It becomes my pleasant duty to welcome you to the hospitalities of my native city. To extend to you who for the first time meet beyond the Mississippi, a greeting--not only in behalf of the friends of woman suffrage, but for those of our citizens who, while not in full sympathy with your views, have a desire to hear you in deliberative council and to cordially tender you the same courtesies offered other conventions which have chosen St. Louis as their place of annual gathering. And I am the more happy to do this because of the opportunity it affords me to disabuse your minds of certain impressions which have gone abroad concerning our slowness of action in the line of advanced ideas. Certainly in some phases of that reformation to which you and your co-laborers have pledged your lives, your fortunes--the cause of woman--St. Louis is the leader. When, eighteen or twenty years since, Harriet Hosmer desired to study anatomy, to perfect herself in her art, not a college in New England would open its doors to her; she traveled West, and through the generous patronage of Wayman Crow of this city, she became a pupil of the dean of the St. Louis Medical college. When other cities had refused equality of wages and position, St. Louis placed Miss Brackett at the head of our normal school, giving her--a heretofore exclusively male prerogative--the highest wages, added to the highest educational rank. And here in St. Louis began the advance march which has finally broken down the walls of the highest judicial fortress, the Supreme Court of the United States. Washington University, in response to my request, unhesitatingly opened its doors, and for the first time in the history of America, woman was accorded the right to a legal course of training with man, and, at its close, after successful examination, I was freely accorded the degree of Bachelor of Laws! A city or a State that could perpetrate the anomaly of a female bachelor, is certainly not far behind the radicalism of the age.