ising, hall rent,
expenses of speakers, etc., were costly affairs. Before every one Miss
Anthony always received scores of letters from the other workers
begging that it might be given up for that year, insisting that for
various reasons it would be a failure, and declaring that they could
not and would not attend. Mrs. Stanton usually headed the list of the
objectors, for she hated everything connected with a convention. On the
back of one of these vehement protests, carefully filed away, is
written in Miss Anthony's penmanship, "Mrs. Stanton's chronic letter
before each annual meeting." She never paid the slightest heed to any
of these appeals, but went straight ahead, wheeled all of them into
line, engaged the speakers, raised the money and carried the convention
to a finish. When the funds were lacking she advanced them from her
own, usually ending one or two hundred dollars out of pocket. Then she
went about among the friends and secured enough to replace the loan or,
failing in this, worked so much the harder to make it up out of her
earnings.

On her way home from Washington, Miss Anthony stopped for a visit with
her loved cousin Anson Lapham and on leaving he handed her a check for
$1,000, saying, "Susan, this is not for suffrage but for thee
personally." Nevertheless she at once applied it on the debt still
hanging over her from The Revolution. Francis & Loutrel, of New York,
who had furnished her with paper, letter-heads, etc., also presented
her at this time with their receipted bill for $200.

In the winter of 1875, Miss Anthony prepared her speech on "Social
Purity" and gave it first at the Grand Opera House, Chicago, March 14,
in the Sunday afternoon Dime lecture course.[82] When she reached the
opera house the crowd was so dense she could not get inside and was
obliged to go through the engine room and up the back way to the stage.
The gentleman who was to introduce her could not make his way through
the throng and so this service was gracefully performed by "Long John"
Wentworth, who was seated on the stage. At the close of the address, to
her surprise, A. Bronson Alcott, Parker Pillsbury and A.J. Grover came
up to congratulate her. She had not known they were in the city. Mr.
Alcott said: "You have stated here this afternoon, in a fearless
manner, truths that I have hardly dared to think, much less to utter."
No other speaker, man or woman, ever had handled this question with
such boldness and severit