National woman suffrage conventions were still red-letter events to Susan and she attended them no matter how great the physical effort, traveling to New Orleans in 1903. Of particular concern was the 1904 convention because of Mrs. Catt's decision at the very last moment not to stand for re-election on account of her health. Looking over the field, Susan saw no one capable of taking her place but Anna Howard Shaw. Not to be able to turn to Mrs. Stanton's capable daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, at this time was disappointing, but Harriot's long absence in England had made her more or less of a stranger to the membership of the National American Association, and for some reason she did not seem to fit in, lacking her mother's warmth and appeal.[441] [Illustration: Quotation in the handwriting of Susan B. Anthony] "I don't see anybody in the whole rank of our suffrage movement to take her [Mrs. Catt's] place but you," Susan now wrote Anna Howard Shaw. "If you will take it with a salary of say, $2,000, I will go ahead and try to see what I can do. We must not let the society down into _feeble_ hands.... Don't say _no_, for the _life_ of _you_, for if Mrs. Catt _persists_ in going out, we shall simply _have_ to _accept it_ and we must _tide over_ with the _best material_ that we have, and _you are the best_, and would you have taken office _four years ago_, you would have been elected over-whelmingly."[442] Anna could not refuse Aunt Susan, and when she was elected with Mrs. Catt as vice-president, Susan breathed freely again. It warmed Susan's heart to enter the convention on her eighty-fourth birthday to a thundering welcome, to banter with Mrs. Upton who called her to the platform, and to stop the applause with a smile and "There now, girls, that's enough."[443] Nothing could have been more appropriate for her birthday than the Colorado jubilee over which she presided and which gave irrefutable evidence of the success of woman suffrage in that state. There was rejoicing too over Australia, where women had been voting since 1902 and over the new hope in Europe, in Denmark, where women had chosen her birthday to stage a demonstration in favor of the pending franchise bill. For the last time, she spoke to a Senate committee on the woman suffrage amendment. Standing before these indifferent men, a tired warrior at the end of a long hard campaign, she reminded them that she alone remained of those who thirty-five years before, in 1869, had appealed to Congress for justice. "And I," she added, "shall not be able to come much longer.