Decline of Secret Orders and Fraternities
There is tremendous activity in the establishment of secret orders and lodges throughout the country; due, as one writer states, to the fact that “human vanity craves tinsel and show and high-sounding titles, and in a republic these are easy of attainment in the circles of the endless fraternities.” But these fraternities have now been multiplied to such an extent that some are languishing from lack of support, and as illustrating this, it is stated that the “Sons of Temperance,” who recently held their fifty-seventh annual session in Prince Edward Island, have fallen away from a membership of five hundred thousand in 1884 to about seventy-five thousand at present. And this is no doubt indicative of a sad decline in the cause of temperance.