400 Woman's Ballot Indorsed. "And moving on from high to higher, The center of a world's desire." On behalf of the Kansas delegation, I second the nomination of John P. St. John, of Kansas. When it was announced that all the votes of the convention had been cast for Governor St. John, the tumult was tremendous, and as we all stood up and sang, "Mine eyes have seen the glory Of the coming of the Lord," there were tears on many a cheek. I was a member of the Committee on Resolutions, and especially interested in the one on equal suffrage. It read as follows, and was mainly written by James Black, of Pennsylvania, the Prohibition party's first candidate for president; my own part I will print in italics: Resolved, That the activity and coöperation of the women of America for the promotion of temperance has, in all the history of the past, been a strength and encouragement which we gratefully acknowledge and record. In the later and present phase of the movement for the prohibition of the traffic, the purity of purpose and method, the earnestness, zeal, intelligence and devotion of the mothers and daughters of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union have been eminently blessed of God. Kansas and Iowa have been given them as "sheaves of rejoicing, and the education and the arousing of the public mind, and the now prevailing demand for the Constitutional Amendment are largely the fruit of their prayers and labors. Sharing in the efforts that shall bring the question of the abolition of this traffic to the polls, they shall join in the grand "Praise God from whom all blessings flow," when by law victory shall be achieved. Resolved, That believing in the civil and political equality of the sexes, and that the ballot in the hands of woman is her right for protection, and would prove a powerful ally for the abolition of the liquor traffic, the execution of law, the promotion of reform in civil affairs, and the removal of corruption in public life, we enunciate the principle, and relegate the practical outworking of this reform to the discretion of the Prohibition party in the several states, according to the condition of public sentiment in those states. I had been so much in the South that its delegates confided to me their earnest hope that we would "draw it mild," but I felt that they would hardly disown their traditional doctrine of state rights as here expressed. They did not, nor do I believe "Home Protection" as a Name. 401 that, as a class, they will antagonize those of us who are committed to the equal suffrage plank in the Prohibition platform. There was some debate, lively and courteous, but the resolution was adopted with but little dissent. Not so the party name. Rev. Dr. Miner, of Boston, a chief among the old liners, moved that the old name "Prohibition" be restored. "Our side" amended with the proposition to retain the name given two years before at Chicago, viz., "Prohibition Home Protection Party,"-ten syllables! and on this rock we foundered. It was not in human nature to put up with a decahedron name, and one parted in the middle at that! If we had moved to substitute "Home Protection," we should have done much better. I remember uttering a few sentences in favor of retaining the long name, but the old liners were too strong for us, and almost without debate, the change was agreed to. This action scored another of those huge disappointments through which one learns "to endure hardness as a good soldier." Away back in 1876, I think it was, when our great and good Mrs. Yeomans, of Canada, spoke at Old Orchard Beach, my ear first caught the winsome and significant phrase "Home Protection." My impression is that she did not coin, but adapted it from the tariff vocabulary of the Dominion. Listening to her there in the great grove of pines, with blue sky overhead and flashing sea waves near, it flashed on me, "Why not call this gospel temperance work the 'Home Protection Movement,' for that's just what it is, and these words furnish the text for our best argument and go convincingly along with our motto: For God and Home and Native Land?''' The more I thought about all this, the more it grew on me, and in 1877, when invited by Henry C. Bowen, of the New York Independent, to speak at his famous "Fourth of July Celebration," I chose "Home Protection" for my theme and brought out from the Independent office my "Home Protection Manual," which I distributed among our white ribbon women throughout the nation. We called our petitions, "Home Protection," our great Illinois campaign in 1879 went by that name, and when I was converted, heart and soul, to the Prohibition party, I believed, as I do still, that its strength would be immeasurably increased by adopting Home Protection as its name. But the old name was endeared to those who had suffered for it, and 402 My First Campaign Speech. they were not disposed to give it up. In this I then, and always, believed them to be unwise. Directly after the convention I went, by the earnest request of Mr. Daniels, vice-presidential nominee of the Prohibition party, to speak at a ratification meeting in Cumberland, Md. I dreaded the encounter, for, except at our temperance conventions, I had but once in my life, so far as I can recall, spoken on politics.* To meet the "world's people" in the opening of a fierce campaign was painful to me, and I did it only as a token of loyalty to our new candidate. This town among the hills is fore-ordained to be provincial, by reason of its physical geography. Its pretty little opera house was well filled that night; but the air felt cold as winter to my spirit, though July's heat was really there. ously enough did its well-dressed women look on me, standing forlorn before the footlights, on a bare stage, and sighing for the heart-warmth of a Woman's Christian Temperance Union meeting, where women would have crowded around me, flowers sent forth their perfume, and hymns and prayers made all of us at home. I spoke, no doubt, forlornly; anyhow, I felt forlorn. The gainsaying political papers said next day, that I was poor enough, and our candidate even poorer than I! Major Hilton, of Washington, D. C., was with us, and I think if there were honors that evening, he bore them away. Meanwhile, we had heard that our noble martyr of the Prohibition army had accepted the sacrifice, not without intense reluctance and most bitter heartache, and our campaign began. I say "ours," because the white ribbon women were so thoroughly enlisted in it. By going as delegates to its convention, many of our leaders "lent their influence," and our five “general officers," Mesdames Buell, Woodbridge, Stevens, and Miss Pugh, with myself, issued a card expressing our hearty sympathy, and our belief that, since the Prohibition party, of all the four then in the field, had indorsed our memorial, we were bound to take its part. At the annual meetings of that battle autumn, nearly all our state unions did this in one form or another, Iowa and Pennsylvania being then, as now, on the opposing side. The single exception occurred in Canandaigua, N. Y., September, 1875, when, having spoken by invitation before the Conference Temperance Society of the M. E. Church, I also briefly addressed the first Prohibition party audience I had ever seen, by invitation of Rev. Mr. Bissell; but I did not speak as an adherent. CHAPTER III. THE ST. LOUIS CONVENTION. When our National Woman's Christian Temperance Union Convention met in St. Louis, just before the swift arbitrament of the memorable election day that changed the national administration, the air was full of thunderbolts. For the first time, there was much ado to get a church. The Central Methodist agreed, and then disagreed to our assembling there. "Will you promise not to mention politics?" was the question. "Nay; but we will promise that the politics believed in by us shall most assuredly be mentioned," was the reply. "We can give up the high-toned churches, but not our high-toned ideas; we will meet in a tent in a public square, if need be, but we will never smother a single sentence that we wish to speak." Our St. Louis women were brave and staunch, but not a little tried and tossed in the seething counter-currents of the time. Where to put either delegates or convention they hardly knew. But all their difficulties dispersed in due season. Good church-people of liberal spirit opened their houses; Rev. John A. Wilson, a generous-hearted pastor of the United Presbyterian denomination, secured for us the use of his church, saying, "I traveled with your national president some years ago in Egypt and the Holy Land, and I don't believe she will permit anything very bad"-albeit he was an ardent Blaine man and I fear he repented his bargain before we were through. In my annual address I used as a theme Mrs. Lathrap's new and suggestive phrase, and spoke on “GOSPEL POLITICS." DEAR SISTERS-By the laws of spiritual dynamics this has been one of our best, perhaps because one of our most progressive, years. Stationary pools and people tend toward stagnation. The most senseless of proverbs is that about the rolling stone that gathers no moss. What does it want of moss when it can get momentum ? 404 Senator Blair's Wise Words. In the arena of National Prohibition we shall fight our hardest battles and win our most substantial victories. Nothing will alarm and anger our opponents like our effort in this field, because no effort less direct aims a blow so decisive at the very vitals of their trade. Senator Blair, of New Hampshire, has made a more careful study of national prohibition, and with better opportunity to learn, than any other student of this subject in the nation, and he thus sums up his opinion: "For more than half a century, the working life of more than two generations, gigantic efforts have been put forth by noble men and women, by philanthropists, by statesmen, and by states, to restrain and destroy the alcoholic evil through the operations of moral suasion and by state law. Public sentiment has been aroused and public opinion created, and at times, in my belief, it might have been crystallized into national law had the labor been properly directed. But it has failed, as it will always fail, so long as we save at the spigot and waste at the bung, if I may borrow an expressive simile from the business of the enemy. The temperance question is in its nature a national question, just as much so as the tariff is and more than slavery was. It is waste of time to deal with it only by towns and counties and states. All possible local efforts should be put forth against the liquor-death everywhere. The yellow fever should be fought in the by-ways and hospitals, by the physician and the nurses as well as by the quarantine of our ports and the suspension of infected traffic by national law, but the enemy will forever come in like a flood, unless the nation, which is assailed as a nation, defends itself as a nation. What the temperance reform most needs is unification of effort, nationalization. Samson was not more completely hampered by withes than is this giant reform by the geographical lines of states; and if its supporters would but use their strength, they would at once find their natural arena circumscribed only by the national domain. How shall this be done? By concentration upon the enactment of a national constitutional law. The nation can act in no other way than by law; and now there is no national law for the removal of the alcoholic evil. On the contrary, we have seen how, by guaranteeing the importation and transportation and permitting the manufacture, the national Constitution is the very citadel of the rum-power." Existing parties can not in the nature of the case, take up this question. Not to this end were they born; not for this cause did they come into the world. Upon this issue the voters who compose them are irrevocably divided. Twenty years ago Governor St. John and Senator John Sherman voted one way. Now the latter champions the brewer's cause, and the former is Prohibition's standard-bearer. Party inclosures must be broken down, that men who think and vote alike may clasp hands in a political fraternity where the issue of to-day outranks that of yesterday or of to-morA friendly editor uttered his word of warning to us in terms like these: "There is any amount of political lightning in the air, and if you are not careful a bolt will strike the Woman's Christian Temperance Union." Whereupon our brave Mary T. Lathrap replied: “Women who have been fighting Jersey lightning for ten years are n't afraid of the political kind." row. |