direct it into channels of true patriotism, but in
the future, with all the elements of discontent now gathering
from foreign countries, you will have the scenes of the French
Commune repeated in our land. What women, exasperated with a
sense of injustice, have done in dire extremities in the nations
of the Old World, they will do here....

I will leave it to your imagination to picture to yourselves how
you would feel if you had had a case in court, a bill before some
legislative body or a political aspiration for nearly half a
century, with a continual succession of adverse decisions, while
law and common justice were wholly on your side. Such, honorable
gentlemen, is our case....

In the history of the race there has been no struggle for liberty
like this. Whenever the interest of the ruling classes has
induced them to confer new rights on a subject class it has been
done with no effort on the part of the latter. Neither the
American slave nor the English laborer demanded the right of
suffrage. It was given in both cases to strengthen the Liberal
party. The philanthropy of the few may have entered into those
reforms, but political expediency carried both measures. Women,
on the contrary, have fought their own battles and in their
rebellion against existing conditions have inaugurated the most
fundamental revolution the world has ever witnessed. The
magnitude and multiplicity of the changes involved make the
obstacles in the way of success seem almost insurmountable....

Society is based on this fourfold bondage of woman--Church,
State, Capital and Society--making liberty and equality for her
antagonistic to every organized institution. Where, then, can we
rest the lever with which to lift one-half of humanity from these
depths of degradation, but on "that columbiad of our political
life--the ballot--which makes every citizen who holds it a full
armed monitor?"

Miss Anthony then introduced a number of the foreign delegates who had
been in attendance at the National Council. Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant
of England, in an eloquent address, said:

I stand here as the grandniece of one of the greatest orators and
clearest and wisest statesmen that Europe has known, Edmund
Burke. It seems to me an almost overwhelming humility that I
should be com