of
her keen insight and executive ability, we invite all interested
in good government to give us the inspiration of their presence
in the coming convention.

In the absence of Mrs. Stanton Miss Anthony presided, opening her
address with the sentence, "Here we have stood for the last twenty-one
years, demanding of Congress to take the necessary step to secure to
the women of this nation protection in the exercise of their
constitutional right to a voice in the government." She introduced the
Hon. Albert G. Riddle (D. C.), who in 1871 had made an argument before
the Joint Judiciary Committee in favor of woman's right to vote under
the Fourteenth Amendment; and later had argued before the Supreme
Court her right to vote in the District. In the course of his remarks
he said: "All the changes in favor of woman--everything indeed that
has been achieved--has been in consequence of this contest for woman
suffrage. Its advocates began it; they traveled along with it; and all
that has been gained in the statutes of the various States and of the
United States has been by their efforts; whatever has taken a
crystallized form of irrepealable law is because of this discussion,
because of this agitation."

Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker (Conn.) read the resolution demanding a
representation of women in the Centennial Celebration of the Adoption
of the United States Constitution soon to be held in New York City.
Miss Anthony then introduced Senator Henry W. Blair (N. H.), who was
received with much applause, as the unswerving champion of woman
suffrage. In an address considering the constitutional phase of the
question, he said:

There has been such progress in the formulation of the State and
the national law that it has become necessary for the Supreme
Court of the United States to decide that we are not a sovereign
people, that we have no nation at all, in order to prevent woman
from exercising the right of suffrage throughout this country. In
that decision which deprived Mrs. Virginia L. Minor of her right,
the Supreme Court was driven to the necessity of deciding in
express terms, "The United States has no voters of its own
creation." If the United States has no voters, then the old
doctrine of State sovereignty is the true one and there is no
nation. We are subservient and subordinate to the power of the
States to-day by virtue of this decision just ex