this year adding Kentucky to the list.  It is not essential to a full appreciation of her work to follow in detail these tours, which extended through a number of years and were full of pleasant as well as disagreeable features; nor is it possible to quote extensively the comments of the press.  Miss Anthony undoubtedly has been as widely written up as any lecturer, and she seldom received less than a column in each paper of every town visited.  Large numbers of these notices have been carefully preserved in those wonderful scrap-books which cover a period of fifty years.

At first her demands seemed so radical and the idea of a woman on the platform was so contrary to the precedent of all the ages, that the tone of the press, almost without exception, was contemptuous or denunciatory.  As the justice of her claims began to dawn upon the minds of enlightened people, as many other prominent women joined in advocating the same reforms, and as these were adopted, one after another, without serious consequences, the public mind awakened to the remarkable change which was being wrought, and in a large measure gave its approval.  When the masses of people throughout the country came to see and hear and know Miss Anthony, they resented the way in which she had been misrepresented.  There was in her manner and words so much of dignity, earnestness and sincerity that “those who came to scoff remained to pray,” and this change of sentiment was nowhere so marked as in the newspapers.  Even those who differed radically from her views paid tribute to the persistence with which she had urged them and the sacrifices she had made for them during the past thirty years.  Not only had there been developed a recognition of her high purposes and noble life, but also of her great intellectual ability and clear comprehension of all the issues of the day.  An extract from the Terre Haute Express, February 12, 1879, illustrates this: 

Miss Anthony’s lecture was full of fine passages and strong appeals, and replete with well-stated facts in support of her arguments.  She has wonderful command of language, and her speech at times flows with such rapidity that no reporter could do her justice or catch a tithe of the brilliance of her sayings.  Moreover, there are not half of our public men who are nearly so well posted in the political affairs of our country as she, or who, knowing them, could frame them so solidly in argument.  If the women of the nation were half so high-minded or even half so earnest, their title to the franchise might soon be granted.[96]

Another Indiana paper thus voiced the changing sentiment:  “The fact is, that like the advance agent of any great reform—­especially if a woman—­Susan B. Anthony has been so belied and maligned by the press in years gone by that many who do not stop to think had come to believe her a perfect ogre, a cross-grained, incongruous old maid whom nobody could like, when the truth of the matter is, one has but to look at