ferers from these evils. Compelled by their position in
society to depend on men for subsistence, for food, clothes, shelter,
for every chance even to earn a dollar, they have no way of escape from
the besotted victims of appetite and passion with whom their lot is
cast. They must endure, if not endorse, these twin vices, embodied, as
they so often are, in the person of father, brother, husband, son,
employer. No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous
woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral
husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical
abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man
himself can not possibly comprehend.

It is not my purpose to harrow your feelings by any attempt at depicting
the horrible agonies of mind and body that grow out of these monster
social evils. They are already but too well known. Scarce a family
throughout our broad land but has had its peace and happiness marred by
one or the other, or both. That these evils exist, we all know; that
something must be done, we as well know; that the old methods have
failed, that man, alone, has proved himself incompetent to eradicate, or
even regulate them, is equally evident. It shall be my endeavor,
therefore, to prove to you that we must now adopt new measures and bring
to our aid new forces to accomplish the desired end.

Forty years' efforts by men alone to suppress the evil of intemperance
give us the following appalling figures: 600,000 common drunkards!
Which, reckoning our population to be 40,000,000, gives us one drunkard
to every seventeen moderate drinking and total-abstinence men. Granting
to each of these 600,000 drunkards a wife and four children, we have
3,000,000 of the women and children of this nation helplessly,
hopelessly bound to this vast army of irresponsible victims of appetite.

[Reference was here made to woman's helplessness under the laws.]

The roots of the giant evil, intemperance, are not merely moral and
social; they extend deep and wide into the financial and political
structure of the government; and whenever women, or men, shall
intelligently and seriously set themselves about the work of uprooting
the liquor traffic, they will find something more than tears and prayers
needful to the task. Financial and political power must be combined
with moral and social influence, all bound together in one earnest,
energetic, persiste