AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION.
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sponse to the welcome of the suffrage association said: "It gives us great pleasure to visit your beautiful city and fertile State. It gives us pleasure not because your State is fertile and your city beautiful but because it is in these Western States that there is most hope of the growth of the woman suffrage movement. The older States are what old age is in the human frame, something that is difficult to change; but where there is young blood there is hope and the progress of a new idea is more rapid."
Mrs. Howe, responding to the welcome of the citizens, said some one had spoken of woman suffrage as a hobby; she questioned whether the opposition to suffrage was not the hobby and suffrage the horse. The discussion of these great questions was doing much to make the women of the country one in feeling, and to do away with sectional prejudices. A most cordial hearing was given to the Woman's Congress lately held at Louisville, Ky., and especially to the woman suffrage symposium which occupied one evening. Mrs. Howe spoke of the wonderful, providential history of Kansas, and the way in which a new and unexpected chapter of the country's history opened out from the experience of the young Territory. She remembered when the name of Kansas was the word which set men's blood at the East tingling. She continued:
You men of Kansas, you who have been bought with a price, noble men have worked and suffered and died that you might be free. For you Charles Sumner fell in the Senate of the United States. He fell to rise again, but others fell for whom there was no rising. Having received this great gift of freedom, pray you go on to make it perfect. You may think that you have a free State, well founded and stable, and that it will stand; but remember that the State, like the Church, is not a structure to be built and set up but a living organism to grow and move. Its life is progress and freedom. Do not think that you can stay this great tide of progress by saying, "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther." No such limitation is possible. That tide will oversweep every obstacle set in its way.
Why, men of Kansas, having been so nobly endowed at the beginning, have you let the younger children in the nursery of our dear mother country learn lessons that you have not learned? Are the women of Wyoming and Washington better than your women, and do the men of those Territories love their women better than you love yours? You will say "no," with indignation; but remember that love is shown in deeds far more than in words. Until you make your women free I must hold that you do not love them as well as those do who have given their mothers and sisters the gift of
