In 1840 Lucretia Mott was one of the delegates chosen to represent American societies at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in that year. It is well known that she and all other lady delegates were refused recognition because they were women. Sir John Bowring, Mr. Ashurst, and Daniel O’Connell were among those who protested against this arbitrary act of exclusion; but the protest was in vain. Garrison had not been present when the question of refusing to allow the lady delegates to take part in the Convention was discussed. He arrived in England five days after the question had been settled. With characteristic generosity, he refused to sit as a delegate where the ladies had been excluded. They had been relegated as spectators to a side gallery, and he insisted on taking his seat there also. The absurdity of holding a World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in which the chief workers against slavery were present as spectators, not as participators, caused a great deal of discussion at the time; and the general movement in England towards the social, educational, and political equality of women may be said to date from that period. For thirty years Lucretia Mott hardly ever let a day pass without doing something to weaken the fabric of slavery, which she felt to be the greatest curse of her native land. Her manner and voice were sweet, solemn, and tranquil; her small and fragile figure, her exquisite womanliness of demeanour, made it difficult to believe that she could become the object of violent hatred and persecution. Yet she had often known what it was to stand on a platform in the midst of a shower of stones and vitriol, and to endure in silence the unmanly insults of the pro-slavery press. The simple and direct sincerity of her mind, her forgetfulness of self, and her tranquil courage, carried conviction to the minds of thousands that she had a message worth listening to. But at first many even of her own religious community thought it necessary to show their disapprobation of her conduct, by refusing to recognise her when they met. She owned that this “had caused her considerable pain,” but it never caused her to swerve for a moment from the course she felt to be that of duty. She usually took a share of the seat behind the door in railway cars, because that place was ordinarily assigned to negroes, and would converse kindly with her fellow-passengers there.