| Frances E. Willard Leader of the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union |
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Address Before The Second Biennial Convention Of The
World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union by Frances Willard, President
President, Woman's Christian Temperance Union
October, 1893
Beloved Comrades of the White Ribbon Army:
WHEN we began the delicate, difficult, and dangerous operation of
dissecting out the alcohol nerve from the body politic, we did not
realize the intricacy of the undertaking nor the distances that must be
traversed by the scalpel of investigation and research. In about seventy
days from now, twenty years will have elapsed since the call of battle
sounded its bugle note among the homes and hearts of Hillsboro, Ohio.
....
A one-sided movement makes one-sided advocates. Virtues, like hounds,
hunt in packs. Total abstinence is not the crucial virtue in life that
excuses financial crookedness, defamation of character, or habits of
impurity. The fact that one's father was, and one's self is, a bright
and shining light in the total abstinence galaxy, does not give one a
vantage ground for high-handed behaviour toward those who have not been
trained to the special virtue that forms the central idea of the
Temperance Movement. We have known persons who, because they had "never
touched a drop of liquor," set themselves up as if they belonged to a
royal line, but whose tongues were as biting as alcohol itself, and
whose narrowness had no competitor save a straight line. An all-round
movement can only be carried forward by all-round advocates; a
scientific age requires the study of every subject in its correlations.
It was once supposed that light, heat, and electricity were wholly
separate entities; it is now believed and practically proved that they
are but different modes of motion. Standing in the valley we look up and
think we see an isolated mountain; climbing to its top we see that it is
but one member of a range of mountains many of them of well-nigh equal
altitude. ...
....If the home is to be protected, not only must the dram-shop be
made an outlaw, but its allies, the gambling hells, the houses of
unreportable infamy, the ignorance of the general population as to
alcoholics and other narcotics, the timidity of trade, the venality of
portions of the press, and especially the subserviency of political
parties to the liquor traffic, must be assailed as confederates of the
chief enemy of the home. . . . It is certain that the broad and
progressive policy of the W.C.T.U. in the United States makes the
whiskey rings and time-serving politicians greatly dread its influence.
They honour the Union by frequent and bitter attacks. It is a recognised
power in international affairs. If its policy were made narrow and
non-partisan, its influence would immensely wane in practical matters of
great importance.
"The department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, conducted by
the W.C.T.U., and led by Mrs. Mary H. Hunt, of Boston, has now made such
instruction mandatory in thirty-six States of the Republic. This is a
very large and substantial triumph of the broad and progressive policy.
"Instead of the National W.C.T.U. having lost the confidence of the
churches by its broad policy, I believe, after much travel and years of
observation, that it never had more of that confidence than at the
present hour. At a recent Congressional Hearing, in Washington, I heard
a distinguished Presbyterian Professor of Theology, Rev. Dr. Herrick
Johnson, of Chicago, call the W.C.T.U. the most powerful, the most
beneficent, and the most successful organization ever formed by women.
Similar testimony abounds in all the most enlightened circles of the
land."
Let us not be disconcerted, but stand bravely by that blessed trinity
of movements, Prohibition, Woman's Liberation and Labour's uplift. .....
The Temperance cause started out well night alone, but mighty forces
have joined us in the long march. We are now in the midst of the
Waterloo battle, and in the providence of God the Temperance army will
not have to fight that out all by itself. For Science has come up with
its glittering contingent, political economy deploys its legions, the
woman question brings an Amazonian army upon the field, and the stout
ranks of labor stretch away far as the eye can reach. As in the old
Waterloo against Napoleon, so now against the Napoleon of the liquor
traffic, no force is adequate except the allied forces.
A GENERAL SURVEY.
There are two changeless sources of solid happiness; first, the
belief in God, and second, the habit of hard work toward useful ends.
The first affords a sunshiny mental atmosphere, the second keeps that
ever-active engine, the brain, from working on itself. For it cannot be
idle, and if its energies are not directed toward objective occupation,
it will find employment in such dissection of its own powers as will
weaken them, and tend toward morbid views and general bewilderment. ....
The great philosopher, Emanuel Kant, says that "every action carries
with it its own punishment and its own reward," and the putting in of
our powers to help our race is its own exceeding great reward. ....
The three requisites for success are ability, availability, and
responsibility. The first is native, the second acquired, the last
conferred. In every White Ribboner, whose work is worth the name, these
three must meet, and the greatest outcome of the crusade in its original
and organic form was that it gave to women of ability the schooling in
which they acquired availability, and helped them to the positions in
which, through responsibility, they grew from what they were to what
they had the power to be. .....
So far as the White Ribbon movement is concerned, this has been its
best and brightest year from the outlook of the World's W.C.T.U., and
that is the only point of view that is adequate. How little did they
dream, those devoted women of the praying bands, who with their patient
footsteps bridged the distance between home and saloon, and in their
little despised groups poured out their souls to God, and their pitiful
plea into the ears of men, that the "Movement" would be systematized
twenty years later into an organization known and loved by the best men
and women in every civilized nation on the earth; and that its heroic
missionaries would be obliged to circumnavigate the globe in order to
visit the outposts of the Society. How little did they dream that in the
year of the World's Columbian Exposition well nigh half a million of
children would send their autographs on the triple pledge cards of our
Loyal Temperance Legions, and Sunday School Department; that we should
have a publishing house, owned and conducted by the Society itself, from
which more than a hundred million pages of the literature of light and
leading should go forth this year; how little could they have conceived
of the significance that is wrapt up in the lengthening folds of the
Polyglot Petition, signed and circulated in fifty languages, and
containing the signatures and attestations of between three and four
million of the best people that live, praying for the abolition of the
alcohol traffic, the opium traffic, and the licensed traffic in degraded
women. How little they dreamed of that great movement by which the study
of physiology and hygiene were to bring the arrest of thought to
millions of young minds concerning the true inwardness of all narcotic
poisons in their effects on the body and the brain. How "far beyond
their thought" the enfranchisement of women in New Zealand and Wyoming,
Kansas and "Michigan, my Michigan!" How inconceivable to them the vision
of our House Beautiful reared in the heart of the world's most electric
city, and sending forth its influence to the furthest corner of the
globe. How little did they dream that the echo of their hymns should yet
be heard and heeded by a woman whose lineage, and the prowess of whose
historic name may be traced through centuries,-and that not alone from
the cottage and the homestead, but from the emblazoned walls of splendid
castles, should be driven the cup that seems to cheer, but at the last
inebriates. But we must remember that, after all, these are but the days
of small beginnings compared with what 20 more years shall show.
Doubtless if we could see the power to which this movement of women's
hearts for the protection of their hearthstones shall attain in the next
generation, the inspiration of that knowledge would exhilarate us beyond
that which is good for such steady patient workers as we have been, are,
and wish to be; but I dare prophesy that twenty years from now woman
will be fully panoplied in the politics and government of all
English-speaking nations; she will find her glad footsteps impeded by no
artificial barriers, but whatever she can do well she will be free to do
in the enlightened age of worship, helpfulness and brotherhood, toward
which we move with steps accelerated far beyond our ken. The momentum of
the centuries is in the widening, deepening current of 19th century
reform; the 20th century's dawn shall witness our compensations and
reprisals, and as these increase humanity shall pay back into the
mother-heart of woman its unmeasured penitence and unfathomed regret for
all that she has missed (and through her, every son and daughter that
she has brought into the world), by reason of the awful mistake by
which, in the age of force, man substituted his "thus far and no
farther," in place of the "thus far and no farther" of God; one founded
in a selfish and ignorant view of woman's powers, the other giving her
what every sentient being ought to have-a fair field and a free course
to run and be glorified.
The Prohibition agitation in America has not been as great in the
past year as formerly, and the reasons are not far to seek. A
presidential campaign always lowers the moral atmosphere for a year
before it begins and a year after it is over. Legislators become timid,
politicians proceed to "hedge," journalists, with an eye to the loaves
and fishes, furl their sails concerning issues that have at best only a
fighting chance; the world, the flesh, and the devil get their innings,
and the time is not yet. In the past year the attention of the nation
has been focused on the World's Fair and the endless difficulties to
which that has given birth. There has been an incalculable amount of
ill-will set in motion as the result of personal financial interest and
ignoble ambition. All this savours not the things of God or of humanity.
The re-adjustment of political parties is still inchoate; men's hearts
are failing them for fear; leaders in the traditional party of moral
ideas have thrown off all disguises and grounded any weapons of
rebellion they may once have lifted against the liquor traffic. The
financial panic has rivetted the attention of the public on their own
dangers and disasters, and the spirit of money-making has lamentably
invaded the ranks of the temperance army itself; but prohibition is as
lively an issue to-day as emancipation was in 1856; an issue that stirs
such deadly hatred is by no means dead. It is still quick with fighting
blood, and its enemies know this even better than its friends.
.....the economic view of prohibition is one that appeals to the
largest number of our people, and none will deny that more and more they
are separating into two camps, the industrious and thrifty favouring
prohibition, the idle and spendthrift class opposing it. This is no
doubt the most helpful report that can be made upon the present
situation. The general drift, or as a great statesman in England has
said, "The flowing tide's with us." Those who let strong drink alone
must always be the most forceful and in the long run successful and
potential portion of the country. Our fathers were as good as we, but
they took no stand against the drink habit or the liquor traffic. There
is hardly a woman here upon the side-board of whose grandfather's home
would not have been found a decanter if not a demijohn. The same
influences that have brought us out of the passive into the active voice
may be trusted steadily to swell the number of recruits who shall join
their intelligence, energy, talents, and sobriety with ours. The
Temperance cause has everything to gain and nothing to lose from free
discussion, from experimental study of its results, whether physical or
financial, moral or mercantile, ethical or aesthetic. These are the
hidings of our power; the strong foundations on which, as on a rock, we
have begun to rear the edifice of a clear brain, an edifice that shall
extend and rise until it becomes the Pharos of humanity.
....Mrs. Frances Belford of Denver, Colorado, has tabulated the
following suggestive specifications, which will be of service to
speakers and writers; hence they are subjoined:-
COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC.
In relation:
" " toCrime.
" " to Divorce.
" " to Education.
" " to Alms houses.
" " to Asylums.
" " to Charitable Institutions and organized Charities.
" " to Adulteration.
" " to Society or the status of social drinking.
" " to Police expenses.
" " to Revenue-Municipal, State, Nation.
" " to Disease-Heredity. Acquired.
" " to Attitude of the Church by denomination.
" " to Number of Professors of Religion who are actual Prohibitionists.
" " to Number who are not.
" " to Statistics of homes ruined.
" " to Children at work who ought to be in school, where whiskey is the
direct cause of absence.
" " to Mortgages.
" " to Number of women impoverished and self-supporting.
" " to Ownership of Property by professed Christians, who lease it for
saloon and other immoral purposes.
" " to Hindrances to Prohibition.
" " to Home Missions.
" " to Sunday Schools. .....
The Bill which has recently passed the legislature in Ontario,
Canada, is one that White Ribbon women would do well to study. It is a
comprehensive enactment for the proper protection of children, and is
based upon the principle that every child born into the country has
rights which no parent shall be able to alienate. Hence the State is
made responsible to the Government for the welfare of its waifs and
strays, and for the children of dissolute parents.
The children may, upon proven charges, be removed from parental
control; and among the provisions is one for the removal from the
streets after 9 o'clock of children not in charge of proper guardians.
The home has everything to gain from such a piece of legislation, and
the saloon, the gambling house, and the haunt of infamy have everything
to lose.
... the isolation of women from each other has delayed the progress
of Humanity. But women are now saying "we never understood each other so
well as we do in these days." There is a heart-language that they are
learning in every nation, and nothing can stand before the sisterhood of
woman that is now growing up around the world.
No testimony is more uniform or more cheering than that which comes
from our round-the-world missionaries, showing the solidarity of
sentiment among women everywhere, no matter what their complexion,
language, or condition of servitude; they all believe in the White
Ribbon Movement when it is explained to them, and none more heartily
than the dusky-faced women of Africa, to whom our ambassadors spoke
through interpreters, and who listened so long and with such acute
interest that the pale-faced women from the West could not find it in
their hearts to break up the meeting until an unusually late hour. The
universal kindness and goodwill manifested toward our representatives,
brings to our minds with pathetic significance, those sacred words, "He
fashioneth their hearts alike."
....When their work wrought along this line shall have taught them
the strength of woman's influence for good, and the force of woman's
protest against evil, then this strength and this force can readily be
aroused and utilized along many other lines of Christian effort included
in the plans of our world-wide Association. .....
In reply to questions from me Miss Ackerman has sent the following
interesting itinerary from her private note book:-
Miles traveled, over 100,000; cities visited, 502; meetings held,
1,417; lectures, 870; addresses, 447; spoken on war vessels and
steamers, 41; traveled on steamers, 59; Sunday Schools visited, 114; Day
Schools visited, 176; Bands of Hope visited, 69; pulpits filled, 182;
saloons visited (prayed and spoke), 897; initiated Good Templars, 647;
tied white ribbon on, 8,479; given the pledge (men), 7,460; Unions
formed (locals), 230; nationals, 2; colonials, 4; Good Templars lodges,
2; men's societies, 10; Jewish temple, 1; chairmen, 947; chair- women,
47; marched at head of processions in 52 different cities; received
3,486 letters; postage, stationary, and telegraph, $840.05; wrote 5,947
letters and 420 newspaper articles on different phases of the work, and
220 letters to home papers; had 60,000 leaflets printed; 2,000 manuals;
raised $8,976.75, and spent it in the work as I went. .....
I once asked the greatest of inventors, Thomas A. Edison, if he were
a total abstainer, and when he told me that he was, I said "May I
enquire whether it was home influence that made you so?"-and he replied,
"No, I think it was because I always felt that I had a better use for my
head." Who can measure the loss to the world if that wonderful
instrument of thought that has given us so much of light and leading in
the practical mechanism of life had become sodden with drink instead of
electric with original ideas? But there is another argument on which we
can perhaps insist with a larger constituency:
SOCIAL PURITY.
When a man would rob a woman of her virtue or a woman is about to
sell herself in the most degraded bargain that the mind can contemplate,
what does he give her, and what does she take? Strong Drink ....
There are three sets of slaves that we women are working to
emancipate. They are, white slaves, that is degraded women; wage slaves,
that is the working classes; and whiskey slaves, that is the product
furnished by brewers and distillers. ......
WOMAN'S BALLOT.
He who knows what ought to be knows what will be, and we know that
the home vote ought to be let loose on the saloon; as our English leader
has said, "She who is life-giver ought to be law-giver." The Michigan
Liquor Dealers Association have decided to do their utmost to destroy
the law that arms women in that State with the municipal ballot and
declares that "when the Legislature granted this power to women (with an
educational restriction) it struck a blow directly at the Liquor Dealers
interests and rights."
......
"Poverty causes intemperance and intemperance causes poverty, and
that is the whole of it." So said a working woman, cutting the Gordian
knot of this difficult question, in a single sentence by the short road
of her own experience and observation.
To-day, as of old, it is true that women come to the cross, and to
the sepulchres where holy causes are distressed or dying or entombed,
and cry out once more in the abundance of their tender faith, "The Lord
is risen indeed."
.....The upper classes can better abstain than the overworked and
often ill-fed lower.
Who can call work for shop-girls irrevelant to the temperance
movement? What is it leads them to drink? It is wretched fare, miserable
quarters at home, insufficient food, and wearying hours of ill-requited
toil. If we have any justice it behooves us to look into this cause, and
not deal for ever and a day with the effects of the liquor traffic, and
with these alone.
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