as well as
foreign rulers, alike ignorant of our institutions. With free
schools and compulsory education, no one has an excuse for not
understanding the language of the country. As women are governed
by a "male aristocracy" we are doubly interested in having our
rulers able at least to read and write.

The popular objection to woman suffrage is that it would "double
the ignorant vote." The patent answer to this is, abolish the
ignorant vote. Our legislators have this power in their own
hands. There have been various restrictions in the past for men.
We are willing to abide by the same for women, provided the
insurmountable qualification of sex be forever removed....
Surely, when we compel all classes to learn to read and write and
thus open to themselves the door of knowledge not by force but by
the promise of a privilege all intelligent citizens enjoy, we are
benefactors, not tyrants. To stimulate them to climb the first
rounds of the ladder that they may reach the divine heights where
they shall be as gods, knowing good and evil, by withholding the
citizen's right to vote for a few years will be a blessing to
them as well as to the State....

Mrs. Stanton had made her last address in person to a national
convention in 1892, when she resigned the presidency of the
association--that incomparable essay on The Solitude of Self--but she
never had failed to send her annual battle cry. The one to this
convention, which began the fulfilment of her dream of a world-wide
movement for woman suffrage, was written with all her old-time logic
and forceful argument and it proved to be her last, as her long and
valuable life was ended the next November.

Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton (O.) read the paper of Mrs. Caroline
Hallowell Miller (Md.), detained at the last moment, on Why We Come
Again, in which she explained why the suffragists would continue to
come to Washington and haunt Congress until their object, a Federal
Amendment, had been attained. The humor for which Mrs. Miller, a staid
"Quaker," was noted sparkled in its sentences although she protested
that she was entirely serious. Miss Anthony introduced Henry B.
Blackwell (Mass.) with the quaint remark: "He was the husband of Lucy
Stone; I don't think he can quite represent her but he will do the
best he can!" Mr. Blackwell briefly reviewed the agitation for women
suffrage during t