Crane, Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw, Mrs. Raymond Brown, the splendidly
executive president of our New York State Suffrage Association, and my
benefactress, Mrs. George Howard Lewis of Buffalo. To all of them,
and to thousands of others, I make my grateful acknowledgment of
indebtedness for friendship and for help.

XVI. COUNCIL EPISODES

I have said much of the interest attending the international meetings
held in Chicago, London, Berlin, and Stockholm. That I have said less
about those in Copenhagen, Geneva, The Hague, Budapest, and other
cities does not mean that these were less important, and certainly the
wonderful women leaders of Europe who made them so brilliant must not be
passed over in silence.

First, however, the difference between the Suffrage Alliance meetings
and the International Council meetings should be explained. The Council
meetings are made up of societies from the various nations which are
auxiliary to the International Council--these societies representing all
lines of women's activities, whether educational, industrial, or
social, while the membership, including more than eleven million women,
represents probably the largest organization of women in the world.
The International Suffrage Alliance represents the suffrage interest
primarily, whereas the International Council has only a suffrage
department. So popular did this International Alliance become after
its formation in Berlin by Mrs. Catt, in 1904, that at the Copenhagen
meeting, only three years later, more than sixteen different nations
were represented by regular delegates.

It was unfortunate, therefore, that I chose this occasion to make a
spectacular personal failure in the pulpit. I had been invited to
preach the convention sermon, and for the first time in my life I had an
interpreter. Few experiences, I believe, can be more unpleasant than to
stand up in a pulpit, utter a remark, and then wait patiently while it
is repeated in a tongue one does not understand, by a man who is
putting its gist in his own words and quite possibly giving it his own
interpretative twist. I was very unhappy, and I fear I showed it, for I
felt, as I looked at the faces of those friends who understood Danish,
that they were not getting what I was giving them. Nor were they, for
I afterward learned that the interpreter, a good orthodox brother, had
given the sermon an ultra-orthodox bias which those who knew my creed
certainly did not recognize. Th