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"THE WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION IS ORGANIZED MOTHER-LOVE."

-Hannah Whitall Smith.

CHAPTER I.

ON THE THRESHOLD.

From my earliest recollection there hung on the dining-room wall at our house, a pretty steel engraving. It was my father's certificate of membership in the Washingtonian Society, and was dated about 1835. He had never been a drinking man, was a reputable young husband, father, business man and church member, but when the movement reached Churchville, near Rochester, N. V., he joined it. The little picture represented a bright, happy temperance home with a sweet woman at the center, and over against it a dismal, squalid house with a drunken man staggering in, bottle in hand. Unconsciously and ineffaceably I learned from that one object-lesson what the precepts and practice of my parents steadily enforced, that we were to let strong drink alone.

In 1855 I cut from my favorite Youth's Cabinet, the chief juvenile paper of that day, the following pledge, and pasting it in our family Bible, insisted on its being signed by every member of the family-parents, brother, sister and self.

"A pledge we make no wine to take,

Nor brandy red that turns the head,

Nor fiery rum that ruins home,

Nor brewers' beer, for that we fear,

And cider, too, will never do.

To quench our thirst, we'll always bring

Cold water from the well or spring;

So here we pledge perpetual hate

To all that can intoxicate."

It is still there, thus signed, and represents the first bit of temperance work I ever did. Its object was simply to enshrine

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First Offers the Pledge.

in the most sacred place our home afforded a pledge that I considered uniquely sacred. Nobody asked me to sign it, nor was there a demand because of exterior temptation, for we were living in much isolation on a farm three miles from Janesville, Wis., where my childhood was invested-not "spent."

Coming to Evanston, Ill., in 1858, we found a prohibition village, the charter of the University forbidding the sale of any intoxicating liquor as a beverage.

Temperance was a matter of course in this "Methodist heaven" where we have lived from that day to this, from the time it had but a few hundred, until now when it claims seven thousand inhabitants.

About 1863-'65 a "Temperance Alliance" was organized here by L. L. Greenleaf, then our leading citizen, the Chicago representative of the Fairbanks' firm, who have made St. Johnsbury, Vt., a model temperance town. Before that Alliance I read one temperance essay when I was a quiet school teacher amid these shady groves, and one evening at the "Alliance sociable" I offered the pledge for the first time and was rebuffed by a now distinguished literary man, then a pastor and editor in our village. This was my first attempt and his brusque and almost angry negative hurt me to the heart. We are excellent friends all the same, and I do not believe he dreams how much he pained me, so little do we know what touches us, and what we touch, as we wend our way along life's crowded street.

In all my teaching, in Sunday-school, public school and seminary, I never mentioned total abstinence until the winter of the Crusade, taking it always as a matter of course that my pupils did n't drink, nor did they as a rule.

I never in my life saw wine offered in my own country but once, when Mrs. Will Knox, of Pittsburgh, a former Sundayschool scholar of my sister Mary, brought cake and wine to a young lady of high family in our church, and to me, when we went to call on her after her wedding. "Not to be singular" we touched it to our lips-but that was twenty-five years ago, before the great examples burnt into the Nation's memory and conscience by Lucy Webb Hayes, Rose Cleveland and Frances Folsom Cleveland.

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That was truly a prophetic innovation at the White House when our gracious Mrs. Hayes replaced the dinner with its wineglasses by the stately and elegant reception. Perhaps while men rule the state in their government "of the minority, by the minority, for the minority," its highest expression will still be the dinner-table with its clinking glasses and plenty of tobacco-smoke afterward, but when men and women both come into the kingdom for the glad new times that hasten to be here, the gustatory nerve will be dethroned once and for evermore. For there are so many more worthy and delightful ways of investing (not "spending ") one's time; there are so many better things to do. The blossoming of women into deeds of philanthropy gives us a hint of the truer forms of society that are to come. Emerson said, We descend to meet," because he claims that we are on a higher plane when alone with God and nature. But this need not be so. Doubtless in the outworn and stereotyped forms of society where material pleasures still hold sway, we do "descend to meet," but when a philanthropic purpose determines our companionships, and leads to our convenings, then we climb together into purer and more vital air. The "coming women," nay, the women who have come, have learned the loveliest meanings of the word "society." Indeed, some of us like to call it comradeship," instead, this interchange of highest thought and tenderest aspiration, in which the sense of selfhood is diminished and the sense of otherhood increased. We make no "formal calls," but the informal ones are a hundred-fold more pleasant. If a new woman's face appear in church we wonder if she won't come with us" in the W. H. M. S., the W. F. M. S., the W. C. T. U., or some other dear "ring-around-a-rosy" circle, formed "for others' sake." If new children sit beside her in the church pew, we plan to win them for our Band of Hope or other philanthropic guild where they will learn to find “society” in nobler forms than this poor old world has ever known before. The emptiness of conventional forms of speech and action is never so patent as when contrasted with the "fullness of life " that crowns those hearts banded together to bring the day when all men's weal shall be each man's care. Wordsworth wrote wearily of

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"The greetings where no kindness is."

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