use, held the mind strictly to the actual facts which gave that group of representative men and women its moral significance, its severe but picturesque unity.  Some future artist, looking back for a memorable illustration of this period, will put this new “Declaration of Independence” upon canvas, and will ransack the land for portraits of those ladies who spoke for their countrywomen at the Capitol, and of those senators and representatives who gave them audience.  Mrs. Stanton was followed by Miss Anthony, morally as inevitable and impersonal as a Greek chorus, but physically and intellectually individual, intense, original, full of humor and good nature.

The Hearth and Home, in Photographs of our Agitators, thus depicts Miss Anthony on this occasion: 

She is the Bismarck; she plans the campaigns, provides the munitions of war, organizes the raw recruits, sets the squadrons in the field.  Indeed, in presence of a timid lieutenant, she sometimes heads the charge; but she is most effective as the directing generalissimo.  Miss Anthony is a quick, bright, nervous, alert woman of fifty or so—­not at all inclined to embonpoint—­sharp-eyed, even behind her spectacles.  She presides over the treasury, she cuts the Gordian knots, and when the uncontrollables get by the ears at the conventions, she is the one who straightway drags them asunder and turns chaos to order again.  In every dilemma, she is unanimously summoned.  As a speaker, she is angular and rigid, but trenchant, incisive, cutting through to the heart of whatever topic she touches.

Mrs. Hooker wrote:  “There were congratulations without stint; but Sumner, grandest of all, approaching us said in a deep voice, really full of emotion:  ’I have been in this place, ladies, for twenty years; I have followed or led in every movement toward liberty and enfranchisement; but this meeting exceeds in interest anything I ever have witnessed.’” In her weekly letter to the Independent, Mary Clemmer wrote of this convention: 

I am glad to say that it was not mongrel—­in part a dramatic reading, in part a concert, and in part an organ advertisement; but wholly a convention whose leaders, in dignity and intellect, were fully the peers of the men whose councils they besieged and arraigned.  There was Mrs. Stanton—­smiling, serene, and motherly—­just the woman whose hand laid upon a young man’s arm, whose voice speaking to him, could do so much to hold him back from evil.  There was Susan Anthony—­anxious, earnest and importunate, sarcastic, funny and unconventional as ever.  Among all the company, “Susan” is the most violently and the most unjustly abused.  To be sure, she can be very provocative of such speech.  She sometimes has a lawless way of talking and acting, which men think wonderfully fascinating in a belle, but utterly unforgivable in a plain, middle-aged woman.  Moreover, “Susan’s” utter abnegation to her cause, her passion for it, sometimes