ic, and yet as I watched its march in this
centennial year, its gala day--_not a tribute_ marked its
gratitude to her who had proved its savior and friend, in the
hour of peril.

Again, came the colored man in rank and file--and in thought I
saw the fifteenth-amendment jubilee, which proclaimed his
emancipation. As banner after banner passed me, with the name of
Garrison, of Phillips, of Douglass, I looked in vain for the name
of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose one book, "Uncle Tom's
Cabin"--did more to arouse the whole world to the horrors of
slavery, than did the words or works of any ten men. I searched
for a tribute to Lucretia Mott and other women of that conflict,
but none appeared. And so to-day, standing here with heart and
brain convulsed with all these memories and scenes, can you
wonder that we are stirred to profoundest depths, as we review
the base ingratitude of this nation to its women? It has taxed
its women, and asked the women, in whose veins flows the blood of
their Pilgrim and Revolutionary mothers, to assist by money,
individual effort and presence, to make it a year of jubilee for
the proclamation of a ransomed male nationality. Zenobia, in
gilded chains it may be, but chains nevertheless, marches through
the streets of Philadelphia to-day, an appendage of the chariot
wheels which proclaim the coming of her king, her lord, her
master, whether he be white or black, native or foreign-born,
virtuous or vile, lettered or unlettered. As the state-house
bell, with its inscription, "Proclaim liberty--throughout the
land, unto all the inhabitants thereof," pealed forth its
jubilant reiteration,--the daughters of Jefferson, of Hancock, of
Adams, and Patrick Henry, who have been politically outlawed and
ostracized by their own countrymen, here had no liberty
proclaimed for them; they are not inhabitants, only sojourners in
the land of their fathers, and as the slaves in meek subjection
to the will of the master placed the crown of sovereignty on the
alien from Europe, Asia, Africa, she is asked to sing in dulcet
strains: "The king is dead--long live the king!"

And thus to-day we round out the first century of a professed
republic,--with woman figuratively representing freedom--and yet
all free, save woman.

For five long hou