aw, Mrs. Crossett and Mrs. Allison S.
Capwell, president of the Erie County Suffrage Association.

At the evening session Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Miller (N. Y.), presided,
daughter of Gerrit Smith, who was a staunch advocate of woman suffrage
from the time the movement for it began. Hundreds were turned away for
lack of room. The convention was officially welcomed to the city by
Mayor J. N. Adams and the welcome on the part of the State was
expressed by Senator Henry W. Hill, a consistent supporter of the
legislative work for suffrage. The principal feature of the evening
was the president's address of Dr. Shaw, of whom the report in the
Buffalo _Express_ said: "The Rev. Anna Howard Shaw has set a new
standard for womanhood. She is one of the most wonderful women of her
time, alert, watchful, magnetic, earnest, with a mind as quick for a
joke as for the truth. She points her arguments with epigrams and tips
the arrows of her persuasion with a jest.... Even the unbelievers are
carried away with her brilliancy, eloquence and mental grasp." There
was no adequate report of her address but she began by saying:

We are scarcely able today to understand what those brave
pioneers endured to secure the things which we accept as a matter
of course. They started the greatest revolution the world has
ever witnessed. During these last sixty years more changes have
been wrought for the benefit of women, more opportunities for
education have been secured and more all-round enlightenment than
in the 6,000 years preceding. There are women who accept these
advantages and the positions that have been obtained because of
this early movement who have no conception of what it has meant
to open the highways of progress for them. Some of those who
oppose the suffrage say: "These things would have come; men would
have given woman these opportunities as civilization advanced."
Why did they not come sooner if men were so willing? Why should
they have grown more in the last sixty years than in all the
years before?... But the women in all this long time of struggle
have not stood entirely alone. There have always been some men to
stand by their side and they owed it to do so, for ever since the
world began women have stood by men in their efforts to achieve
the right. Never was there a great leader who had not some woman
by his side. Woman was first a