Page:Women's War with Whisky.djvu/6

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6
A Great and Good Man's Opinion.

the gulf that yawns before it, can only step aside with shame-faced humility while the great crusade goes on, or heartily give to it our approval and our aid.

This is not a crusade of professional agitators, clamoring for an abstract right, but an enterprise of suffering, pure and devoted women, laboring for the overthrow of a concrete wrong. It is no pleasant, holiday business in which these women are engaged, but one of self-denying hardship, pregnant in every part with a sense of duty. It is the offspring of a grand religious impulse which gives to our time its one superb touch of heroism, and redeems it from its political debasement and the degradation of its materialism. It is a shame to manhood that it is necessary; it is a glory to womanhood that it is possible.—Dr. J. G. Holland, in Scribner's for May.