Today the results of Frances Willard’s work are seen in the great and growing interest in prohibition. What was to her a dream is coming to pass; what she hoped for will, in all probability, soon be a reality, and her great achievement lies in having made the question, “Shall we permit our homes and our country to be ruined by intemperance?” one of national importance, a question that every citizen of the United States must answer.
In Statuary Hall of our Nation’s Capitol, where stand the statues of those persons whose deeds have earned them the right to fame and honor, there is only one statue of a woman. That woman is Frances E. Willard.
JANE ADDAMS
Not so many years ago a little girl, living in a small Illinois town, had a strange dream. She was quite a little girl; just old enough to be in the second grade at school, nevertheless she always remembered that dream. She says, “I dreamed that every one in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was ‘all there,’ even a glowing fire upon the forge, and the anvil in its customary place near the door, but no human being was within sight. They had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery, and I alone remained in the deserted world. I stood in the blacksmith shop pondering on how to begin, and never once knew how, although I fully realized that the affairs of the world could not be resumed until at least one wheel should be made and something started.”
The little girl dreamed this dream more than once, but she never made the wagon wheel. However, when she was a grown woman she founded and built up something that has become a great force for good in the largest city of her native state.
Perhaps you are wondering what she did. She went to live in one of the poorest and most wretched parts of Chicago. There she furnished her house exactly as she would if it had been in some beautiful street. She called her home a Settlement, and invited her neighbors to come in daily for comfort and cheer.