The Una_, publishing it entirely at her own expense. It took the
broadest ground claimed to-day: individual freedom in the State, the
Church, and the home; woman's equality and suffrage a natural right.
In 1859, she visited Europe for the first time, and spent a year
traveling in France, Italy, Austria, and Germany, giving her leisure
hours to picture galleries and the study of art. She made many
valuable friends on this trip, regained her health, and returned home
to work with renewed zeal for the enfranchisement of woman.

Having decided to celebrate the second decade of the National Woman
Suffrage movement, in New York, Mrs. Davis took charge of all the
preliminary arrangements, including the foreign correspondence. She
gave a good report at the opening session of the Convention, of what
had been accomplished in the twenty years, and published the
proceedings in pamphlet form, at her own expense. One of Mrs. Davis'
favorite ideas was a Woman's Congress in Washington, to meet every
year, to consider the national questions demanding popular action;
especially to present them in their moral and humanitarian bearings
and relations, while our representatives discussed them, as men
usually do, from the material, financial, and statistical points of
view. In this way only, said she, "can the complete idea on any
question ever be realized. All legislation must necessarily be
fragmentary, so long as one-half the race give no thought whatever on
the subject."

In 1871, Mrs. Davis, with her niece and adopted daughter, again
visited Europe, and pursued her studies of art, spending much time in
Julian's life studio, the only one open to women. She took lessons of
Carl Marko in Florence. When in Paris she spent hours every day
copying in the Louvre and Luxembourg. The walls of her home were
decorated with many fine copies, and a few of her own creations. Her
enthusiasm for both art and reform may seem to some a singular
combination; but with her view of life, it was a natural one.
Believing, as she did, in the realization of the ultimate equality of
the human family, and the possibility of the race sometime attaining
comparative perfection, when all would be well-fed, clothed,
sheltered, and educated; humanity in its poverty, ignorance, and
deformity, were to her but the first rude sketch on the canvas, to be
perfected by the skillful hand of the Great Artist. Hence she labored
with faith and enthusiasm to realize her ideal alik