A Great and Good Man's Opinion.
For years and years, and weary, suffering years, multiplied into decades, have the women of America waited to see the traffic destroyed which annually sends sixty thousand of their sons, brothers, fathers and husbands into the drunkard's grave. They have been impoverished, disgraced, tortured in mind and body, beaten, murdered. Under the influence of maddening liquors the hands that were pledged to provide for and protect them, have withdrawn from them the means of life, or smitten them in the dust. Sons whom they have nursed upon their bosoms with tenderest love and countless prayers, have grown into beasts of whom they are afraid, or have sunk into helpless and pitiful slavery. They have been compelled to cover their eyes with shame in the presence of fathers whom it would have been bliss for them to hold in honor. They have been compelled to bear children to men whose habits had unfitted them for parentage—children not only tainted by disease endowed with debased appetites. They have seen themselves and families thrust into social degradation and cut off forever from all desirable life by the vice of the men they loved. What the women of this country from drunkenness, no mind, however sympathetic, can measure, and no pen, however graphic, can describe. It has been the unfathomable black gulf into which the infatuated multitudes of men have thrown their fortunes, their health, and their industry, and out of which have came only—in fire and stench—dishonor, disease, crime, misery, despair and death. It is the abomination of abominations, the curse of curses, the hell of hells!
For weary, despairing years they have waited to see the reform that would protect them from further harm. They have listened to lectures, they have signed pledges, they have encouraged temperance societies, they have asked for and secured legislation, and all to no practical good end. The politicians have played them false; the officers of the law are unfaithful; the Government revenue thrives on the thriftiness of the curse; multitudes of the clergy are not only apathetic in their pulpits, but self-indulgent in their social habits; newspapers do not help, but rather hinder them; the liquor interest, armed with the money that should have brought them prosperity, organizes against them; fashion opposes them; a million fierce appetites are arrayed against them, and, losing all faith in en, what can they do? There is but one thing for them to do. There is but one direction in which they can look, and that is upward! The women's temperance movement, begun and carried on by prayer, is as natural in its birth and growth as the oak that springs from the acorn. If God and the God-like element in women cannot help, there is no help. If the pulpit, the press, the politicians, the reformers, the law, cannot bring reform, who is left to do it but God and the women? We bow to this movement with reverence. We do not stop to question methods; we do not pause to query about permanent results. We simply say to the women engaged in this glorious crusade: "May God help and prosper you, and give you the desire of your hearts in the fruit of your labors!"
It becomes men to be either humbly helpful or dumb. We who have dallied with this question; we who have dispassionately drawn the line between temperance and total abstinence; we who have deplored drunkenness with wine-glasses in our bands; we who have consented to involve a great moral reform with politics; we who have been politically afraid of the power of the brutal element associates with the liquor traffic; we who have split hairs in our discussions of public policy; have shown our unwillingness or our impotence to save the country from
