Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/247

pioneers." She referred with pride to the fact that this organization, with nearly 100 clubs and about 32,000 members, was the first Federation of Women's Clubs to admit suffrage societies. Mrs. Lucretia L. Blankenburg, president of the Pennsylvania Suffrage Association and officer of the General Federation, brought its greeting, the first it had ever sent to a national suffrage convention. Mrs. Frances W. Graham, president of the New York State Woman's Christian Temperance Union, gave its greeting and spoke of the close cooperation which had always existed between the workers for temperance and suffrage. Dr. Shaw asked that she would convey the cordial greetings and best wishes of the association to the National W. C. T. U., to whose convention in Denver she was en route. Mrs. Ella Hawley Crossett, for the sixth term president of the New York State Suffrage Association, united with Dr. Shaw in responding to the welcoming addresses and spoke with deep feeling of the courage and persistence of the pioneers and of the pride with which the State where the movement for woman suffrage had its birth welcomed the convention to celebrate the event.

Miss Emily Howland of Sherwood, N. Y., reformer, educator and philanthropist, a co-worker and friend of the early suffragists, gave a delightful address on The Spirit of 1848, "herself a living embodiment of that spirit," in which she said:

"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends!" These are the words that come to me as I essay to speak of the Spirit of '48! Was it not something of this love which inspired that immortal Declaration made at the Woman's Rights Convention on July 19-20, 1848? "This," says Mrs. Stanton in her autobiography, 'was the initial step in the most momentous reform that has yet been launched upon the world—the first organized protest against the injustice which had brooded for ages over the character and destiny of one-half of the race. No words could express our astonishment on finding a few days afterward that what seemed to us so timely, so rational and so sacred should be a subject for sarcasm and ridicule in the entire press of the nation. The anti-slavery papers alone stood by us manfully."

The Declaration had been signed by many, the audiences being large, but when pulpit and press ridiculed and reproved do we marvel that one by one the women withdrew their names and "joined the persecutors?" Much I fear that our own organization would

shrivel to pitiful proportions if today submitted to the ordeal from which they recoiled. Indeed even Mrs. Stanton confessed that if