CHAPTER V.

WHITE CROSS AND WHITE SHIELD.

The most pointed and practical standard of daily living of which I can think, is to permit in one's self no open habit in word or deed that others might not safely imitate, and no secret habit that one would be ashamed to have the best and purest know. Anything less than this is vastly beneath our privilege. Having thus made the only adequate preparation for a work so holy, we may send out our plans and purposes to the wide world of manhood and of womanhood, calling upon all to climb the heights whence alone we shall see God.

When the Crusade began, no one would have predicted that twelve years later we should be as earnestly at work for fallen women as we were then for fallen men.

That we are so doing, is because we have learned in this long interval, that intemperance and impurity are iniquity's Siamese Twins; that malt liquors and wines have special power to tarnish the sacred springs of being; that every house of ill-repute is a secret saloon and nearly every inmate an inebriate. Unnatural and unspeakable crimes against the physically weaker sex make the daily papers read like a modern edition of Fox's Martyrs. A madness not excelled, if indeed, equaled, in the worse days of Rome, seems to possess the inflamed natures of men, let loose from the two hundred and fifty thousand saloons of the nation upon the weak and unarmed women, whose bewildering danger it is to have attracted the savage glances of these men or to be bound to them by the sacred tie of wife or mother in a bondage worse than that which lashes the living to the dead.

But our Iowa sisters were in the field as early as 1879, and at the annual meeting of their State W. C. T. U., in response to the plea of Mrs. L. B. Benedict, they resolved to found a Home for penitent, erring women, and to that end established a department

White Cross Life-boat Launched at Philadelphia.

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of work. Maine W. C. T. U. has set us a grand example with its Industrial Home, New York with its "Christian Home for Inebriate Women," Cleveland with its "Open Door," Chicago with its "Anchorage," and many cities East and West by the appointment of police matrons to care for women under arrest; all these things prove that temperance women have never been indifferent to this branch of work.

But, after all, it was the moral cyclone that attended the Pall Mall Gazette disclosures, which cleared the air and broke the spell, so that silence now seems criminal and we only wonder that we did not speak before.

Some sporadic efforts had been made in this direction from time to time, but the action of our Philadelphia Convention in 1885 launched the new life-boat nationally, and because no other woman could be found to stand at its helm I have tried to do so, though utterly unable to give to this great work an attention more than fragmentary. My faithful office secretary, Alice Briggs, has really been the main spoke in the wheel at my home office, and Dr. Kate Bushnell, in the field, for I have only spoken in large cities, and the heroic doctor is going everywhere and has made such a reconnoissance of the North Woods lumber centers as ought to place her name among the Grace Darlings of moral rescue work. Mrs. Dr. Kellogg has developed the Mothers' meetings into a potent factor of the department, and Hope Ledyard (Mrs. C. H. Harris) has taken up this specialty at our request.

My own call" is hinted at in these words from my annual address, only a few weeks after the Pall Mall Gazette disclosures.

How hard men work for votes! They do not assemble the faithful by general bell-ringing and let that end it. Nay, verily! They obey the Gospel injunction : Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in." Carriages are running all day between the voters and the polls, no matter how hard it is to bring the two together. Thus must we go out to seek and save the lost; as eager for our Master's triumph in the individual soul, as politicians are for the election of their candidates.

This work can not be done by proxy nor at arms-length. We ought to have always, in every local union, an active committee of visitation to the homes of those who drink. I beg you to do this, though you do nothing else. Go into homes and saloons, inviting lost men to come to Christ. We must go; we can not send. As an earnest-hearted minister recently said

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"Salvation by Tongs is a Failure."

in my hearing: "Salvation by tongs is a failure." The grip of our own hands can alone convey the unbeliever's hand to the firm and tender clasp of the Hand once pierced for us and him.

The Bishop of Durham founded the White Cross League. Its pledge predicts the time when fatherhood shall take its place beside motherhood, its divine correlate, as equal sharer in the cares that have so ennobled women as to make some of them akin to angels. Its blessed pledge declares: "I will maintain the law of purity as equally binding upon men and women; I will endeavor to spread these principles among my companions, and try to help my younger brothers, and will use every means to fulfill the sacred command, Keep thyself pure.'"

Those noble men, Anthony Comstock, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and Rev. Dr. De Costa, of the White Cross League, will address our convention. Their work relates to the overthrow of those Satanic means by which the theory and practice of abominable crimes against social purity are carried on in our great cities, and from thence spread their leprous taint to every town and village.

Our Department for Suppression of the Social Evil is as yet inoperative. It is greatly to be regretted that we do not yet succeed in winning the services, as superintendent of this most difficult work, of a lady who combines the rare qualities of a delicate perception of propriety with practical ability and leisure. The special aim of this new superintendency will be to trace the relation between the drink habit and the nameless practices, outrages and crimes which disgrace so-called modern "civilization"; especially the brutalizing influence of malt liquors upon the sexual nature. Besides this we should emulate the example set us by Mrs. Stevens, of Maine, and her clear-headed associates, in providing a temporary home for the women whom our police matrons rescue from the clutch of penalties whose usual accompaniments often render them still more familiar with sin. But the effect upon our minds of such unspeakable disclosures as those of the Pall Mall Gazette, and the horrible assurances given us by such authority as Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, that we should uncap perdition in the same direction, were the hidden life of our own great cities known, has so stirred the heart of womanhood throughout this land, that we are, I trust, ready for an advance. Had we to-day the right woman in this place of unequaled need and opportunity, we could be instrumental in the passage of such laws as would punish the outrage of defenseless girls and women by making the repetition of such outrage an impossibility. Woman only can induce lawmakers to furnish this most availing of all possible methods of protection to the physically weak. Men alone will never gain the courage thus to legislate against other men. Crimes against women seem to be upon the increase everywhere. Three years ago the Chicago Inter Ocean gathered from the press in three weeks forty cases of the direst outrage, sixteen of the victims being girls. In a majority of cases, where the gentler sex is thus hunted to its ruin, or lured to the same pit in a more gradual way, strong drink is the devil's kindling-wood of passion, as everybody knows, Hence the relation of this most sacred work to that of the W. C. T. U. is so close

that the press, through some of its noblest representatives has, in the last year, appealed to us to ignore the tempted and the fallen of our own sex no longer. It is not by the vain attempt to re-introduce the exploded harem method of secluding women that they are to be saved. It is rather by holding men to the same standard of morality which, happily for us, they long ago prescribed for the physically weaker, that society shall rise to higher levels, and by punishing with extreme penalties such men as inflict upon women atrocities compared with which death would be infinitely welcome. When we remember the unavenged murder of Jennie Cramer, of New Haven, and the acquittal of the ravishers of Emma Bond, a cultivated school teacher in Illinois; when we reflect that the Pall Mall Gazette declares "the law is framed to enable dissolute men to outrage girls of thirteen with impunity"; that in Massachusetts and Vermont it is a greater crime to steal a cow than to abduct and ruin a girl, and that in Illinois seduction is not recognized as a crime, it is a marvel not to be explained, that we go on the even tenor of our way, too delicate, too refined, too prudish to make any allusion to these awful facts, much less to take up arms against these awful crimes.

We have been the victims of conventional cowardice too long. Let us signalize the second century of temperance reform by a fearless avowal of our purpose to take up the work of promoting social purity by the inculcation of right principles and the serious demand for more equitable laws. The Society of the White Cross will warmly coöperate with our endeavors in this righteous cause. Oh, may some clear brain, true heart and winsome spirit in our great fraternity cry out under the baptism of the Heavenly Spirit, "Here am I, Lord, send me!"

These are the first words I ever publicly uttered on a subject that had been farther from my thoughts than I like to acknowledge, all my life long. When I was first a boarding-school pupil, at Evanston, in 1858, a young woman who was not chaste came to the college through some misrepresentation, but was speedily dismissed; not knowing her degraded status I was speaking to her, when a school-mate whispered a few words of explanation that crimsoned my face suddenly; and grasping my dress lest its hem should touch the garments of one so morally polluted, I fled from the room. It was, no doubt, a healthful instinct that led me to do this, but I am deeply grateful that the years have so instructed and mellowed my heart, that, could the scene recur, I would clasp that poor child's hand, plead with her tenderly and try to help instead of deserting her as I did in my more selfrighteous youth.

The next time this subject was thrust upon me is described in my first address after becoming superintendent of the depart

ment. It was given to an audience of women at the twelfth annual meeting of the Chicago W. C. T. U., in 1886:

In the year 1869, while studying in Paris, I used often to see passing along the pleasant streets, great closed wagons, covered with black. Inquiring of my elegant landlady the explanation of these somber vehicles, she answered, sorrowfully, "It is the demi-monde, who go to be examined." I then learned for the first time that in Paris, fallen women have a legal "permit" to carry on what is a recognized business, but must remain seclu ed in their houses at certain hours, must avoid certain streets, and must go once a week, under escort of the police, to the dispensary for examination and certificate that they are exempt from contagious disease. Always, after that, those awful wagons seemed to me to form the most heart-breaking funeral procession that ever Christian woman watched with aching heart and tear-dimmed eyes. If I were asked why there has come about such a revolution in public thought that I have gained the courage to speak of things once unlawful to be told, and you may listen without fear of criticism from any save the base, my answer would be:

"Because law-makers tried to import the black wagon of Paris to England and America, and Anglo-Saxon women rose in swift rebellion."

Even a worm will turn at last, and when her degradation was thus deliberately planned and sanctioned by the state, on the basis of securing to the stronger partner in a dual sin the same protection from nature's penalty which society had granted him so long, and of heaping upon the weaker partner in that sin all the disgrace and shame, then womanhood's loyalty to woman was aroused; it overcame the silence and reserve of centuries, and Christendom rings with her protest to-day.

Thus do the powers of darkness outwit themselves, and evils evermore tend to their own cure. It is now solemnly avowed by thousands of the best and most capable women who speak the English tongue, not only that the contagious-diseases acts shall never be tolerated upon a single inch of British or American soil, but that houses of ill-fame shall be not only prohibited but banished altogether. The system of license must not come. The let-alone policy must go. The prohibitory method must be achieved.

Having determined on a great petition to Congress, asking for the better protection of women and girls through severer penalties for assaults upon them, and that the age of protection might be raised to eighteen years, I went in company with my dear friend, Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, of Philadelphia, whose guest I was at the time, to see Mr. Powderly, chief of the Knights of Labor, at their headquarters in the same city. A score of clerks were busy in the office below, and I was told that it was difficult to get access to Mr. Powderly, delegations often waiting for hours to take their turn. But Mrs. Bryant, editor of the journal of the Knights