Such a conservative audience, it was supposed, would surely hold this radical in check.

Alas! they were all doomed, for once, to hear the naked truth, on every vital question of the day.

Thinking this might be his only opportunity to rouse some liberal thought in conservative minds, he struck the keynote of every reform; defended labor strikes, the Nihilists of Russia, prohibition, woman suffrage, and demanded reformation in our prisons, courts of justice, and halls of legislation.
On the woman question, he said: "Social science affirms that woman's place in society marks the level of civilization.

From its twilight in Greece, through the Italian worship of the Virgin, the dreams of chivalry, the justice of the civil law, and the equality of French society, we trace her gradual recognition, while our common law, as Lord Brougham confessed, was, with relation to women, the opprobrium of the age of Christianity.

For forty years earnest men and women, working noiselessly, have washed away the opprobrium, the statute books of thirty States have been remodeled, and woman stands, to-day, almost face to face with her last claim--the ballot.