Miss Susan B. Anthony, a well-known, indefatigable and life-long
advocate of temperance, anti-slavery, and woman's rights, has
been, since 1851, Mrs. Stanton's intimate associate in
reformatory labors. These celebrated women are of about equal
ages, but of the most opposite characteristics, and illustrate
the theory of counterparts in affection by entertaining for each
other a friendship of extraordinary strength.

Mrs. Stanton is a fine writer, but a poor executant; Miss Anthony
is a thorough manager, but a poor writer. Both have large brains
and great hearts; neither has any selfish ambition for
celebrity; but each vies with the other in a noble enthusiasm,
for the cause to which they are devoting their lives.

Nevertheless, to describe them critically, I ought to say that
opposites though they be, each does not so much supplement the
other's difficiencies as augment the other's eccentricities. Thus
they often stimulate each other's aggressiveness, and at the same
time diminish each other's discretion.

But whatever may be the imprudent utterances of the one, or the
impolitic methods of the other, the animating motives of both are
evermore as white as the light. The good that they do is by
design; the harm by accident. These two women sitting together in
their parlors, have for the last thirty years been diligent
forgers of all manner of projectiles, from fire works to
thunderbolts, and have hurled them with unexpected explosion into
the midst of all manner of educational, reformatory, religious,
and political assemblies, sometimes to the pleasant surprise and
half welcome of the members, more often to the bewilderment and
prostration of numerous victims; and in a few signal instances,
to the gnashing of angry men's teeth. I know of no two more
pertinacious incendiaries in the whole country! Nor will they
themselves deny the charge. In fact this noise-making twain are
the two sticks of a drum for keeping up what Daniel Webster
called "the rub-a-dub of agitation."

How well I remember the day I first met my life-long friend. George
Thompson and William Lloyd Garrison having announced an anti-slavery
meeting in Seneca Falls, Miss Anthony came to attend it. These
gentlemen were my guests. Walking home after the adjournment, we met
Mrs. Bloomer and Miss An