s lips
as well as pens to carry instruction to the utmost.

Your friend,
GERRIT SMITH.

SARATOGA CONVENTIONS,

August, 1854-'55.

Seeing calls for two national conventions, by the friends of
Temperance, and the Anti-Nebraska movement, to be held in Saratoga the
third week of August, the State Woman Suffrage Committee decided to
embrace that opportunity to hold a convention there at the same
time.[131] As it was at the height of the fashionable season it was
thought much good might be accomplished by getting the ear of a new
class of hearers.

But after the arrangements were all made, and Miss Anthony on the
ground, she received messages from one after another of the speakers
on whom she depended, that none of them could be present. Accordingly,
encouraged by the Hon. William Hay, she decided to go through alone.
Happily, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Sarah Pellet being in Saratoga, came
forward and volunteered their services, and thus was the Convention
carried successfully through.[132] The meeting was held in St.
Nicholas Hall, which was well filled throughout, three-hundred dollars
being taken at the door. The following _resume_ of this occasion is
from the pen of Judge William Hay, in a letter to _The North Star_ of
Rochester (Frederick Douglass, editor):

THE SARATOGA CONVENTION.

Miss Sarah Pellet addressed an audience of six hundred persons in
the afternoon, most of whom returned with others to St. Nicholas
Hall in the evening, thus manifesting their satisfaction with
what they had heard and their interest in the cause, which was
farther discussed by Mrs. Gage, whose address was an elaborate
argument for the removal of woman's legal and social
disabilities. Among other authorities she quoted with judgment,
was the following from Wm. W. Story: "In respect to the powers
and rights of married women, the law is by no means abreast the
spirit of the age. Here are seen the old fossil prints of
_feudalism_. The law relating to woman tends to make every family
a barony, a monarchy, or a despotism, of which the husband is
the baron, king, or despot, and the wife the dependent, the serf,
or slave. That this is not always the fact, is not due to the
law, but to the enlarged humanity which spurns the narrow limits