city was
extended by the widely-known "reform" Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg, who
pointed out the vast field of municipal work for women and expressed
his firm conviction of their need for the suffrage. He was followed
with a greeting by Mrs. Blankenburg, a former president of the State
Suffrage Association. Its formal welcome to the delegates was given by
the president, Mrs. Ellen H. Price, who said in part: "We hope that
you will feel at home in Pennsylvania, for the idea that has called
this organization into being--that divine passion for human
rights--actuated the great founder of our Commonwealth in setting up
his 'holy experiment in government.'" After regretting that a State
founded on so broad a conception had not applied it to women Mrs.
Price said:

We welcome you in the name of William Penn, who, antedating the
Declaration of Independence by nearly a century, enunciated in
his Frame of Government the truth that the States of today are
coming very rapidly to acknowledge: "Any Government is free to
the people under it when the laws rule and the people are a party
to those laws; anything more than this (and anything less) is
oligarchy and confusion." We welcome you in the name of our only
woman Governor, Hannah Penn, who, as we are told, for six years
managed the affairs of the infant colony wisely and well.

We welcome you in the name of the patriots who placed on our
Liberty Bell the injunction, "Proclaim Liberty throughout the
Land to all the Inhabitants Thereof"; in the name of those
ancestors of ours (yours and mine) who here gave up their lives
in that struggle to establish the principle that "taxation
without representation is tyranny" for a nation; in the name of
those uncompromising agitators who delivered their message of
liberty even at the risk of life itself, till the shackles fell
from a race enslaved; in the name of Lucretia Mott, that gentle,
that queenly champion of the downtrodden and oppressed, that
inspired preacher whose motto, "Truth for Authority, not
Authority for Truth," should be the watchword of every soul that
seeks for freedom.

We welcome you in the name of the pioneers in the education of
women, of those who gave us the first Medical College for Women,
Ann Preston, Emily Cleveland, Hannah Longshore, whose daughter is
here today--our honorary president,