She started, October 23, on a long lecture tour arranged for her through Nebraska,[93] Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Wisconsin, which lasted the remainder of the year.  She almost perished with cold and fatigue before it was finished but found some compensation in the $30 a night which the lectures yielded.  At this time she received an urgent request from a San Francisco lecture committee to come to that State, but was unable to accept.  “If I only could have sister Mary with me over Sunday in these dull and lonely little towns, I could stand it the rest of the week,” she wrote; and to a friend who sent her an account of a visit to her mother:  “I am very glad you do go occasionally to see dear mother, sitting there in her rocking-chair by the window as life ebbs out and out.  O, how I fear the final ebb will come when I am away, but still I hope and trust it may not, and work and work on.”

As Miss Anthony was still under contract with the lecture bureau, she was once more compelled to forego the satisfaction of attending the annual convention in Washington, January 8 and 9, 1878, but as in 1876 she sent $100 of the money she had worked so hard to earn.  “It is not quite just to myself to do it,” she wrote a friend, “but if the women of wealth and leisure will not help us, we must give both the labor and the money.”  While this convention was a success as to numbers and enthusiasm, several things occurred which the ladies thought might have been avoided if Miss Anthony had been in command with her cool head and firm hand.  Especially was this true in regard to a prayer meeting which some of the religious zealots, in spite of the most urgent appeals from the other members, persisted in holding in the reception room of the Capitol directly after a morning session of the convention.  The affair itself was most inopportune but, to make it still worse, the cranks and bores who always are watching for an opportunity, gained control and turned it into a farce.

In her disgust and wrath Mrs. Stanton wrote Miss Anthony:  “Mrs. Sargent and I did not attend the prayer meeting.  As God has never taken a very active part in the suffrage movement, I thought I would stay at home and get ready to implore the committee, having more faith in their power to render us the desired aid.”  Mrs. Sargent, with her usual calm and beautiful philosophy, wrote:  “Do not let yourself be troubled.  We can not take down and rebuild without a great deal of dirt and rubbish, and we must endure it all for the sake of the grand edifice that is to appear in due time.  Work and let work, each in her own way.  We can not all work alike any more than we can look alike.  We must not require impossibilities.  All action helps us, it shows life; inaction, we know, means death.  I hope you can be with us next convention.  The women of this country and of the world owe you a debt they never can repay.  I know, however, that you will get your reward.”