Woman's Relation to the Cause of Temperance.
By T. P. Stevenson
THE following is an extract from a speech delivered at Chicago, December 13, by Rev. T. P. Stevenson:— There are two words which, within three or four years, have come to be newly linked with the Temperance movement. Our ears have grown familiar with the combinations “Gospel Temperance,” and “Women’s Temperance work,” each marking a distinct and positive feature of recent efforts. It is almost too obvious to need saying that woman’s activity in this work is justified by the fact that she is the chief sufferer from the evils of intemperance. I read yesterday morning of a brute who had kicked and beaten his wife until she lay insensible and dying, and the sufficient explanation was added in four words, “He had been drinking.” We read just such stories almost every day as part of our current news, and receive invariably the same explanation of the outrage. A month ago Mrs. Evelyn Stuart sat in her beautiful apartments in a neighboring city, admired, congratulated, envied; hiding even from her own kindred her secret of insupportable sorrow, until on the same day on which she unbosomed her grief to the mother that bore her, she returned to her elegant home to drown her anguish in a fatal draught of opium. The explanation, beyond which no one thought of inquiring, was found in the fact that Robert Stuart was a confirmed drunkard, and made her life bitter with insult and cruelty. It is a custom among the Mormons that a wife is always buried in her wedding robes. She wears them on but two occasions, her marriage and her funeral. And many a discarded wife, forsaken by her fickle lord for some younger rival, learns to look with a pathetic interest on these memorials, and to long for the quiet rest of which they are the emblem. Not only in distant and outlawed Utah, but all over our beautiful country, in our prosperous cities, our stately homes, our hallowed sanctuaries, are wives whose memory of the marriage vows which fell on their ear smites on the soul like a mocking echo, and from whose eyes the sight of any memorial of the occasion brings but a flood of tears over cruelly disappointed hopes. Horace Mann once justified the cost of a stately and spacious reformatory institution, at the opening of which he was speaking, and all the cost of its maintenance for years to come, provided it should be the means of saving a single boy from ruin. A gentleman afterward asked him whether this was not an exaggeration. “Not, if it were my boy,” was the solemn and convincing reply. The one hundred thousand women who have formed this Temperance Union justify their labors and sacrifices by the fact that every one can say “It is,—or it may be to-morrow—my boy, my husband, my brother, who is perishing.” Joseph Cook has made apt use of a homely illustration of the comparative importance of the interests which excite us,—an illustration which he tells us has become classical in Germany—two women frantic with excitement, one because her child was in the well; the other because her pitcher was in the well. The Temperance reform is an excitement over children in wells. And while I, myself a father, would not depreciate the anguish which rends a father’s heart when his own child is perishing, I need not ask who it is that suffers most when a child is in the well. If any man, listening to this argument, is conscious of the rising sentiment, “This Temperance work belongs properly to the women. We had better leave it to them,” let me say he is no soldier. Every soldier knows that the reserves must be supported. As they move forward into the breach every gun is trained more carefully on the enemy’s position, and every grim hand plies more diligently its instrument of death. I recognize the responsibilities which rest on the pulpit. I insist on the obligation which binds every other profession. I appeal to all citizens, to children and men of gray hairs, to churches, and to Sabbath-schools, to fall in and close up the ranks for a final and decisive struggle.