[71] Of the press the Woman's Journal said: "The Louisville papers gave the convention full and fair reports and the Herald and Times had editorials declaring woman suffrage to be inevitable. Colonel Henry Watterson in the Courier-Journal struggled between a sincere desire to be courteous and hospitable to a convention of distinguished women meeting in his city and an equally sincere belief that woman suffrage would be a bad thing. A rousing editorial in favor of it appeared in Desha Breckinridge's paper, the Lexington Leader.
CHAPTER XII.
NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1912.
The Forty-fourth annual convention, which met in Witherspoon Building, Philadelphia, Nov. 21-26, 1912, celebrated three important victories. At the general election in the early part of the month, Oregon, Arizona and Kansas had amended their constitutions and conferred equal suffrage on women by large majority votes and the result in Michigan was still in doubt. It was the sentiment of the country that the eastward sweep of the movement was now fully under way. There was a new and vibrant tone in the Call and in the speeches and proceedings.[72] The Woman's Journal said in its account: "Another new feature was the enormous crowds that turned out at the convention. Evening after evening, in conservative Philadelphia, ten or a dozen overflow meetings had to be held for the benefit of the people who could not possibly get into the hall. At the Thanksgiving service on Sunday afternoon, not only was the great Metropolitan Opera House filled to its capacity but for blocks the street outside was jammed with a seething crowd, eager to hear the illustrious speakers. It looked more like an inauguration than like an old-fashioned suffrage meeting."
There was a great out-door rally in Independence Square at the beginning, such as had been witnessed many times on this historic spot conducted by men but never before in the hands of women. Miss Elizabeth Freeman was manager of this meeting, assisted by Miss Jane Campbell, the Rev. Caroline Bartlett Crane, Mrs. Camilla von Klenze, Mrs. Teresa Crowley and Miss Florence Allen. From five platforms over forty well-known speakers demanded that the principles of the Declaration of Independence signed in the ancient hall close by should be applied to women and that the old bell should ring out liberty for all and not for half the people. Mrs. Otis Skinner read the Women's Declaration of Rights, which had been written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1876 and presented at the great centennial celebration in that very square,[73] and a little ceremony was held in honor of Mrs. Charlotte Pierce of Philadelphia, the only one then living who had signed it, with a remembrance presented by Mrs. Anna Anthony Bacon.
The convention was noteworthy for the large number of distinguished speakers on its program. On the opening afternoon, after a moment of silent prayer in memory of Lucretia Mott, the welcome of the city was extended by the widely-known "reform" Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg, who pointed out the vast field of municipal work for women and expressed his firm conviction of their need for the suffrage. He was followed with a greeting by Mrs. Blankenburg, a former president of the State Suffrage Association. Its formal welcome to the delegates was given by the president, Mrs. Ellen H. Price, who said in part: "We hope that you will feel at home in Pennsylvania, for the idea that has called this organization into being—that divine passion for human rights—actuated the great founder of our Commonwealth in setting up his 'holy experiment in government.'" After regretting that a State founded on so broad a conception had not applied it to women Mrs. Price said:
We welcome you in the name of William Penn, who, antedating the Declaration of Independence by nearly a century, enunciated in his Frame of Government the truth that the States of today are coming very rapidly to acknowledge: "Any Government is free to the people under it when the laws rule and the people are a party to those laws; anything more than this (and anything less) is oligarchy and confusion." We welcome you in the name of our only woman Governor, Hannah Penn, who, as we are told, for six years managed the affairs of the infant colony wisely and well.
We welcome you in the name of the patriots who placed on our Liberty Bell the injunction, "Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land to all the Inhabitants Thereof"; in the name of those ancestors of ours (yours and mine) who here gave up their lives in that struggle to establish the principle that "taxation without representation is tyranny" for a nation; in the name of those uncompromising agitators who delivered their message of liberty even at the risk of life itself, till the shackles fell from a race enslaved; in the name of Lucretia Mott, that gentle, that queenly champion of the downtrodden and oppressed, that inspired preacher whose motto, "Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth," should be the watchword of every soul that seeks for freedom.