o the State; in each town or village a local society
auxiliary to the county. Friends desirous of forming a society should
meet, even though few in number, and organize.

CHAPTER V.

THE NATIONAL SUFFRAGE CONVENTION OF 1886.

The Eighteenth national convention met in the Church of Our Father,
Washington, D. C., Feb. 17-19, 1886, presided over by Miss Susan B.
Anthony, vice-president-at-large, with twenty-three States
represented. In her opening address Miss Anthony paid an eloquent
tribute to her old friend and co-laborer, their absent president, Mrs.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton; sketched the history of the movement for the
past thirty-six years, and described the first suffrage meeting ever
held in Washington. This had been conducted by Ernestine L. Rose and
herself in 1854, and the audience consisted of twenty or thirty
persons gathered in an upper room of a private house. To-night she
faced a thousand interested listeners.

The first address was given by Mrs. Sarah M. Perkins (O.), Are Women
Citizens? "While suffrage will not revolutionize the world," she said,
"the door of the millennium will have a little child's hand on the
latch when the mothers of the nation have equal power with its
fathers."

In the evening Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby addressed the audience on The
Relation of the Woman Suffrage Movement to the Labor Question. She
began by saying, "All revolutions of thought must be allied to
practical ends." After sketching those already attained by women, she
continued:

The danger threatens that, having accomplished all these so
thoroughly and successfully that they no longer need our help and
already scarcely own their origin, we will be left without the
connecting line between the abstract right on which we stand and
the common heart and sympathy which must be enlisted for our
cause ere it can succeed. Why is it that, having accomplished so
much, the woman suffrage movement does not force itself as a
vital issue into the thoughts of the masses? Is it not because
the ends which it most prominently seeks do not enlist the
self-interest of mankind, and those palpable wrongs which it had
in early days to combat have now almost entirely disappeared?...

We need to vitalize our movement by allying it with great
non-partisan questions, and many of these are involved in the
interests of the wage-earning classes.... We need to labor to