greet the foreign guests in the name of the International Council of Women, of which she was president, was detained until later. Mrs. Catt with words of highest eulogy introduced Miss Barton, who said:
Ladies of Europe, if a hundred tongues were mine they could not speak the glad welcome in our hearts. It is an epoch in the history of the world that your coming marks. For the first time within the written history of mankind have the women of the nations left their homes and assembled in council to declare the position of women before the world, bringing to national and international view the injustice and the folly of the barriers which ignorance has created and tradition fostered and preserved through the unthinking ages until they came to be held not only as a part of the natural laws and rights of man but as the immutable decrees of Divinity itself. . . . If woman alone had suffered under these mistaken traditions, if she could have borne the evil by herself, it would have been less pitiful, but her brother man, in the laws he created and ignorantly worshipped, has suffered with her. He has lost her highest help; he has crippled the intelligence he needed; he has belittled the very source of his own being and dwarfed the image of his Maker.
Ladies, there is a propriety in your crossing the seas to hold the first council in America, for it was in this new untrammeled land of freedom, free birth, free thought and free speech that the first outspoken notes were given, the first concerted action taken toward the release of woman, the enlightenment of man as a lawmaker, and the attention of the world directed to the injustice, unwisdom and folly of the code under which it lived. It was here that the first hard blows were struck. It was here the paths were marked out that have been trodden with bleeding feet for half a century, until at length the blows no longer rebound and the hands of the grateful, loving womanhood of the world struggle for a place to scatter roses in the paths which erstwhile were flint and thorns; and an admiring world of women and men alike breathe in tones of respect, gratitude and love the names of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Miss Anthony, I am glad to stand beside you while I tell these women from the other side of the world who has brought them here. This, ladies of Europe, is your great prototype—this the woman who has trodden the trackless fields of the pioneer till the thorns are buried in roses; this, the woman who has lived to hear the hisses turn to dulcet strains of music; the woman who has dared to plead for every good cause under heaven, who opened her door to the
