two sides to the issue, and there are two great party organizations. They can both take part with alcohol against man, or one of them for alcohol and the other for man, or both can stand for man as against his great enemy. But neither can evade the issue much longer, for wherever they take to concealment, even if it be in the uttermost parts of the earth, the issue will find them there. It has found them both already, and they will never escape from it again until it is settled. If they, or either of them, choose to be destroyed, the opportunity is open, and an alliance with the cause of intemperance, or an attempted evasion of the issue, will shatter the strongest political organization which ever existed. New parties will arise when old ones fail to promote the public good. The most patient and long-enduring people will tire under the load this nation has carried, lo! now these hundred years. Political action, by State and nation, is indispensable to the success of the temperance movement, to the victory of man in his conflict with appetite and with an accursed trade which is buttressed in all the fortifications of sin, defended by all the disciplined enginery of the bottomless pit, and strengthened with billions of the golden sinews of war.

The political party which espouses the cause of alcohol must defeat both God and man, or it must die. No matter how pure and glorious its past record, there is no political organization in existence in this country to-day which can uphold the traffic in intoxicating drinks and survive. Whatever party shall thus prostitute its organization will soon perish from the earth, and fortunate will it be for its memory that it can rot.

I write from the stand-point of a Republican who would gladly die to promote the good of his party when he can do so and remain a patriot, but who also realizes that to him no special responsibility or prescience is given, and that the whole people are interested as well as he to be right. And because the people are becoming informed, and when informed will be right, he feels sure that ere long they will destroy any party organization which does not assist to "pulverize the rum power."

But when various important problems concern vitally the

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public welfare, and all are connected each with the other, no one issue, however great, no one "cause," however good, can isolate itself and succeed in a party which has no occasion to be save only on account of that one. A party with one plank in its platform may destroy existing organizations, or force them to purchase life by adopting a neglected issue the consideration of which the public welfare demands. But it is not in the power of new organizations to substitute themselves at pleasure in the body-politic, except for the mere purposes of agitation and the creation of opinion, for parties which have become historic, upon which have become concentrated the interests, affections and confidence of the people, and through and by which the government has been administered, and the nation led on its triumphant career of prosperity and glory.

The people will cling to their old associations and adhere to their tried agencies and methods until compelled to change for the public good. But the people will not wait forever. While we lag our children perish. The whole problem, after all, is in the answer to one question: In what way can the public mind be most readily convinced, and the vote of a majority obtained?

That is a question which every man must, and which I hope every woman soon may, decide in the forum of private conscience, under the inspiration of the largest patriotism and for the welfare of mankind.

God or Baal! which?

I purposely say no more on the subject in this book, and as nearly four years ago, at the Chicago convention, I warned the party to which I belong of impending danger, albeit without avail, so I do now entreat not one but all parties, and the whole people, to rise in their might, and by spontaneous, patriotic and righteous action, either through the parties to which they now belong or in new organizations, to remove from the land this great evil, which impartially curses and ruins all we love; and to call upon mankind everywhere to join with them in its extirpation from the face of the earth.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION.

The W. C. T. U. both a Religious and Secular Organization — Exhortation, Enlightenment, Administration, Charity-It is Woman Organized — Ten Thousand Local Unions - National W. C. T. U. — The Woman's Crusade - Dr. Dio Lewis- History of the Crusade, by Sarah K. Bolton - The Story of the Crusade - Graphic Incidents The Woman's Crusade becomes the Woman's Christian Temperance Union -- The Chautauqua Meeting - Mrs. Annie Wittenmyer, President - Cincinnati First Annual Meeting, 1875 - Minneapolis Annual Meeting, 1886-Thirty or Forty Departments of their Temperance Activity Miss Francis E. Willard President since 1879 - Department of Organization - Preventive Department - Educational Department; Mrs. Mary Hunt - Social Department - Legal Department- The World's W. C. T. U., John Bright's Sister President — Organizers and Superintendents - The Union Signal - Song as a Power in the Work; Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson, Miss Anna Gordon A Few Names of Leaders.

THE

HE Woman's Christian Temperance Union is now the leading force in the temperance reform. It is the greatest exclusively woman's association that exists, or ever has existed, in the world. As woman and woman's possessions child, husband, home are the prey of alcohol, it is fitting that her sex should organize en masse for defensive and offensive warfare against the destroyer of all that she holds dear. The W. C. T. U. is both a religious and a secular organization. In this respect it differs from any other with which I am acquainted. It can do anything of which God will approve, within the powers of humanity, to accomplish its great end.

It can preach and sing psalms; it can watch and pray; it can lecture, print, and raise money; it can command all times and all seasons; the Sabbath or the week day, there is no hour when its work is not in order, nor in which it is not proceeding; all agencies belong to it, every profession and every occupation pay it tribute when the Union summons for assistance in its work of exhortation, enlightenment, administration and charity. As woman is a part and force

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in everything, the Union seeks to utilize all that she is or can be made to be, and all that she can appropriate from the world around her, in the great conflict that is to make her free indeed.

There are ten thousand local unions in this country; fortyeight which embrace these local unions, each having jurisdiction of a State or Territory, save one for the District of Columbia. The whole are merged in the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, with two hundred thousand active members, who have also become the great rallying and directing force of church action for the cause of temperance in this country; and already existing, expanding, and rising like a city of palaces, or a universal republic in the air resting upon the pillars of the earth, is the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the world.

This organization is the death of the liquor traffic, and of its associated vices and crimes. The traffic never before met such a foe as educated, organized Christian American womanhood. This is the great embarrassment to those who are engaged in it. None realize as they do the certainty of its destruction. They feel and know it to be sure, for woman is against it, and you will be told by any candid and intelligent man in the trade that he believes, for this reason, if for no other, the traffic to be doomed, and its disappearance to be but a question of comparatively brief time.

The advent of woman upon the battle-field has planted the bloody ground all over with flowers of hope, and filled the murky air with the ascending incense of prayers and praise, which are answered by the descending balms and perfumes of paradise. It is a war for life—not against it; the great enemy we seek to destroy is death.

The Woman's Crusade is now the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The Crusade was a miracle. There is no precedent for it in history; and, as I read the account of its birth and growth and career, I am impressed with the feeling that this thing was supernatural. Here is a new force, or an old one operating under new conditions, impelled and guided by a head and hand that I wot not of. It has not been repeated. There does not seem to be necessity for its repetition, because now the Woman's Christian Temperance

Union is abroad in the world. The Union can perform the field-work of the Crusade even better than the mother, but how could the Union ever have been organized, how could it have come to exist at all, but for a movement like the Crusade? More and more the Crusade, to my mind, ceases to be primarily an assault upon the liquor traffic. Was it not rather a new creation which, now that the fullness of time had come, was to be born into the world, and were not the strange, rapt and enthusiastic labors, in which man took no part, save only as an attendant, the maternal struggle by which the whole sex brought forth a new institution, a woman force, which should be perpetual, and should work out the higher, the supreme life of the womanhood of the future? I feel sure that this institution is as permanent as the church; its work will never be done, because it turns its hand to everything which improves the nature and promotes the happiness of the race, assailing and destroying first that which injures most.

Such an institution will wax more and more unto the perfect day, when the finer and more spiritual powers of woman shall be the directing influence to elevate both sexes to higher standards of conduct and to more abundant fruitions of a better life.

Dr. Dio Lewis was one of a family of five children, whose pious mother defended her little brood as best she could against the rum demon which dwelt in a saloon hard by, where the husband and father devoted soul, body and substance to destruction, and his family to abuse, starvation and despair. But that mother would not despair; and she, with a few other women, surrounded the saloon-keeper, turned his den for a time into a house of prayer, and besought him to abandon the business which was destroying their homes. They were successful. Forty years later, Mr. Lewis, who had become an eminent educator, was speaking in a small town in Ohio upon the subject of temperance. Relating this incident of his early life, he requested all who would follow the example of his mother to rise. It is said that the whole congregation rose. At once a meeting was appointed to be held in the Presbyterian Church the next morning. Dr. Lewis was a guest at the mansion of