was a sweet oasis in the severe monotony of a life which had been filled always with hard work, criticism and misrepresentation, although it was only a public expression of the numerous and strong friendships which had been many times manifested in private. The birthday celebration served also to disprove the oft-repeated assertion that all women conceal their age, but though Miss Anthony made this frank avowal of her fifty years, there was scarcely a newspaper which did not introduce its comments with the usual silly and threadbare remarks.
After the people began to recover in a social, intellectual and financial way from the effects of the Civil War, the lyceum bureau became a marked feature in literary life. The principal bureaus were in New York, Boston and Chicago. Their managers engaged the best speakers and each season marked out a route, made the appointments, advertised extensively and sent them throughout the country. They paid excellent prices, assuming all responsibility, and engagements with them were considered very desirable. Under the management of the New York bureau, Mrs. Stanton began a tour in November, 1869. Miss Anthony at this time, while well-known from one end of the country to the other, had not gained a reputation as a platform orator. She thoroughly distrusted her own power to make a sustained speech of an entire evening, and at all conventions had placed others on the program for the principal addresses, presided herself, if necessary, and kept everything in motion.
By the winter of 1870, however, the bureau began to receive applications from all parts of the United States for lectures from her, and Mrs. Stanton being ill for a month, Miss Anthony went as her substitute. She proved so acceptable that in February, March and April she was engaged by the bureau for many places in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, and received a considerable sum for her services, besides securing a number of subscribers and some liberal donations for The Revolution. In her journal she speaks of the good audiences, the enthusiasm and the many prominent callers at most of the places. At Mattoon she had a day and a night with Anna Dickinson and wrote: "I found her the most weary and worn I had ever seen her, and desperately tired of the lecture field. Her devotion to me is marvelous. She is like my loving and loved child."
At Peoria, the editor of the Democratic paper stated that the laws of Illinois were better for women than for men. Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, whom she never had seen, was in the audience, and sent a note to the president of the meeting, asking that Miss Anthony should not answer the editor but give him that privilege. He then took up the laws, one after another, and, illustrating by cases in his own practice, showed in his eloquent manner how cruelly unjust they were to women and proved how necessary it was that women should have a voice in making them. He also offered the following resolution, which was unanimously adopted: "We pledge ourselves, irrespective of party, to use all honorable means to make the women of America the equals of men before the law."
In Detroit Rev. Justin Fulton occupied one evening in opposition to woman suffrage, and Miss Anthony replied to him the next. An audience of a thousand gathered in Young Men's Hall at each meeting. The Free Press had a most scurrilous review of the debate in which it said:
The speakeress rattled on in this strain until a late hour, saying nothing new, nothing noble, not a word that would give one maid or mother a purer or better thought. She drew no pictures of love in the household—she did not seem to think that man and wife could even stay under the same roof. She was not content that any woman should be a bashful, modest woman, but wanted them to be like her, to think as she thought.... People went there to see Susan B. Anthony, who has achieved an evanescent reputation by her strenuous endeavors to defy nature. Not one woman in a hundred cares to vote, cares aught for the ballot, would take it with the degrading influences it would surely bring.... Old, angular, sticking to black stockings, wearing spectacles, a voice highly suggestive of midnight Caudleism at poor Anthony, if he ever comes around, though he never will. If all woman's righters look like that, the theory will lose ground like a darkey going through a cornfield in a light night. If she had come out and plainly said, "See here, ladies, see me, I am the result of twenty years of constant howling at man's tyranny," there would never have been another "howl" uttered in Detroit. Or, if she had plainly said, in so many words, "I am going to lecture on bosh, for the sake of that almighty half-dollar per head—take it as bosh," people would have admired her candor, though forming the same conclusions without her assistance....
Myra Bradwell, the able editor of the Chicago Legal News, paid the following tribute: "Miss Anthony is terribly in earnest on this suffrage question. We fully agree with her that the great battle-ground in the first instance should be in Congress.... She is now fifty, and the best years of her life have been devoted solely to the cause of woman. She has never turned aside from this object but has always been in the field, defending her principles against all assaults with an ability which has not only won the admiration of her friends but the respect of her enemies."
She made many new acquaintances on this tour, and one entry in the diary is: "Quite a novel feature this—to have people quarrel as to who shall have the pleasure of entertaining me as their guest!" She returned to New York on Saturday, April 30, and on Sunday the diary says: "Spent the day at Mrs. Tilton's and heard Beecher preach a splendid sermon on 'Visiting the Sins of the Parents on the Children.'"
Various friends of the woman suffrage cause had decided that something must be done to unite the two national organizations. An editorial in the Independent to this effect was followed by a call for a conference to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, April 6, signed by Theodore Tilton, Phoebe Cary, Rev. John Chadwick and a number of others. The meeting was duly held, and the venerable Lucretia Mott, who now rarely left home, came all the way from Philadelphia to use her influence toward a reconciliation. Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton were lecturing in the West and the former telegraphed: "The entire West demands united national organization for the Sixteenth Amendment, this very congressional session, and so does Susan B. Anthony." Mrs. Stanton wrote to the conference: "I will do all I can for union. If I am a stumbling-block I will gladly resign my office. Having fought the world twenty years, I do not now wish to turn and fight those who have so long stood together through evil and good report. I should be glad to have all united, with Mr. Beecher or Lucretia Mott for our general.... I am willing to work with any and all or to get out of the way entirely, that there may be an organization which shall be respectable at home and abroad."
The representatives of the American Association insisted that they had offered the olive branch at the time of their organization and it had been refused. This olive branch had been a suggestion that the National Association should consider itself a local society and become auxiliary to the American. After a protracted but fruitless discussion of over four hours, they withdrew from the room, declining to accept or to suggest any overtures. The proposition made by the callers of the conference was that the two associations should merge into one, with a new constitution embodying the best features of both, and with a board of officers elected from the two existing organizations. Even the friendly offices of Lucretia Mott, which never before were disregarded, failed to effect a union, and the many letters from mutual friends were equally ineffective. In her regular letter to The Revolution Miss Anthony said:
There is but one feeling all through this glorious West, and that is that it is a sin to have a divided front at this auspicious moment. Since my last I have had splendid meetings in Quincy, Farmington, Elwood, Mendota, Peru, La-Salle, Batavia, Peoria and Champaign in Illinois, and in Sturgis and Jonesvine, Michigan. I can tell you with emphasis that the fields are white unto harvest—waiting, waiting only the reapers. And it is a shame—it is a crime—for any of the old or new public workers to halt by the way to pluck the motes out of their neighbors' eyes. Not one of us but has blundered; yet if only we are in earnest, each will forgive, in the faith that the others, like herself, mean right. How any one can stand in the way of a united national organization at an hour like this, is wholly inexplicable.
Just before the May Anniversary Mrs. Stanton published the following card in The Revolution: "It is a great thing for those who have been prominent in any movement to know when their special work is done, and when the posts they hold can be more ably filled by others. Having, in my own judgment, reached that time, at the present anniversary
