Let us be grateful that our horizon is widening. We women have learned to reason from effect to cause. It is considered a fine sign of a thinker to be able to reason from cause to effect. But we, in fourteen years’ march, have learned to go from the drunkard in the gutter, who was the object lesson we first saw, back to the children, as you will hear to-night; back to the idea of preventive, educational, evangelistic, social, and legal work for temperance; back to the basis of the saloon itself.
We have found that the liquor traffic is joined hand in hand with the very sources of the National Government. And we have come to the place where we want prohibition, first, last, and all the time. While the brewer talks about his “vested interests,” I lend my voice to the motherhood of the nation that has gone down into the valley of unutterable pain and in the shadow of death, with the dews of eternity upon the mother’s brow, given birth and being to the sons who are the “vested interests” of America’s homes.
We offset the demand of the brewer and distiller, that you shall protect their ill-gotten gains, with the thought of these most sacred treasures, dear to the hearts that you, our brothers, honor—dear to the hearts that you love best. I bring to you this thought, to-night, that you shall vote to represent us, and hasten the time when we can represent ourselves.
I believe that we are going out into this work, being schooled and inspired for greater things than we have dreamed, and that the army of women will prove the grandest sisterhood the world has ever known. As I have seen the love and kindness and good-will of women who differed so widely from us politically and religiously, and yet have found away down in the depths of their hearts the utmost love and affection, I have said, what kind of a world will this be when all women are as fond of each other as we strong-minded women are?
Home is the citadel of everything that is good and pure on earth; nothing must enter there to defile, neither anything which loveth or maketh a lie. And it shall be found that all society needed to make it altogether homelike was the home-folks; that all government needed to make it altogether pure from the fumes of tobacco and the debasing effects of strong drink, was the home-folks; that wherever you put a woman who has the atmosphere or home about her, she brings in the good time of pleasant and friendly relationship, and points with the finger of hope and the eye of faith always to something better—always it is better farther on.
As I look around and see the heavy cloud of apathy under which so many still are stifled, who take no interest in these things, I just think they do not half mean the hard words that they sometimes speak to us, or they wouldn’t if they knew; and, after awhile, they will have the same views I have, spell them with a capital V, and all be harmonious, like Barnum’s happy family, a splendid menagerie of the whole human race—clear-eyed, kind and victorious!
AN APPEAL FOR LIBERTY.
BY JOSEPH STORY.
