to report their
work for equal rights and to plan more for the future. One with a
pleasant, honest face and wistful brown eyes, had been lecturing
in the interest of the amendment in the country districts of New
York, riding from village to village in an open sleigh, with the
thermometer many degrees below zero, and speaking sometimes in
unwarmed halls. She did not expect to take a day's rest until the
6th of next November, and then if the amendment carried, she said
quietly, she should be willing to lie down and die....

It is pleasant also to note the increasing number of bright,
sensible, earnest young women coming from all parts of the
country to aid the older workers and to close up their thinning
ranks. The sight would be a revelation to that Massachusetts
legislator who was lately reported as saying that the petitioners
who had been asking for suffrage for so many years were fast
dying off, and soon there would be none left. He would have seen
how greatly he was reckoning without his host--or his hostesses.
A sound and righteous reform does not die with any leader,
however beloved.

The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw pronounced the invocation at the opening
session. In the course of her president's address Miss Susan B.
Anthony said:

For the twenty-sixth time we have come together under the shadow
of the Capitol, asking that Congress shall take the necessary
steps to secure to the women of the nation their right to a voice
in the national government as well as that of their respective
States. For twelve successive Congresses we have appeared before
committees of the two Houses making this plea, that the
underlying principle of our Government, the right of consent,
shall have practical application to the other half of the people.
Such a little simple thing we have been asking for a quarter of a
century. For over forty years, longer than the children of Israel
wandered through the wilderness, we have been begging and praying
and pleading for this act of justice. We shall some day be
heeded, and when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution
of the United States, everybody will think it was always so, just
exactly as many young people believe that all the privileges, all
the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always
were h