Form of Petition

To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled:

The undersigned, citizens of ——, believing slavery the great cause of the present rebellion, and an institution fatal to the life of Republican Government, earnestly pray your Honorable Bodies to immediately abolish it throughout the United States; and to adopt measures for so amending the Constitution, as forever to prohibit its existence in any portion of our common country.

MEN. | WOMEN.

Anniversary Meeting, May 14, 1864.—The adjourned meeting convened in the lecture-room of the Church of the Puritans, Saturday p.m., May 14th. The President in the chair.

The Secretary read the report of the Executive Committee, which was unanimously adopted. The resolutions were then read, and motion taken to act upon them separately. The 2d, 7th, and 8th elicited a long and earnest discussion, but were at last adopted, with but one or two dissenting votes.

The Committee then presented a list of women to serve as officers the coming year, who were unanimously elected.

Officers of the Women's National League:—President, Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Vice-Presidents, L. M. Brownson, Mary Bates, Mrs. Col. A. B. Eaton, S. A. Fayerweather; Corresponding Secretary, Charlotte B. Wilbour; Recording Secretaries, Susan B. Anthony, Elvira Lane; Treasurer, Mary F. Gilbert; Executive Committee, Mrs. L. M. Brownson, Mrs. H. M. Jacobs, Mary O. Gale, Mattie Griffith, Redelia Bates, Rebecca K. Shepherd, Frances V. Halleck, Mrs. C. S. Lozier, M.D.; Laura M. Ward, M.D.; Malvina A. Lane.

The Women's National League to its Members and Friends:—The folding, directing, and sending out 20,000 petitions, then the assorting, counting, and rolling up, each State by itself, 300,000 signatures, has been an herculean task, that only those who have witnessed it could fully appreciate. Remember that paper, printing, postage, office, and clerks, all require money. At the last meeting of the Executive Committee we resolved to ask each of our 5,000 members to send us the small sum of fifty cents to carry on the work.

Let the petitions be thoroughly circulated during the summer, throughout the country, that the people may speak in thunder-tones to our next Congress at its earliest sittings. Neither the Emancipation or Amendment bill has yet passed the House, and the recent vote on the Montana question shows the animus of the Administration. If the majority of our voters propose to re-elect such men to rule over us, those who believe in free institutions must begin the work of educating the nation into the idea that a stable government must be founded on justice—that freedom and equality are rights that belong to every citizen of a republic.

Susan B. Anthony, Secretary, 20 Cooper Institute.

Amend the Constitution.—The Women's National League have just sent out, all through the States, fifteen thousand petitions, with an appeal to have them filled up and returned as speedily as possible. The bill to amend the Constitution so as to prohibit the holding of slaves in any part of the country has passed the Senate. Now comes the struggle in the House. If every one of the fifteen thousand persons—at least ten thousand of them ministers—will but gather up one hundred or more names, a million-voiced petition may yet pour into the Representatives' Hall; and such a voice from the people can not but make sure the vote, and leave the bill ready for the President's signature, and Congress disposed to recommend that a special session of each State Legislature be called immediately to act upon the question; and thus the hateful thing—Slavery—be buried out of sight before the opening of the Presidential campaign. Let the petitions be mailed to Washington, direct, to some member, or to Hon. Thomas D. Eliot, Chairman of Committee on Slavery and Freedmen. There is not a day to be lost. Let all work.—The National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 28, 1864.

The World.

New York City, July 25, 1864.

Women's Loyal National League.

The Necessity for Funds—The Delinquency of the Friends of the Negro—Miss Anthony on the Constitution—Fighting, a Barbaric way of Settling Questions.—About fifteen ladies and half a dozen gentlemen were present at the meeting of the Woman's League, yesterday. Although more than one of the speakers bewailed the delinquency of the "friends of the negro" in failing to supply the League with the necessary funds, yet the piles of post-paid circulars on the tables, ready for the mail, were larger than ever. There was also a bundle of tracts on emancipation as the only means of peace.

The meeting being called to order, a committee reported a series of resolutions, the gist of which was that, whereas the League is continually receiving from its friends to whom it applies for pecuniary assistance communications stating that the day for petition and discussion is past, and that the bullet and bayonet are now working out the stern logic of events; nevertheless the League considers that such day is not past, and it urges the friends of the negro to come forward boldly and pour out of their abundance liberally for its aid.

Speech by Miss Susan B. Anthony.

Miss Susan B. Anthony made a speech arguing that the decision of the anti-slavery question should not be left to the "stern logic of events" which is wrought by the bullet and the bayonet. More knowledge is needed. The eyes and the ears of the whole public are now open. It should be the earnest work of every lover of freedom to give those eyes the right thing to see and those ears the right thing to hear. It pains her to receive in answer to a call for assistance and funds, letters saying that the day for discussion and petition is past. It looks as if we had returned to the old condition of barbarism, where no way is known of settling questions except by fighting. Women, who are noted for having control of the moral department of society and for lifting the other half of the race into a higher moral condition, should not relapse into the idea that the status of any human being is to be settled merely by the sword. Miss Anthony then spoke of the constitutional right of Congress to pass an emancipation law. She read a letter from a lady who, on receiving documents from the League, first doubted the power of Congress to pass such a law; then she thought perhaps it had; then she compared the petition and the Constitution; then she thought it had no such power, and finally she concluded to circulate the petition anyhow. Miss Anthony proceeded at some length to expound the Constitution, showing that it does not say that slaves shall not be emancipated, and therefore concluding that they may. But if Congress can not emancipate slaves constitutionally, it should do so unconstitutionally. She does not believe in this red-tapism that can not find a law to suppress the wrong, but always finds one to oppress the innocent. If she was a mayor, or a governor, or a legislator, and there was no law to punish mobocrats, she thought she should go to work to make one pretty quick. She requested the opinion of some gentleman.

A gentleman present related a number of touching incidents about the recent mobbing of negroes in this city, most of which have already appeared in print in this and other papers. Miss Anthony held up two photographs to the view of the audience. One represented "Sojourner Truth," the heroine of one of Mrs. H. B. Stowe's tales, and the other the bare back of a Louisiana slave. Many of the audience were affected to tears. "Sojourner Truth" had lost three fingers of one hand, and the Louisiana slave's back bore scars of whipping. She asked every one to suppose that woman was her mother, and that man her father. In that case would they think the time past for discussion and petition? The resolutions were at once unanimously passed. The meeting adjourned.

Miss Anthony in Chicago.

Miss Susan B. Anthony is now on her homeward way from Kansas, where she has been spending several of the past months, and where she has performed much excellent service in the cause of the freedmen of the country generally. She has recently visited Chicago and given a lecture, which is highly commended by the Tribune and Republican of that city, the latter giving an extended report of it in its columns, besides pronouncing upon it very flattering encomiums, concluding with these words: "The audience dwelt with thoughtful and marked interest upon her words, and when occasionally her remarks called forth an irrepressible burst of feeling, the applause was marked and emphatic, without descending to a noisy disturbance." Of the lecture in general, the Chicago Tribune thus speaks:

Last evening Miss Susan B. Anthony, of Rochester, N. Y., addressed an audience composed chiefly of colored people, in Quinn's Chapel. Her subject was "Universal Suffrage." Mrs. Jones, the President of the Ladies' Aid Society, in introducing her, said: "She was one of their old and firm friends; not one who had believed in sitting down to the communion first, and letting the negro come last. She was not one who needed to have her father or brothers starved in Southern prisons, to make her aware of the humanity of the black man."

Miss Anthony is a clear, logical speaker, earnest and truthful, and has long considered the questions of the day. Few men in this or any other city could more ably present the subject, or more closely chain the audience that listened to her noble utterances, and one could not but wish that she had spoken to thousands rather than hundreds. Miss A. is recently from Leavenworth, Kansas, where she has been spending some months past, aiding as she had opportunity, in the elevation of the freed people, and occasionally by lectures, contributing to form a true public sentiment in that new State. Consequently, she speaks from absolute knowledge of the present state of the freedmen. Her criticism of the theories of reconstruction was masterly, showing that the fundamental principles of this Government are set aside and really endanger all that we have seemed to gain by the war, and that nothing but the admission of the black man to the franchise can save the nation from future disgrace and ultimate ruin.—National Anti-Slavery Standard, August, 1865.