of disposition and control over her property, inherited or
acquired, freed it from the claims of her husband's creditors,
and clothed her with ample legal remedies even against her
husband. Perhaps Nebraska alone of all the States, by its court
of last resort, has upheld the power of the wife to make
contracts with her husband and enforce them against him in her
own name by the appropriate legal remedies. This surely is
progress. Beyond this there lies but one field to win or fortress
to reduce. Then surely the worn soldier in the long campaign
crowned with the garlands of victory may rest from the battle.

Not many years ago, coming from Wisconsin, I think, a girl
presented herself in the Illinois courts for admission to the
bar, and after a rigid and unsparing examination she was admitted
with public compliment. She took an office in the great city of
Chicago and in the short remnant of an uncertain life so wrought
in her profession as to attain an average professional income,
and win the undivided respect and esteem of her professional
associates. And when from a far country, whither she had gone in
hope to escape a fell disease, her lifeless corpse was brought
back for sepulture, many of the foremost lawyers of Chicago
gathered about her bier and bore emphatic testimony to her
virtues as a woman and her attainments as a lawyer. To me no
greater work has been done by any American woman. When Alta
Hulett unobtrusively, silently but indomitably pressed her way to
the front of the legal profession, and established herself there,
she vindicated the right of her sex to contend for the highest
prizes of life, and left her countrywomen a legacy which will
ultimately blazon her name imperishably in the history of the
advancement of women; and every American woman who, like her,
goes to the front of any honorable occupation, employment or
profession, and stays there, becomes her coaedjutor in work and a
sharer in her reward.

Laden with the trophies of thirty years of conflict, of progress,
of measurable success, the vice-president of the National Woman
Suffrage Association and her associates present themselves to
Nebraska and ask a hearing upon the final issue, "Shall this work
be crowned by granting to women in this State the highest
pri