After the abolition of slavery there remained that other relic of barbarism, entrenched in a far more impregnable position, the rum-power. Intemperance has had to meet many who have attacked it in past days, but never yet an organization so tireless in effort, so fertile in expedients, and so exhaustless in resources as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. That association has made many mistakes, and is in danger of making many more, but one of the elements of its power is its willingness to learn. If it cannot fight with one weapon it adopts another. The brewers and distillers have millions of money at their command, but millions of money are not so formidable as millions of motherly hearts.
If now we turn to that other evil, more subtly and surely ruinous even than intemperance, impurity and the social evil, we find a new organization rising with great promise of power, viz.: The White Cross Society. The aim of that Association is to promote purity. It reaches out its hands to young men and women alike, and that work, in its organized form, owes its existence to the fertile brain and motherly heart of Josephine Butler, the wife of a canon of an English cathedral.
If woman works for the salvation of the physical life of her brothers and sisters, of course she must be equally anxious for the salvation of their souls. Woman has an instinct for religion. Living a life of greater seclusion than man, her heart in the silence, like a flower in the darkness, has grown toward the light. And this spiritual faculty has found the natural field for its operations in missionary work. The first American missionary martyr was Harriet Newell. Grand as was the life, and courageous as was the heart of Adoniram Judson, in all that called for heroism and consecration he was surpassed by his first wife, the beautiful, the almost preternaturally heroic Ann Hasseltine.
Women preponderate in all the departments of missionary activity. They are in distant lands as teachers, Bible-readers, nurses, physicians, missionaries’ wives. They go enthusiastically to homes in dug-out houses, and teach school and rear and train children, and keep the house, and do the drudgery, and then go to heaven, without complaining of earthly obscurity. They are among the Indians on their reservations, and in the Chinese quarters of the Pacific cities. But it has sometimes seemed to me that the most difficult and unattractive work for Christ that woman has ever undertaken, has been among the millions of blacks in the South. The work itself in many instances, if not all, has been disagreeable, if not repulsive. It has been at home, and has not inspired the enthusiastic admiration which has been given to those who have been in the foreign field. It has been attended with misconception, social ostracism, and sometimes with personal danger not found in any other branch of missionary service. But in all parts of the South are women at work with no motive but the love of Christ and humanity, winning souls by their Christ-like examples, and refining the uncultivated and vicious by the sweetness and purity of their unconsciously beautiful lives.
Woman’s work for woman among the blacks of the United States is the most important of all work for that people. Pure women have lessons to teach their own sex who have been degraded by a century of bondage, or who are the inheritors of the legacies of slavery, that none others can teach, and which must be well learned before there can be much progress in the moral amelioration of the race.
Her enthusiasm, her swift hostility to the more degrading sins, her sympathy which bears all the sorrows of those around her, her intuition of the Divine Fatherhood, and her patience, qualify woman for kinds of work which most men can never do so well. But there is one thing that men can do—they can remember the Apostle’s injunction, “Help those women.”
THE INDIAN PROBLEM.
ADDRESS OF PRES. JULIUS H. SEELYE, D.D., AT NEW HAVEN.
The whole number of Indians in the United States, including Alaska, probably is not far from 300,000, of whom about one-half now wear citizen’s dress, and about one-fourth speak the English language sufficiently to be understood. Some of these people are citizens, and some are wards of the nation. They differ from each other as they differ from us, in their languages and thoughts and ways. They represent nearly every grade of civilized and savage life. Their original rights to a large portion of our national domain we have recognized by purchase and by treaties, which have plighted the faith of the nation for their protection and support. We certainly desire to live in peace with them, but with many of them we are in constant danger of war. What shall we do with them and for them? How shall we wisely maintain our rights respecting them, and at the same time righteously fulfill our obligations? How shall the Indian cease to disturb us, and become a blessing to the nation?