"Mr. Chairman," he began, "when I heard the gentleman who has just spoken lay down principles which placed the rioters, incendiaries, and murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips [pointing to the portraits in the hall] would have broken into voice, to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up." The effect of the whole speech was tremendous. At last the abolitionists had found a champion equal to the best, and from that hour to the end of the anti-slavery conflict, he was foremost in the fight. He accepted without reservation the doctrines which Garrison had formulated: that slavery was under all circumstances a sin and that immediate emancipation was a fundamental right and duty. Up and down the land, obeying every call so far as his strength would permit, he travelled, lecturing against slavery, asking no pecuniary reward. He was soon a great popular favorite--the greatest, perhaps, who ever mounted a lecture platform in America,--and gained a hearing in quarters where, before, abolitionists had been hated and derided. His tact in winning over a turbulent audience was extraordinary; the strongest opponents of the anti-slavery cause felt the spell of his power, and often confessed the justice of his arguments. When that fight was won and the negro had gained his freedom, Wendell Phillips remained the foremost critic of public men and measures in America, and year after year, he devoted his great gifts to guiding popular opinion. A champion of temperance, of the rights of labor, of the Indians, of equal suffrage, he stood forth until his death an inspiring and august figure--a man who devoted his life wholly to the welfare of his country. One of the reforms which Wendell Phillips advocated was that of woman suffrage, but this movement has come to be particularly associated with the name of Susan B. Anthony. Like her great predecessor in that cause, Lucretia Mott, Miss Anthony was a Quaker, and the Quakers, it should be remembered, made no distinction of sex when it came to speaking in their meeting-houses. Her father was well-to-do, and she received a careful education, and in 1847, first spoke in public. The temperance movement absorbed her energies at first; then the Abolitionist cause; and finally the work of securing equal civil rights for women. During the winter of 1854, she held woman suffrage meetings in every county in New York State, and the remainder of her life was devoted to this cause.