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HAPPIER DAYS - ANNA HOWARD SHAW &
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
Eulogy to Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony, seated in
center, wearing spectacles, and the Reverend Anna Howard
Shaw, standing at the left with her hand on a chair, met
with a group of Utah woman suffrage leaders, including Dr.
Martha Hughes Cannon, standing farthest left - Utah State
Historical Society.
It follows the full text transcript of
Anna Howard Shaw's Eulogy to Susan B. Anthony speech, delivered at
Rochester, New York
- March 15, 1906.
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Your flags at
half-mast tell of a nation's loss, |
but there are no
symbols and no words which can tell the love and
sorrow which fill our hearts. And yet out of the
depths of our grief arise feelings of truest
gratitude for the beauty, the tenderness, the
nobility of example, of our peerless leader's
life.
There is no death
for such as she. There are no last words of
love. The ages to come will revere her name.
Unnumbered generations of the children of men
shall rise up to call her blessed. Her words,
her work, and her character will go on to
brighten the pathway and bless the lives of all
peoples. That which seems death to our unseeing
eyes is to her translation. Her work will not be
finished, nor will her last word be spoken while
there remains a wrong to be righted, or a
fettered life to be freed in all the earth.
You do well to strew her bier with palms of
victory, and crown her with unfading laurel, for
never did more victorious hero enter into rest.
Her character was well poised; she did not
emphasize one characteristic to the exclusion of
others; she taught us that the real beauty of a
true life is found in the harmonious blending of
diverse elements, and her life was the epitome
of her teaching. She merged a keen sense of
justice with the deepest love; her masterful
intellect never for one moment checked the
tenderness of her emotions; her splendid
self-assertion found its highest realization in
perfect self-surrender; she demonstrated the
divine principle that the truest
self-development must go hand in hand with the
greatest and most arduous service for others.
Here was the most harmoniously developed
character I have ever known—a living soul whose
individuality was blended into oneness with all
humanity. She lived, yet not she; humanity lived
in her. Fighting the battle for individual
freedom, she was so lost to the consciousness of
her own personality that she was unconscious of
existence apart from all mankind.
Her quenchless passion for her cause was that it
was yours and mine, the cause of the whole
world. She knew that where freedom is there is
the center of power. In it she saw potentially
all that humanity might attain when possessed by
its spirit. Hence her cause, perfect equality of
rights, of opportunity, of privilege for all,
civil and political, was to her the bed-rock
upon which all true progress must rest.
Therefore she was nothing, her cause was
everything; she knew no existence apart from it;
in it she lived and moved and had her being. It
was the first and last thought of each day; it
was the last word upon her faultering lips; to
it her flitting soul responded when the silenced
voice could no longer obey the will, and she
could only answer our heart-broken questions
with the clasp of her trembling hand.
She was in the truest sense a reformer,
unhindered in her service by the narrowness and
negative destructiveness which often so sadly
hampers the work of true reform. Possessed by an
unfaltering conviction of the primary importance
of her own cause, she nevertheless recognized
that every effort by either one or many earnest
souls toward what they believed to be a better
or saner life should be met in a spirit of
encouragement and helpfulness.
She recognized
that it was immeasurably more desirable to be
honestly and earnestly seeking that which in its
attainment might not prove good than to be
hypocritically subservient to the truth through
a spirit of selfish fear or fawning at the beck
of power. She instinctively grasped the truth
underlying all great movements which have helped
the progress of the ages, and did not wait for
an individual nor a cause to win popularity
before freely extending to its struggling life a
hand of helpful comradeship. She was never found
in the cheering crowd that follows an already
victorious standard. She left that to the
time-servers who divide the spoil after they
have crucified their Savior.
She was truly
great; great in her humility and utter lack of
pretension.
On her eightieth birthday this noble soul could
truthfully say in response to the words of
loving appreciation from those who showered
garlands all about her:
"I am not
accustomed to demonstrations of gratitude or
of praise. I have ever been a hewer of wood
and a drawer of water to this movement. I
know nothing, I have known nothing of
oratory or rhetoric. Whatever I have done
has been done because I wanted to see better
conditions, better surroundings, better
circumstances for women."
Speaking of her, Lady Henry Somerset said:
"She has the
true sign of greatness in that she is
absolutely without pretension. No woman of
fame has ever so thoroughly made this
impression of modesty and unselfishness upon
my mind."
This was the
impression which she made upon all who knew her,
and leaving her presence one would say, "How
humble she is!" Viewing her life achievements,
one exclaims, "How transcendently great she is!"
No wonder she has won a name and fame worldwide
and that she has turned the entire current of
human conviction.
One indeed wrote
truly who said of her:
"She has lived
a thousand years if achievements can measure
the length of life."
She whose name we honor, whose friendship we
reverence, whose love we prize as a deathless
treasure, would say this is not an hour for
grief or despair— "If my life has achieved
anything, if I have lived to any purpose, carry
on the work I have to lay down."
In our last conversation, when her prophetic
soul saw what we dare not even think, she said:
"I leave my
work to you and to the others who have been
so faithful. Promise that you will never let
it go down or lessen our demands. There is
so much to be done. Think of it! I have
struggled for sixty years for a little bit
of justice and die without securing it."
Oh, the unutterable cruelty of it! The time will
come when at these words every American heart
will feel the unspeakable shame and wrong of
such a martyrdom.
She did not gain the little bit of freedom for
herself, but there is scarcely a civilized land,
not even our own, in which she has not been
instrumental in securing for some woman that to
which our leader did not attain. She did not
reach the goal, but all along the weary years
what marvelous achievements, what countless
victories!
The whole progress
has been a triumphal march, marked by sorrow and
hardship, but never by despair. The heart
sometimes longed for sympathy and the way was
long, and oh! so lonely; but every step was
marked by some evidence of progress, some wrong
righted, some right established.
We have followed her leadership until we stand
upon the mount of vision where she today leaves
us. The promised land lies just before us. It is
for us to go forward and take possession.
Without faltering, without a desertion from our
ranks, without delaying even to mourn the loss
of our departed leader, the faithful host is
marching on. Already the call to advance is
heard along the line, and one devoted young
follower writes:
"There are
hundreds of us now, her followers, who will
try to keep up the work she so nobly began
and brought so nearly to completion. We will
work the harder to try to compensate the
world for her loss."
Another writes:
"I believe as
you go forth to your labors you will find
less opposition and far more encouragement
than heretofore. The world is profoundly
stirred by the loss of our great leader, and
in consequence the lukewarm are becoming
zealous, the prejudiced are disarming, the
suffragists are renewing their vows of
fidelity to the cause for which Miss Anthony
lived and died. Her talismanic words, the
last she ever uttered before a public
audience, 'Failure is impossible,' should be
inscribed on our banners and engraved on our
hearts."
She has not only blessed us in the legacy of her
life and work, but she has left us the dearest
legacy of her love. The world knew Miss Anthony
as the courageous, earnest, unfaltering champion
of a great principle, and the friend of all
reforms.
Those of us who
knew her best knew that she was all this and
more; that she was one of the most home-making
and home-loving of women. To her home her heart
always turned with tenderest longing, and for
the one who made home possible she felt the most
devoted love and gratitude.
She inscribed upon
the first volume of her life history,
"To my
youngest sister, Mary, without whose
faithful and constant home-making there
could have been no freedom for the out-going
of her grateful and affectionate sister."
To this home-making sister the affection of
every loyal heart will turn, and we, her
coworkers, will love and honor her, not alone
for this devotion to her sister, but for her
loyal comradeship and faithful service in our
great cause. She is our legacy of love, and it
will be the joy of every younger sister to
bestow upon her the homage of our affection.
On the heights alone such souls meet God. In
silent communion they learn life's sublimest
lessons. They are the world's real heroes.
Hers was an heroic
life. By it she teaches us that the philosophy
of the ancients is wrong; that it is not true
that men are made heroic by indifference to life
and death, but by learning to love something
more than life. Her heroism was the heroism of
an all-absorbing love, a love which neither
indifference, nor persecution, nor
misrepresentation, nor betrayal, nor hatred, nor
flattery could quench; a heroism which would
suffer her to see and to know nothing but the
power of injustice and hatred to destroy, and
the power of justice and love to develop, all
that is best and noblest in human character.
To such ends the
causes which such souls espouse "Failure is
impossible." Truly did Dean Thomas say in her
address at our National Convention: "Of such as
you were the lines of the poet Keats written—
They shall be remembered forever,
They shall be alive forever,
They shall be speaking forever,
The people shall hear them forever.
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