d
house and everybody was aware that the message in Mrs. Catt's
hand was the vital message of the convention. Everybody wondered
what would be its main focus. Nobody quite understood why an
address to Congress should be delivered at a mass meeting. The
latter point the speaker quickly cleared up. Once before in
suffrage history, she said, there had been an address to
Congress. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had made
it. At this moment she was but doing over what they had done a
half-century ago. She would deliver her address to Congress from
that platform to that audience and leave it to the printed page
to carry the message on into the sacred halls themselves.

Then, with Senate and House visualized by the directness of her
appeal to them and by the sharp limning of her argument, she
pleaded for democracy, arraigned the obstructionists of the
Federal Suffrage Amendment, showed up the harsh inconsistencies,
the waste of time and energy and money asked of women in State
referenda, clarified the reasons for establishing suffrage by the
Federal route and brought the whole case into high relief by
resting the responsibility where it belongs--on the Congress of
the United States.

The speaker, never ornate in rhetoric or delivery, seemed to
withdraw her personality utterly, so that there was left only the
mental and spiritual content of her message. To hear her was like
listening to abstract thought, warmed by the fire of abstract
conviction. To see her was like looking at sheer marble,
flame-lit. Many an orator sways an audience's mind by emotional
appeal. Hers was the crowning achievement to sway an audience to
emotion by the symmetry and force of her appeal to its mind.
Again and again salvos of applause stopped her for a moment but
again and again the steady rhythm of her strong voice regained
control. At the end her grip on attention was so acute that a
little hush followed the last word.

The address consumed an hour and a half in delivery and made a
pamphlet of twenty-two pages when published. Up to the time the
Federal Amendment was ratified it was a part of the standard
literature of the National Association and thousands of copies were
circulated.[111] Among the subheads were these: The History of our
Country and the Theory of our Government