eration, substituting reason for ridicule, sympathy for
sneers. I urge the young women especially to prepare themselves
to take up the work so soon to fall from our hands. You have had
opportunities for education such as we had not. You hold to-day
the vantage-ground we have won by argument. Show now your
gratitude to us by making the uttermost of yourselves, and by
your earnest, exalted lives secure to those who come after you a
higher outlook, a broader culture, a larger freedom than have yet
been vouchsafed to woman in our own happy land.

Congratulatory letters[39] and telegrams were received from all
portions of the United States and from the old world. Space admits
the publication of but a few, yet all breathed the same hopeful
spirit and confidence in future success. Abigail Bush, who presided
over the first Rochester convention, said:

No one knows what I passed through upon that occasion. I was born
and baptized in the old Scotch Presbyterian church. At that time
its sacred teachings were, "if a woman would know anything let
her ask her husband at home." * * * I well remember the incidents
of that meeting and the thoughts awakened by it. * * * Say to
your convention my full heart is with them in all their
deliberations and counsels, and I trust great good to women will
come of their efforts.

Ernestine L. Rose, a native of Poland, and, next to Frances Wright,
the earliest advocate of woman's enfranchisement in America, wrote
from England:

How I should like to be with you at the anniversary--it reminds
me of the delightful convention we had at Rochester, long, long
ago--and speak of the wonderful change that has taken place in
regard to woman. Compare her present position in society with the
one she occupied _forty_ years ago, when I undertook to
emancipate her from not only barbarous laws, but from what was
even worse, a barbarous public opinion. No one can appreciate the
wonderful change in the social and moral condition of woman,
except by looking back and comparing the past with the present. *
* * Say to the friends, Go on, go on, halt not and rest not.
Remember that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" and of
right. Much has been achieved; but the main, the vital thing, has
yet to come. The suffrage is the magic key to the statute--the
insignia of