General Conference lifted us out of despair by noble resolutions against licensing the liquor traffic, and thereafter clerical dignitaries broke our hearts by a masterly inactivity—or took a scourge of small cords and proceeded, as it were, to drive us out with the hue and cry of “women’s rights,” lest, should a woman vote, her natural function should cease, and the sound of the lullaby and sewing machine be no longer heard in the land. It was comical sometimes to see how the bishops and politicians moved on the same line and for the same reason. But like some of our good bishops of slaveholding times, these certainly will not shine with lustre in the sky of history. Humbler ministerial brethren endured reproach with us and fought our battles; then we had sometimes the sorrow of seeing them removed from places of influence to obscure points in the service of the church. At last we and they tacitly understood that a preacher who wrought valiantly for prohibition jeoparded his “prospects.” So it came that some who had led us “went back” in the holy cause, and “standing afar off,” justified themselves, saying, “I’m as good a prohibitionist as you are, but I’m more practical.” Desperation seizes the soul of women in reform work when a preacher or politician uses the word “practical”; we know we shall get his “sympathy” but never his influence or his vote. And the diplomatic brother who has to explain that he is a temperance man, may hold clear qualifications for a citizenship in heaven, but is of no account whatever as a citizen of the militant kingdom Of God on earth, that must fight against “principalities and powers” if it would win the world to the principles of Christ.
It should be clearly understood that the legitimate work of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union is to close the open saloon, and not, as many mistake, to interfere with personal liberty by forcing total abstinence upon the individual. The members of the organization in the interests of consistency must be total abstainers; and because science pronounces alcohol a poison and an active peril in the human body, a vigorous educational propaganda is kept up in order that future generations may be protected by knowledge against the dangers of alcoholic drinks. The main point at issue is that the State has no right to license an institution which is a corrupter of public morals and a menace to social life. The Supreme Court of the United States has so interpreted. It is the sole duty of the State to protect and develop citizens; to protect their lives, their property, their morals and their rights; to develop the highest type of citizen that education by law and schoolhouse can produce. The saloon hazards the well-being of every citizen that is born to a State; it annuls the work of the church and the college; it disintegrates, degrades and destroys family life—the unit of the State; it impoverishes the home, pauperizes the child and debases manhood; it fills almshouses, jails and insane asylums; it lays the burden of the support of these institutions on the State; the taxes which all the people have paid for their mutual protection and development are unrighteously diverted to the sustenance of the victims of the saloon; the State protects a small class of citizens in doing injury to the interests of all other classes. For revenue, and for revenue only, it gives a right and a power to the saloon to make an unending army of criminals, paupers and lunatics out of the sons and daughters which every mother has gone down into the shadow of death to deliver into the keeping of her country.
The motherhood of the enlightened world is arousing against this treachery of the commonwealth to her sacred trust. The State has no right to sell her sons even unto righteousness; still less to deliver them into the bonds of iniquity for a price. It is incredible that the mother’s revolt did not begin long ago, for even the brute will fight for its young. But now they have begun to understand their duty and their power, and “so long as boys are ruined and mothers weep; so long as homes are wrecked and the sob of unsheltered children finds the ear of God; so long as the Gospel lets in the light for the lost, and Christ is King, there will be a contest on the temperance question until victory. So long as this Christian nation sanctions the destruction of its sons for revenue, and sets on a legalized throne ‘that sum of all villainies,’ the saloon; so long as ‘the wicked are justified for reward’ and cities are built with blood, there will be a prohibition issue, and one day the right will triumph.”
CHAPTER XVII.
NERVOUS PROSTRATION AND A VENERABLE COUSIN.
I once heard a woman say that she had lived half a lifetime before she realized that the commandments were written for her. In a vague sort of way she had appropriated, “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not bear false witness;” but she did not intend to do these things—the commandments must be for those who did. Her dumb amazement may be imagined on hearing a venerable and saintly soul state that she was so grateful to God that in her long life she had had no temptation to be a Magdalen. It was unthinkable that she should have had.
But the stress of life grew to agony; disappointments and wrongs heaped upon my friend; and one day she stood bare-souled and alone before God, confronting the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill!” In her struggle back to the Divine she learned that all of the commandments were written for her. Ever since, her heart has been pierced with tenderest sympathy for every man or woman who has fallen before temptation, and the despair of the suicide seems her own.
Unvarying good health and steady nerves were my inheritance, and my husband’s fine, calm judgment helped to increase my nervous vigor. I am afraid I had once a quiet disdain for nervous women, and was supercilious towards what I deemed a lack of moral fiber, believing that with it health conditions would not have become “all at loose ends.” But a time came when I too was going from sofa to easy chair, and dropping back into bed limp and trembling; when the banging of a door or the rustling of a paper “set me wild;” when I was being a means of grace to all my family through giving them an opportunity to “let patience have its perfect work”—and all with no justifying cause, except that the iron of sorrow had entered my soul, the color had been taken from my life, and I had not yet found my readjustments. Nevertheless I denied my condition, and so one day the doctor tried to explain it to me. “A person,” he began, “is said to be nervous when presenting a special susceptibility to pain, or exhibiting an undue mobility of the nervous system, as when one starts, or shakes on the occasion of abrupt or intense sensorial impressions, thus showing an exalted emotional susceptibility. The heart itself under the influence of nervous stimulation may in a moment change its customary order and rate of action, and in extreme cases cease to beat. The whole mental processes, as well as the functions of organic life, may be seriously involved. Now in your case, madam——”