Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/88

 sympathy, whose expenditure of time and money and whose high social standing gave to it a strength even in those early days that one of less ability and social position and more pronounced opposition could not have secured. Mrs. Caroline E. Merrick, the pioneer suffragist of Louisiana and the lifelong friend of Miss Anthony, came in for her share of the honors of the evening. With equal grace and tenderness Miss Gordon advanced to her and offered her too the fragrant expressions of more youthful workers. For a moment Miss Anthony and Mrs. Merrick stood together, and the audience, rising to its feet in a great wave of enthusiasm, waved handkerchiefs and fans in greeting. Perhaps that precious hour of triumph, away down here in this old southern State, as she stands nearing the border land of another world, recompensed the great pioneer for much that she had borne when life was young and audiences, as she said, less sympathetic. Mrs. Merrick's remarks, also, touched a deep chord and roused the audience to a state of earnest sympathy.

Miss Anthony told of her visit to New Orleans in 1884 during the Centennial Exposition, when she was the guest of Mrs. Merrick, and spoke of Mrs. Eliza J. Nicholson, owner and editor of the Picayune, paying a tribute to her and to the gifted writer, "Catharine Cole," of its editorial staff, both now passed from earth. In Dr. Shaw's eloquent response to the greetings she said: "Nothing has given me greater hope for women and has made me prouder of women than the splendid reserve power shown by southern womanhood for the last twenty-five years. When your hearthstones were left desolate and your bravest and strongest had gone forth never to come back, your women, who had been cared for as no other women ever were cared for, who were uneducated to toil, unacquainted with business requirements, averse to them by instinct and tradition—when they had to face the world they went out uncomplaining and worked with sublime heroism.I am glad to come among you southern women and to say that you have been an inspiration to the women of the North and to whole world. The daughters of those women of twenty-five years ago are the ones who have made this splendid convention possible. Over our country now there floats only one flag but that is a flag for women as well as men. If there are any men who ought to have faith in women and in their power to dare and do it is southern men, who owe so much to southern women."

Mrs. Catt then gave her president's address of which an ex-