It was on the 17th of June that the verdict was given.  On that very day, a little less than a century before, the brave militia was driven back at Bunker Hill—­back, back, almost wiped out; yet truth was in their ranks, and justice, too.  But how ended that rebellion of weak colonists?  The cause of American womanhood, embodied for the moment in the liberty of a single individual, received a rebuff on June 17, 1873; but, just as surely as our Revolutionary heroes were in the end victorious, so will the inalienable rights of our heroines of the nineteenth century receive final vindication.

In his speech of 1880, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, Wendell Phillips said—­what as a rule is true—­that “a reformer, to be conscientious, must be free from bread-winning.”  I will open Miss Anthony’s accounts and show that this reformer, being, perhaps, the exception which proves the rule, has been consistently and conscientiously in debt.  Turning over her year-books the pages give a fair record up to 1863.  Here began the first herculean labor.  The Woman’s Loyal League, sadly in need of funds, was not an incorporated association, so its secretary assumed the debts.  Accounts here became quite lamentable, the deficit reaching five thousand dollars.  It must be paid, and, in fact, will be paid.  Anxious, weary hours were spent in crowding the Cooper Institute, from week to week, with paying audiences, to listen to such men as Phillips, Curtis, and Douglass, who contributed their services, and lifted the secretary out of debt.  At last, after many difficulties, her cash-book of 1863 was honorably pigeon-holed.  In 1867 we can read account of herculean labor the second.  Twenty thousand tracts are needed to convert the voters of Kansas to woman suffrage.  Traveling expenses to Kansas, and the tracts, make the debtor column overreach the creditor some two thousand dollars.  There is recognition on these pages of more than one thousand dollars obtained by soliciting advertisements, but no note is made of the weary, burning July days spent in the streets of New York to procure this money, nor of the ready application of the savings made by petty economies from her salary from the Hovey Committee.

It would have been fortunate for my brave friend, if cash-books 1868, 1869, and 1870 had never come down from their shelves; for they sing and sing, in notes of debts, till all unite in one vast chorus of far more than ten thousand dollars.  These were the days of the Revolution, the newspaper, not the war, though it was warfare for the debt-ridden manager.  Several thousand dollars she paid with money earned by lecturing, and with money given her for personal use.  One Thanksgiving was, in truth, a time for returning thanks; for she received, canceled, from her cousin, Anson Lapham, her note for four thousand dollars.  After the funeral of Paulina Wright Davis, the bereaved widower pressed into Miss Anthony’s hand canceled notes for five hundred dollars, bearing