Page:Democratic Ideals (Olympia Brown).djvu/44

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Lecturer and Author


the spontaneity and magnetism so essential to the public speaker, and it would have been better for her reputation if she had confined herself to literature where she might have gained greater recognition than was possible on the platform.

The following beautiful paragraph will show something of her power. She wrote the Call for the Thirty -second Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900, closing with this fine paragraph, "The way up the heights of woman's advancement has been long and steep, but it has not been dreary. The consciousness of giving the world a forward movement along the path of liberty is the highest reward that is vouchsafed to human effort. The greatest men of the century have walked with us; poets have sung for us, prophets have inspired us with visions of success; statesmen have made courts and forums ring with eloquence in our behalf; stones have blossomed into roses; scorn has become applause; timidity, opposition and indifference have changed into a grand chorus of appeal for women's equality before the law. Let us then close the nineteenth century with a convention which shall be a jubilee for our successes and the preparation for the twentieth century, which is to be not man's nor woman's but humanity's."

A volume of her lectures on various sub