equal right in life.

The president, the Hon. William Dudley Foulke, in his re-