r position thirty years ago, under the old
common law of England, with that we occupy under the advanced
legislation of to-day, is enough to assure us that we have passed
the boundary line--from slavery to freedom. We already see the
mile-stones of a new civilization on every highway.

Look at the department of education, the doors of many colleges
and universities thrown wide open to women; girls contending for,
yea, and winning prizes over their brothers. In the working world
they are rapidly filling places and climbing heights unknown to
them before, realizing, in fact, the dreams, the hopes, the
prophesies of the inspired women of by-gone centuries. In many
departments of learning woman stands the peer of man, and when by
higher education and profitable labor she becomes self-reliant
and independent, then she must and will be free. The moment an
individual or a class is strong enough to stand alone, bondage is
impossible. Jefferson Davis, in a recent speech, says: "A Caesar
could not subject a people fit to be free, nor could a Brutus
save them if they were fit for subjugation."

Looking back over the past thirty years, how long ago seems that
July morning when we gathered round the altar in the old Wesleyan
church in Seneca Falls! It taxes and wearies the memory to think
of all the conventions we have held, the legislatures we have
besieged, the petitions and tracts we have circulated, the
speeches, the calls, the resolutions we have penned, the
never-ending debates we have kept up in public and private, and
yet to each and all our theme is as fresh and absorbing as it was
the day we started. Calm, benignant, subdued as we look on this
platform, if any man should dare to rise in our presence and
controvert a single position we have taken, there is not a woman
here that would not in an instant, with flushed face and flashing
eye, bristle all over with sharp, pointed arguments that would
soon annihilate the most skilled logician, the most profound
philosopher.

To those of you on this platform who for these thirty years have
been the steadfast representatives of woman's cause, my friends
and co-laborers, let me say our work has not been in vain. True,
we have not yet secured the suffrage, but we have aroused public
thought to the ma