attempting it; but if so, how much more do they degrade their sex
when they go out of the way to ask us to believe that they are
intimate with a corruption infinitely more debasing and more
destructive? The best lecture a woman can give the community on
"moral purity" is the eloquent one of a spotless life. The best
discourse she can furnish us on the sad "evil" alluded to is the
sincerity of her profound ignorance of the subject.

A woman suffrage bill was under consideration by the legislature of
Iowa and Miss Anthony felt that missionary work ought to be done in
that State, so she wrote to the friends in one hundred different towns,
offering to speak for $25 or one-half the gross receipts. Sixty of them
accepted and during the spring and autumn of 1875 she filled these
engagements, the sixty lectures averaging $30 apiece. In order to reach
the different places she had to take trains at all hours of the night,
occasionally to ride in a freight car, sometimes to drive twenty-five
or thirty miles across country in mud and snow and prairie winds, and
frequently to go on the platform without having eaten a mouthful or
changed her dress. Even these ills were not so hard to bear as the
cold, dirty rooms, hard beds, and poorly cooked food sometimes found in
small hotels. Frequently she had to sit by the kitchen stove all day as
not a bedroom would have a fire and the only sitting-room contained the
bar and was black with tobacco smoke. The path of the lecturer is
uphill, over stony roads, with briar hedges on both sides.

While Miss Anthony was in attendance at the May Suffrage Anniversary in
New York, a telegram came announcing that her brother Daniel R., of
Leavenworth, had been shot and fatally wounded. Her friends feeling
that they could not go through with the meeting without her, retained
the telegram until after her speech in the evening, and then she could
get no train before the next day. She did not go to bed that night but,
in the midst of her grief, she examined every bill for the convention
and put each in an envelope with the money to pay it. In the early
morning she took a local train for Albany and stopped off to bid a last
farewell to her old friend, Lydia Mott, who was dying of consumption.
Her sisters met her at the Rochester station with wrapper, slippers and
comfortable things for the sickroom, and she learned that her brother
was still alive. Telegrams came to her at intervals du