During her visit at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Sargent, in Berlin, Miss Anthony quite innocently posted her letters in the official envelopes of our Suffrage Association, which bore the usual mottoes, “No just government can be formed without the consent of the governed,” etc.  In a few days an official brought back a large package, saying, “Such sentiments are not allowed to pass through the post office.”  Probably nothing saved her from arrest as a socialist, under the tyrannical police regulations, but the fact that she was the guest of the Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States.

My son Theodore wrote of Miss Anthony’s visit in Paris:  “I had never before seen her in the role of tourist.  She seemed interested only in historical monuments, and in the men and questions of the hour.  The galleries of the Louvre had little attraction for her, but she gazed with deep pleasure at Napoleon’s tomb, Notre Dame, and the ruins of the Tuileries.  She was always ready to listen to discussions on the political problems before the French people, the prospects of the Republic, the divorce agitation, and the education of women.  ’I had rather see Jules Ferry than all the pictures of the Louvre, Luxembourg, and Salon,’ she remarked at table.  A day or two later she saw Ferry at Laboulaye’s funeral.  The three things which made the deepest impression on Miss Anthony, during her stay at Paris, were probably the interment of Laboulaye (the friend of the United States and of the woman movement); the touching anniversary demonstration of the Communists, at the Cemetery of Pere La Chaise, on the very spot where the last defenders of the Commune of 1871 were ruthlessly shot and buried in a common grave; and a woman’s rights meeting, held in a little hall in the Rue de Rivoli, at which the brave, far-seeing Mlle. Hubertine Auchet was the leading spirit.”

While on the Continent Miss Anthony experienced the unfortunate sensation of being deaf and dumb; to speak and not to be understood, to hear and not to comprehend, were to her bitter realities.  We can imagine to what desperation she was brought when her Quaker prudishness could hail an emphatic oath in English from a French official with the exclamation, “Well, it sounds good to hear someone even swear in old Anglo-Saxon!” After two months of enforced silence, she was buoyant in reaching the British Islands once more, where she could enjoy public speaking and general conversation.  Here she was the recipient of many generous social attentions, and, on May 25, a large public meeting of representative people, presided over by Jacob Bright, was called, in our honor, by the National Association of Great Britain.  She spoke on the educational and political status of women in America, I of their religious and social position.