"I want you to give me a promise," she pleaded, reaching for Anna's hand. "Promise me you will keep the presidency of the association as long as you are well enough to do the work."[463] Deeply moved, Anna replied, "But how can I promise that? I can keep it only as long as others wish me to keep it." "Promise to make them wish you to keep it," Susan urged. "Just as I wish you to keep it...." After a moment, she continued, "I do not know anything about what comes to us after this life ends, but ... if I have any conscious knowledge of this world and of what you are doing, I shall not be far away from you; and in times of need I will help you all I can. Who knows? Perhaps I may be able to do more for the Cause after I am gone than while I am here." A few days later, on March 13, 1906, she passed away, her hand in Anna's. * * * * * Asked, a few years before, if she believed that all women in the United States would ever be given the vote, she had replied with assurance, "It will come, but I shall not see it.... It is inevitable. We can no more deny forever the right of self-government to one-half our people than we could keep the Negro forever in bondage. It will not be wrought by the same disrupting forces that freed the slave, but come it will, and I believe within a generation."[464] [Illustration: Susan B. Anthony, 1905] She had so longed to see women voting throughout the United States, to see them elected to legislatures and Congress, but for her there had only been the promise of fulfillment in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho, and far away in New Zealand and Australia. "Failure is impossible" was the rallying cry she left with her "girls" to spur them on in the long discouraging struggle ahead, fourteen more years of campaigning until on August 26, 1920, women were enfranchised throughout the United States by the Nineteenth Amendment. Even then their work was not finished, for she had looked farther ahead to the time when men and women everywhere, regardless of race, religion, or sex, would enjoy equal rights. Her challenging words, "Failure is impossible," still echo and re-echo through the years, as the crusade for human rights goes forward and men and women together strive to build and preserve a free world. FOOTNOTES: [446] Harper, _Anthony_, III, p. 1325. [447] Shaw, _The Story of a Pioneer_, p. 210. [448] Harper, _Anthony_, III, p. 1319. [449] _Ibid._, p. 1336. [450] Miss Anthony also carefully prepared her scrapbooks, her books, and bound volumes of _The Revolution_, woman's rights and antislavery magazines for presentation to the Library of Congress, inscribing each with a note of explanation. [451] Ann Anthony Bacon. [452] _New York Suffrage Newsletter_, Jan., 1905. [453] _History of Woman Suffrage_, V, p. 122.