Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/218

 and said: 'She regarded this convention as probably the last she should attend and she hoped to clasp hands with many whom she has known in former years and with many whom she has not known. She has heard with joy of its success and sends you her affectionate greeting and glad congratulations." In the course of this scholarly address Mrs. Howe said:

I can well recall the years in which I felt myself averse to the participation of women in political life. The feminine type appeared to me so precious, so indispensable to humanity, that I dreaded any enlargement of its functions lest something of its charm and real power should therein be lost. I have often felt as if some sudden and unlooked for revelation had been vouchsafed to me, for at my first real contact with the suffragists of, say, forty years ago, I was made to feel that womanhood is not only static but also much more dynamic, a power to move as well as a power to stay. True womanliness must grow and not diminish, in its larger and freer exercise. Whom did I see at that first suffrage meeting, first in my experience? Lucy Stone, sweet faced and silver voiced, the very embodiment of Goethe's "eternal feminine"; William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, noble advocates of human freedom; Lucretia Mott, eloquent and beautiful in her holy old age. What did I hear? Doctrine which harmonized with my dearest aspirations, extending as it did the hope which I had supposed was for an elect and superior few to all the motherhood of the human race. The new teaching seemed to me to throw the door open for all women to come up higher, to live upon a higher plane of thought and to exercise in larger and, more varied fields the talents, wonderful indeed, to which such limited scope had hitherto been allowed. I felt, too, that the new freedom brought with it an identity of interest which formed a bond of sisterhood and that the great force of cooperation would wonderfully aid the promotion of objects dear to all true women alike

I have sat in the little chapel in Bethlehem in which tradition places the birth of the Saviour. It seems fitting that it should be adorned with offerings of beautiful things but while I mused there a voice seemed to say to me, "Look abroad! This divine child is no more, he has grown to be a man and a deliverer. Go out into the world. Find his footsteps and follow them. Work, as he did, for the redemption of mankind. Suffer as he did, if need be, derision and obloquy. Make your protest against tyranny, meanness and injustice!"

The weapon of Christian warfare is the ballot, which represents the peaceable assertion of conviction and will. Society everywhere is becoming converted to its use. Adopt it, oh, you women, with clean hands and a pure heart! Verify the best word written by the apostle; "In Christ Jesus there is neither bond nor free,