and many threats to write a history
which should be free from all imperfections, the fact remains that,
although fifty years have passed since the inception of the great
movement to secure equal rights for women, there never has been another
attempt to preserve the story. But for Miss Anthony's careful collecting
and saving of newspaper accounts, manuscripts of speeches, published
reports and the correspondence of half a century, her persistent and
determined effort for ten years to have them put into readable shape,
and Mrs. Stanton's fine ability to do it, the student never would have
been able to trace the evolution of woman from a chattel in the eye of
the law to a citizen with legal and social rights very nearly equal to
those of man. While there is necessarily some repetition, so long a time
elapsing between the writing of the different volumes, and perhaps a
little prolixity, there is not a dull page in the whole work and the
reader will find it difficult to reach a place where she is willing to
stop. It contains a resume of early conditions; the persecutions endured
by the pioneers in the struggle for freedom; the progress in each
separate State, and in foreign countries; the action taken by different
legislatures and congresses; the grand arguments made for equal rights;
the position of woman in church and State. Into whatever library the
student may go seeking information upon this question, it is to these
volumes he must look to find it in collected and connected form. If Miss
Anthony had done no other work but to produce this History, she would
deserve a prominent place on the list of immortal names.

It was necessary to put so high a price upon it, $15 a set in cloth and
$19.50 in leather binding, as to make a large sale impossible. Miss
Anthony did not undertake it as a money-making scheme, and when the
receipt of Mrs. Eddy's bequest enabled her to discharge all indebtedness
connected with it, she felt herself at liberty to use it as a most
valuable means of educating the people into an understanding of the
broad principle of equality of rights. At her own expense she placed the
History in over 1,000 of the libraries of Europe and America, including
the British Museum, the university libraries of Oxford, Edinburgh,
Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Finland, Melbourne, Toronto, and many of the
university and public libraries of the United States. The members of the
Senate and House Judiciary Committees in several Cong