e question of its repeal and have since secured it. I heard
Mrs. Butler speak in many of her society meetings as well as on other
occasions. Her style was not unlike that one hears in Methodist camp
meetings from the best cultivated of that sect; her power lies in her
deeply religious enthusiasm. In London we met Emily Faithful, who had
just returned from a lecturing tour in the United States, and were much
amused with her experiences. Having taken prolonged trips over the whole
country, from Maine to Texas, for many successive years, Miss Anthony
and I could easily add the superlative to all her narrations.

It was a pleasant surprise to meet the large number of Americans usually
at the receptions of Mrs. Peter Taylor. Graceful and beautiful, in full
dress, standing beside her husband, who evidently idolized her, Mrs.
Taylor appeared quite as refined in her drawing room as if she had never
been exposed to the public gaze while presiding over a suffrage
convention. Mrs. Taylor is called the mother of the suffrage movement.
The reform has not been carried on in all respects to her taste, nor on
what she considers the basis of high principle. Neither she nor Mrs.
Jacob Bright has ever been satisfied with the bill asking the rights of
suffrage for "widows and spinsters" only. To have asked this right "for
all women duly qualified," as but few married women are qualified
through possessing property in their own right, would have been
substantially the same, without making any invidious distinctions. Mrs.
Taylor and Mrs. Bright felt that, as married women were the greatest
sufferers under the law, they should be the first rather than the last
to be enfranchised. The others, led by Miss Becker, claimed that it was
good policy to make the demand for "spinsters and widows," and thus
exclude the "family unit" and "man's headship" from the discussion; and
yet these were the very points on which the objections were invariably
based. They claimed that, if "spinsters and widows" were enfranchised,
they would be an added power to secure to married women their rights.
But the history of the past gives us no such assurance. It is not
certain that women would be more just than men, and a small privileged
class of aristocrats have long governed their fellow-countrymen. The
fact that the spinsters in the movement advocated such a bill, shows
that they were not to be trusted in extending it. John Stuart Mill, too,
was always opposed to the