History of the Woman's Temperance Crusade
9781465553782
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Ours is a famous country for protection. There is the tariff to protect industry, while the patent laws are a safeguard to invention. There are the land grants for railroads, subsidies for steamship companies, charters for corporations. In many of the States we have societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and in nearly all, laws for the protection of game. Busy with all these gentle, wise, and patriotic measures, there is one place our brothers have forgotten adequately to protect, and that is—Home. The Women’s Temperance Crusade, embalmed in the pages that follow, was a protest against this forgetfulness and this neglect. It was the wild cry of the defenceless and despairing, whose echo rose to Heaven and still resounds in every ear that is not deaf. At the height of that wonderful uprising, a sweet-voiced Quaker woman led her band to the chief saloon in an Ohio village. “What business have you to come here?” roared the affrighted dealer. Going to the bar she laid her Bible down and said: “Thee knows I had five sons and twenty grandsons, and thee knows that many of them learned to drink right in this place, and one went forth from here maddened with wine and blew his brains out with a pistol ball; and can’t thee let his mother lay her Bible on the counter whence her boy took up the glass, and read thee what God says: ‘Woe unto him that puts the bottle to his neighbor’s lips?’” The saloon-keeper had but to point to the wall behind him, where hung his “License to sell,” bearing the names of prominent citizens of the village, and emblazoned with the escutcheon of the Commonwealth. They all met in that little scene—Gospel and Law, man’s failure, woman’s grief; while the reason why, and the place in which they met, gave ample answer to the question heard so often: What did the Crusade mean? There is another question quite as often asked: What did the Crusade do? One of its leaders made this reply to the Temperance Sojourner, who writes these lines: “Well, let me answer from my own experience. Until it swept over our place, though I had lived there twenty years, I knew so little about this drinking business that I couldn’t have pointed out a saloon in the whole town. I thought the queer-looking places with blinds and screens were barber-shops. Since then I have found out that they are shops where men get shaved—not of their beards, but of their honor. Since then, too, I took my little four-year-old boy to market with me one morning, and feeling his clasp of my hand tighten, I looked down and saw his head turned backward apprehensively. ‘Why, Willie, what’s the matter?’ I exclaimed. There were volumes of meaning in the reproachful roll of his solemn blue eyes as he whispered: ‘Didn’t mamma know that her little boy was a-passin’ a saloon?’ Surely it was the crowning achievement of the Crusade that it opened the eyes of millions of women and children in this land to the existence and the dangers of the rum-shop. In consequence of this the public finger points to-day with imperious gesture at the saloon, and woman’s voice in tones of irresistible persuasion cries, ‘Look there!’” What did the Crusade do? Take another illustration. In front of a saloon that had refused them entrance, knelt a crusading group. Their leader was also the most prominent Methodist lady of the community. Her head was crowned with the glory of gray hairs; her hands were clasped, her sweet and gentle voice was lifted up in prayer. Around her knelt the flower of all the churches of that city—Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians—many of whom had never worked outside their own denominations until now. At the close, an Episcopal lady offered the Lord’s prayer, in which joined Unitarians, Swedenborgians, and Universalists; and when they had finished, a dear old lady in the dove-colored garb of the Friends’ Society was moved to pray, while all the time below them on the curbstone’s edge knelt Bridget with her beads and her Ave Marie.
