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NATIONAL-AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1900.
353

from the National Council of Women of the United States to this International Congress in London, in which she said:

During the last seventeen years there has been a perfect revolution in England. When Mrs. Stanton and I went there for the first time, in 1883, just a few families were not afraid of us—the Brights, Peter Taylor's household, and some of the old abolitionists who knew all about us. When it was proposed to get up a testimonial meeting for us, even the officers of the suffrage societies did not dare to sign the invitation. They thought we Americans were too radical. ....

This time when we reached London we were the recipients of testimonials not only from the real, radical suffrage people, but also from the conservatives. At that magnificent Queen's Hall meeting of the Suffrage Association, with Mrs. Fawcett presiding, three or four thousand people packed the hall. It was a representative gathering. Australia and New Zealand were there to speak for themselves, and they had me to speak for the United States. I tried to have them call on Miss Shaw instead, but they would not do it. ....

Every young woman who is to-day enjoying the advantages of free schools and opportunities to earn a living and the other enlarged rights for women, is a child of the woman suffrage movement. This larger freedom has broadened and strengthened women wonderfully. At the end of the Council, Lady Aberdeen, who had been its president for six years, in a published interview summing up the work of the women who had been present, said there was no denying that the English-speaking women stood head and shoulders above all the others in their knowledge of Parliamentary law, and that at the very top were those of the United States and Canada—the two freest parts of the world. I said: "If the women of the United States, with their free schools and all their enlarged liberties, are not superior to women brought up under monarchical forms of government, then there is no good in liberty." It is because of this freedom that Europeans are always struck with the greater self-poise, self-control and independence of American women. These characteristics will be still more marked when we have mingled more with men in their various meetings. It is only by the friction of intellect with intellect that these desirable qualities can be gained.

The public sessions of the Council were all that heart could wish. I was present at only a few of them because the business meetings came at the same hour, and were held miles away. But every day people would say to me, "Miss Anthony, you yourself could not have made a stronger suffrage speech than So-and-So made to-day in such-and-such a section"—industrial, professional, etc. In the educational section, one of the best speeches was made by Miss Brownell, dean of Sage College, Cornell University, on co-education.

It was a great occasion. Here were the advocates of this movement for absolutely equal rights received and entertained by the