THE W. C. T. U. PERPETUAL.

525

Let us hope for the permanence of this great organization. I believe it to be indestructible because it is the creation or result of causes operating from the beginning of time, and which in a true sense ordain whatsoever comes to pass, and is a necessary means to the great end of millennial transformation.

The true history of our time is being made by woman. It is her age. We are fortunate to live in it. Let the next, which can look back upon their full proportions, record its wonders. Meanwhile, let the actors in these great events wait for the verdict of posterity, who

"Long shall seek their likeness-long in vain.”

CHAPTER XXV.

WHAT SHALL WE DO NEXT?

Since Waterloo no Year in which Rum has not been the Great Destroyer - Governor St. John's Speech at Worcester - The New Century of Temperance Reform A Look Backward on the Past - Means of the Past Successes - Helps and Hindrances One Hundred Years have Wrought Conviction - The Removal of the Evil is now the Problem The Question Everywhere, North and South, East and West The American People must Act-What to do Next? Washingtonian Moral Suasion not Sufficient-Constitutional Amendment - Not of what Party, but will the Member of Congress Vote Prohibitory Amendment? - In 1890 Submit the Amendment to the People - No more Mistakes-Unanimity and Efficiency - Caucuses, Primaries and Nominating Conventions - National Prohibition our Watchword - Then, America the Temperance Leader and Redeemer of the Nations.

A

S we turn our faces to the foe and move for the promised land, we feel the force of the question, What shall we do next? Let us briefly review the past and consider a few suggestions in answer to this question.

It must be conceded that the use of intoxicating, that is to say of poisonous liquors as a beverage is the chief source and immediate cause of more hurt to society and to individuals than any other agency which can be named. The war of the rebellion cost us fewer lives and less treasure year by year during its term of death and devastation than the nation has sacrificed annually to the Moloch of alcohol during the halcyon period which has elapsed since its close. Pestilence has not slain sixty thousand victims in any one year since the settlement of this country. If cholera and small-pox, combined, should sweep away one hundred thousand of our countrymen in a season, the nation would organize as one vast funeral procession and hang the heavens with the emblems of despair. Famine is with us unknown, or at least unnecessary, and whenever it exists it is a crime either of the victim or of the community, and not an excusable misfortune in any case whatever; but in other civilized lands

ALCOHOL CONFRONTED AS THE ENEMY.

527

starvation, even during the last fifty years, has occasionally taught mankind that the terrible word can not yet be dropped from the human vocabulary as descriptive of an evil liability to which is extant among men.

Yet it may safely be said that since the battle of Waterloo, now the full period of the life of man, there has been no one year in which the combined suffering and pecuniary losses inflicted upon the Caucasian race by war, pestilence and famine, have equalled the total of destruction chargeable to alcohol in the same lapse of time. Beyond this the curse of the latter has been not intermittent and occasional, but perpetual and inexorable, and, I think, on the whole, increas ing like the everlasting and unyielding pressure of gravitation and depravity. In this work we have become familiar with the mathematical statements which come to us from statisticians, municipal authorities, from the leading luminaries of all the professions and from every source of authentic information, by which we learn that at least two-thirds of the pauperism, insanity and crime, and of the public and private burdens which these great evils impose upon us, are directly chargeable to intoxicating drink. Such facts are as familiar as corpses upon a battlefield, and seem to attract no more attention. I hazard nothing in appealing to the consciousness of every one who reads these lines to attest that he has seen more of evil flowing from this than from any other one cause during his whole lifetime, and I should hardly fail if I asserted that the personal sorrows and afflictions which he has most to bewail among friends, kindred and the community where he may dwell are traceable to the same omnipresent curse. Those who preach, preach against it, and those who pray, pray against it. Platform orators denounce it. The press recounts its daily crimes and deviltries, and those who drink, as well as those who abstain, vie with each other in stigmatizing rum as the worst thing there is extant. Yet, somehow, the old king does most wonderfully hold his own. He is the popular curse. He has round billions of money invested in his business, one-tenth, perhaps, of the property and labor of the country, producing and distributing death and misery to the American people. His market is as sure as that for cotton, corn or

1

beef. The unnatural appetite which constitutes the demand has become as insatiable, and almost as universal, as the demand for healthy foods. This appetite descends with the blood, and the parent thus tends bar, even after death, for his child. Multitudes bewail the evils of intoxication, attend temperance meetings, sing temperance songs and pay a dollar a year to help along the blessed cause, and then lease their real estate for saloons, protest against the insertion of prohibition planks in political platforms lest remonstrance against evil shall upset party supremacy; or, it may be, with upright purpose, influenced by profound discouragement and disgust, they break down and destroy an organization which they created and which belongs to them, which they might control and save and use as a mighty power for the removal of the evils which they deplore. So it goes, and the evil expands until, as Governor St. John tells us, no doubt truly, in a speech at Worcester, Mass., in the year 1885, that the production, which in the year 1862 was said to have been 16,000,000 gallons of distilled liquors, and 62,000,000 gallons of beer, perhaps an exceptionally unproductive year, was, according to a recent report of the commissioner of internal revenue, 69,000,000 gallons of distilled spirits, 19,000,000 barrels or 700,000,000 gallons of malt liquors, and over 2,000,000 gallons of wine, all which went into the consumption of this country during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1885. Well, really, we do not seem to be progressing very rapidly according to these figures, but I suspect that the returns of 1862 were imperfect. There is, however, I think, no doubt that the consumption of all kinds of intoxicating liquors has increased quite as rapidly as population in the United States during the last quarter of a century. This is true of malt liquors, unquestionably, and perhaps of wines. The rum traffic is now the great menacing danger of America and of civilization.

What, then, shall we do? I do not assume that I can answer this question. I can state what seems to my vision to be the better way; that is all that any man can do, and the Supreme Ruler of events will direct the pathway of action for the new century and in the ages to come as he has from the beginning until now.