George thought it a very good joke when his upstart colonists
steeped their tea in the salt water of Boston harbor, but the
laugh was on their side in the long run. History has no
precedents for the elevation of woman to a civic status, but we
are making precedents every day in our conduct of popular
government. In Athens--where woman was both worshiped and
degraded--the protectress of the city was a feminine ideal whose
glorious image crowned the Parthenon with consummate beauty. In
America, where woman is beloved and respected as nowhere else in
the world--if she is only true to the ideals of private and
public virtue--if she seeks power only as a means for the highest
good of the race, the old fable of the Pellas Athenae may become
real, and the nation acknowledge with grateful joy, that the
fathers "builded better than they knew," when they placed the
figure of a woman on the dome of their Capitol at Washington.

The second Washington Convention assembled at 10 o'clock, January
19th, 1870, in Lincoln Hall. Mrs. Stanton called the assemblage to
order and invited the Rev. Samuel J. May to open the convention with
prayer. Letters were read from John Stuart Mill, Robert Purvis, Clara
Barton, and others. Miss Barton appealed to her soldier friends in
behalf of woman's right of suffrage thus:

Brothers, when you were weak, and I was strong, I toiled for you.
Now you are strong, and I am weak because of my work for you, I
ask your aid. I ask the ballot for myself and my sex, and as I
stood by you, I pray you stand by me and mine.

Mr. Purvis closed his eloquent letter with these sentiments:

Censured as I may be for apparent inconsistency, as a member and
an officer of the American Anti-Slavery Society, in approving a
movement whose leaders are opposed to the passage of the XV.
Amendment, I must be true to my own soul, to my sense of the
absolute demands of justice, and hence, I say that, much as I
desire (and Heaven knows how deeply through life I have
antagonized therefor) the possession of all my rights as an
American citizen, were I a woman, black or white, I would resist,
by every feeling of self-respect and personal dignity, any and
every encroachment of power, every act of tyranny (for such they
will be), based upon the impious, false, and infamous assumption