ution. One
of these young women asked the other, when she went to town, to
pay a few bills for her and settle her taxes. Accordingly she
went to the tax office, and as she handed in the papers she
noticed written at the foot of her sister's tax bill, "Poll tax,
$1.00." She exclaimed, "Oh, when did Mrs. A. become a voter? I am
so glad Tennessee has granted suffrage to women!" "Oh, she
hasn't; it doesn't," said the young clerk with a smile. "That is
her husband's poll tax." "And why is she required to pay her
husband's poll tax?" "It is the custom," he said. She replied,
"Then Tennessee will change its custom this time. I will see the
tax collector dead and very cold before I will pay Mr. A.'s poll
tax out of my sister's property in order that he may vote, while
she is not allowed to do so!"

MISS ANTHONY: It seems to me that these Southern women are in a
state of chronic rebellion.

MRS. MERIWETHER: We are.

In closing this meeting Miss Anthony said: "Now, don't all of you come
to me to tell me how glad you are that I have worked for fifty years,
but say rather that you are going to begin work yourselves."

The delegates were eloquently welcomed in behalf of the South by
Bennett J. Conyers of Atlanta, who declared that "suffrage for women
is demanded by the divine law of human development." He said in part:

The work of Miss Anthony needs no apology. She has blazed a way
for advanced thought in her lonely course over the red-hot
plowshares of resistance. Now almost at the summit she looks back
to see following her an army with banners. May she long worship
where she stands at Truth's mountain altar, as, with the royal
sunset flush upon her brow, she catches the beckoning of the
lights twinkling on the heavenly shore.... The South is a maiden
well worthy of the allegiance of this cause, and when her aid is
given it will be as devoted as it has been reserved. The South is
the land where has lingered latest on earth the chivalry which
idealized its objects of worship. What though it may have meant
repression? Is it any wonder that the tender grace of a day that
is dead even now lingers and makes men loath to welcome change?
Perhaps it can not be told how much it has cost men to surrender
the ideal, even though it be to change it for the perfected
womanhood....