onventions, having never learned the rules of debate. I was obliged to
address large audiences, having been accustomed to use my voice only in
parlors. Gradually all this bettered itself. I became familiar with the
order of proceedings, and learned to modulate my voice. More important
even than these things, I learned something of the range of popular
sympathies, and of the power of apprehension to be found in average
audiences. All of these experiences, the failures, the effort, and the
final achievement, were most useful to me.

In years that followed I gave what I could to the cause, but all that I
gave was repaid to me a thousandfold. I had always had to do with women
of character and intelligence, but I found in my new friends a clearness
of insight, a strength and steadfastness of purpose, which enabled them
to take a position of command, in view of the questions of the hour.

Among the manifold interests which now opened up before me, the cause of
woman suffrage was for a time predominant. The novelty of the topic in
the mind of the general public brought together large audiences in
Boston and in the neighboring towns. Lucy Stone's fervent zeal, always
guided by her faultless feeling of propriety, the earnest pleading of
her husband, the brilliant eloquence and personal magnetism of Mary A.
Livermore,--all these things combined to give to our platform a novel
and sustained attraction. Noble men, aye, the noblest, stood with us in
our endeavor,--some, like Senator Hoar and George S. Hale, to explain
and illustrate the logical sequence which should lead to the recognition
of our citizenship; others, like Wendell Phillips, George William
Curtis, and Henry Ward Beecher, able to overwhelm the crumbling defenses
of the old order with the storm and flash of their eloquence.

We acted, one and all, under the powerful stimulus of hope. The object
which we labored to accomplish was so legitimate and rational, so
directly in the line of our religious belief, of our political
institutions, that it appeared as if we had only to unfold our new
banner, bright with the blazon of applied Christianity, and march on to
victory. The black man had received the vote. Should the white woman be
less considered than he?

During the recent war the women of our country had been as ministering
angels to our armies, forsaking homes of ease and luxury to bring succor
and comfort to the camp-hospital and battlefield. Those who tarried at
ho