From being the most ridiculed and mercilessly persecuted woman, Miss Anthony has become the most honored and respected in the nation.  Witness the praises of press and people, and the enthusiastic ovations she received on her departure for Europe in 1883.  Never were warmer expressions of regret for an absence, nor more sincere prayers for a speedy return, accorded to any American on leaving his native shores.  This slow awaking to the character of her services shows the abiding sense of justice in the human soul.  Having spent the winter of 1882-83 in Washington, trying to press to a vote the bill for a Sixteenth Amendment before Congress, and the autumn in a vigorous campaign through Nebraska, where a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women had been submitted to the people, she felt the imperative need of an entire change in the current of her thoughts.  Accordingly, after one of the most successful conventions ever held at the national capital, and a most flattering ovation in the spacious parlors of the Riggs House, and a large reception in Philadelphia, she sailed for Europe.

Fortunate in being perfectly well during the entire voyage, our traveler received perpetual enjoyment in watching the ever varying sea and sky.  To the captain’s merry challenge to find anything so grand as the ocean, she replied, “Yes, these mighty forces in nature do indeed fill me with awe; but this vessel, with deep-buried fires, powerful machinery, spacious decks, and tapering masts, walking the waves like a thing of life, and all the work of man, impresses one still more deeply.  Lo! in man’s divine creative power is fulfilled the prophecy, ’Ye shall be as Gods!’”

In all her journeyings through Germany, Italy, and France, Miss Anthony was never the mere sight-seer, but always the humanitarian and reformer in traveler’s guise.  Few of the great masterpieces of art gave her real enjoyment.  The keen appreciation of the beauties of sculpture, painting, and architecture, which one would have expected to find in so deep a religious nature, was wanting, warped, no doubt, by her early Quaker training.  That her travels gave her more pain than pleasure was, perhaps, not so much that she had no appreciation of aesthetic beauty, but that she quickly grasped the infinitude of human misery; not because her soul did not feel the heights to which art had risen, but that it vibrated in every fiber to the depths to which mankind had fallen.  Wandering through a gorgeous palace one day, she exclaimed, “What do you find to admire here?  If it were a school of five hundred children being educated into the right of self-government I could admire it, too; but standing for one man’s pleasure, I say no!” In the quarters of one of the devotees, at the old monastery of the Certosa, at Florence, there lies, on a small table, an open book, in which visitors register.  On the occasion of Miss Anthony’s visit the pen and ink proved so unpromising that her entire party declined this opportunity to make themselves famous, but she made the rebellious pen inscribe, “Perfect equality for women, civil, political, religious.  Susan B. Anthony, U.S.A.”  Friends, who visited the monastery next day, reported that lines had been drawn through this heretical sentiment.