of Richard Henry Lee,
and marked the wild enthusiasm of its reception, and remembered
that at its close, a document, as noble, as divine, as grand, as
historic as that, was to be presented _in silence_; an act, as
heroic, as worthy, as sublime, was to be performed in the face of
the contemptuous amazement of the assembled world, I trembled
with suppressed emotion. When Susan Anthony arose, with a look of
intense pain, yet heroic determination in her face, I silently
committed her to the Great Father who seeth not in part, to
strengthen and comfort her heroic heart, and then she was lost to
view in the sudden uprising caused by the burst of applause
instituted by General Hawley in behalf of the Brazilian emperor.
And thus at the close of the reading of a document which
repudiated kings and declared the right of every person to life,
to liberty and the pursuit of individual happiness, the American
people, applauding a crowned monarch, received _in silence_ the
immortal document and protest of its discrowned queens!

Shall I recount the emotion that swayed me, as I thought of all
that woman had done to build up this country; to sustain its
unity, to perpetuate its principles; of its self-denying and
heroic Pilgrim and revolutionary mothers; of the work of woman in
the anti-slavery cause; the agony and death of her travail in its
second birth for freedom; sustaining the nation by prayers, by
self-sacrificing contributions, by patriotic endeavors, by
encouraging words; and, reviewing the programme, and all the
attendant pageants, remembered that in these grand centennial
celebrations, when the nation rounded out its first century, _not
a tribute_, not a recognition in any shape, form or manner was
paid to woman; that upon the platform, as honored guests, sat
those who had been false in the hour of our country's peril; that
upon this historic soil, stood the now freeman, once a slave,
whose liberty and life were given him at the hands of woman; that
the inhabitants of the far off isles of the sea, India, Asia,
Africa, Europe, were gladly welcomed as free citizens, while
woman, a suppliant beggar, pleaded of one man, invested with
autocratic power, for the simple boon of presenting a protest in
silence, against her degradation, and was _denied_!