Miss Anthony, however, declined to be snubbed, subdued or displaced, and wrote to Mrs. Stanton in the following vigorous style: 

Mrs. Hooker’s attitude is not in the least surprising.  She is precisely like every new convert in every reform.  I have no doubt but each of the Apostles in turn, as he came into the ranks, believed he could improve upon Christ’s methods.  I know every new one thought so of Garrison’s and Phillips’.  The only thing surprising in this case is that you, the pioneer, should drop, and say to each of these converts:  “Yes, you may manage.  I grant your knowledge, judgment, taste, culture, are all superior to mine.  I resign the good old craft to you altogether.”  To my mind there never was such suicidal letting go as has been yours these last two years.

But I am now teetotally discouraged, and shall make no more attempts to hold you up to what I know is not only the best for our cause, but equally so for yourself, from the moral standpoint if not the financial.  O, how I have agonized over my utter failure to make you feel and see the importance of standing fast and holding the helm of our good ship to the end of the storm.  Mr. Greeley’s “On to Richmond” backdown was not more sad to me, not half so sad.  How you can excuse yourself, is more than I can understand.

Mrs. Stanton commented to Mrs. Wright:  “For your instruction in the ways of the world, I send you Susan’s letter.  You see I am between two fires all the time.  Some are determined to throw me overboard, and she is equally determined that I shall stand at the masthead, no matter how pitiless the storm.”

Mrs. Hooker found hers was a greater task than she had anticipated and finally wrote Miss Anthony:  “God knows, and you ought to know, that any one who undertakes a convention has put self-seeking one side and is nearer to being a martyr, stake, fagots and all, than any of us care to be unless called by duty with a loud and unmistakable call.  I shirked the labor last year and pitied you because so much fell upon you, and out of pure love to you and to the cause determined this time to take all I could on my own shoulders, but you must come and help out.”

Mrs. Stanton still persisted in her determination not to go to this convention but Miss Anthony cancelled eight or ten lecture engagements, at from $50 to $75 each, in order to be present in person and see that the affair was properly managed.  Mrs. Hooker, however, was fully equal to the occasion, her convention was a marked success and she proved to be one of the most valuable acquisitions to the ranks of workers for woman suffrage.  She soon learned that the opposition to be overcome was far greater than she had imagined, and after nearly thirty years’ effort, not even in her own State have women been able to secure their enfranchisement.  It seems, however, a bit of poetic justice that this convention, which was to lift the movement for woman suffrage to a higher plane than it ever before had occupied, should have been the first to invite to its platform Victoria C. Woodhull, whose advent precipitated a storm of criticism compared to which all those that had gone before were as a summer shower to a Missouri cyclone.