Chapter I

THE OUTLOOK AT THE BEGINNING OF THE CRUSADE.

We are a nation of God’s own right-hand planting. The Lord has given us a goodly heritage--a land literally flowing with milk and honey. It is estimated that our grain fields are broad and rich enough to supply the people of all nations with bread. We have mineral wealth in rich abundance; and cotton, and flax, and wool, and silks and furs with which to clothe ourselves in royal apparel. Our scheme of government is wise, and just, and humane--the best that was ever vouchsafed to any people. And God has been with us in his providence in a marked and wonderful manner; so that all our enemies have been subdued before us by the breath of his power. At his word steam has lent her wings, and the lightnings their voice, and heaven spread the wires of her whispering gallery, like a network, over the continent, to help on the cause of liberty and human progress.

Under these favorable circumstances, we might have been the strongest and richest nation in the world had not our rulers in their unwisdom encouraged the liquor traffic, and adopted a scheme of raising public revenue in connection therewith which has been destructive to our moral, industrial, and financial interests.

To avoid imposing a direct tax for the support of the government, Congress in 1794 recognized and taxed the liquor traffic as a branch of commerce. State legislatures soon followed the same unwise and suicidal course. From that time on, protected and encouraged by the government, which shared in its spoils, the traffic in intoxicating drinks increased rapidly. In 1873, the beginning of the crusade, according to the estimate of Dr. Young, Chief of the Bureau of Statistics, our annual drink bill reached the enormous sum of $600,000,000! This was an annual tax of over $15 per capita for every man, woman, and child in the country. If the government had levied a direct tax to secure the amount she realized from this business, the cost to the people per capita would have been less than $1.80 instead of $15. And then the government would have saved the immense sum expended annually in sustaining a standing army of revenue officers, detectives, and gaugers required in connection with the liquor business.

This enormous tax, which reached all grades of society, fell heaviest on the laboring classes--upon those who could not afford to pay it; and poverty and ruin came to millions. The whole land was filled with beggary and crime, and a bitter wail of want and woe without surcease went up to God. Millions who ought to have been producers and bread-winners, became consumers, tramps and criminals. Men, mad with strong drink, reeled through the streets; women, grown old before their time, toiled in their comfortless homes in dumb despair, and little half-starved children hid away in fear from their brutal fathers. It was with us as it was with the Egyptians--there was one dead in almost every house.

But the liquor-dealers were so intrenched behind law, so sheltered in politics, so guarded and sustained by the government, that they were an oligarchy that could dictate to statesmen, and control legislatures, and defy public sentiment. Restrictive laws in most of the states were weak and inoperative, and the demand for “free rum” and a “free Sabbath” was fierce and loud, and many of the old barriers against drunkenness and lewdness and crime were being broken down. The government of our large cities was largely in the hands of liquor-dealers or the creatures of their choice, and the police force under their control; many of the courts were overawed or corrupted; Justice was perverted, and Right and Truth trampled under foot. There was no redress anywhere for those who had been wronged and ruined by the liquor traffic; for the liquor oligarchy, which was largely made up of foreigners, had the government by the throat, and compelled her “to drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.”

Spies were in the secret chambers of the government; men high in places of trust guarded the liquor interests; enormous frauds were planned and carried forward year after year; men who ought to have been in the penitentiary were lobbying their schemes for plunder through legislative bodies; the air of the national council chamber was reeking with alcohol and tobacco. There seemed no hope for us or our country. Congress was so much under the influence of the rum power that they refused even to look into the matter when “a commission of inquiry” was asked for by _hundreds of thousands of the best people in the land_, lest they should give offence to the liquor oligarchy. Party managers were careful to lay down their platforms so that liquor-dealers could stand securely on every plank, no matter how many honest, worthy citizens were crowded off.

_The nation was living on her own vitals._ For every thousand dollars received from the liquor oligarchy, the government sacrificed one of her own citizens. Sixty millions of dollars received--sixty thousand men sacrificed annually on this putrid altar of sin.

This was asserted over and over again till the whole land rang with it, but the government was too much under the control of liquor-dealers, who counselled silence and secrecy, to investigate the charge. Legislatures cowering before the liquor power spent their time making laws for the protection of the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea, while thousands of men and women who were “of more value than many sparrows” were going down to death. Men were fined for allowing Canada thistles to grow on their land, but saloons were allowed to scatter the thistle-down of profanity, lewdness, theft, robbery and murder broadcast. And any attempt to stop the ruinous work was branded by liquor-dealers as a gross usurpation of authority.

So the people were intimidated, and the drink curse fitted down into every fold of society, and rested like a heavy, crushing weight on every heart and home. The darkness was intense. None but the angels of God, whose wings of light parted the clouds of gloom as they came down on errands of mercy--none but the white-robed saints, who went with weary feet bearing the lamp of truth into the habitations of cruelty, into the saloons, and brothels and jails--knew, or guessed half of the sin and sorrow curtained away behind the black folds of the liquor traffic.

The slaves of appetite were not the only ones who writhed beneath the iron heel of rum, and felt its hellish, fiery breath. The innocent suffered with the guilty. This black, fathomless gulf of death swept right alongside of Christian homes, and children trained in the lessons of truth with loving care, consecrated at family altars and in the church, were swept away from purity, home, mother and heaven, and cursing God, went down, down with the mighty throng into the dark abyss of a drunkard’s grave and a drunkard’s hell.

The church, in the presence of these evils she was commissioned to overthrow, was criminally silent and inactive, and many of the watchmen on the walls of Zion were dumb, and gave no warning voice when they saw the approach of the enemy.

Temperance was not popular. Many who were abstainers said: “It is folly to war against the drink system; men will sell as long as men will drink, and no power can stop men from drinking.” Temperance societies that had labored heroically for nearly a half century were holding their own against fearful odds--fighting the battle single-handed.

The women were hopeless. Oh, the agony, the tears, the sleepless nights, the heart-breaking anguish that wives and mothers suffered during those long, bitter years of sorrow and silence, when few seemed to care that the demon had come into their houses and was doing his bloody work. When their hearts were breaking, if they cried out in their agony or ventured a protest in the saloon or court, the liquor oligarchy howled them down with the “mad dog cry” of “Strong-minded,” “Unwomanly,” “Go home, old woman, and mend your husband’s breeches,” “Go home and darn your stockings;” and the world joined in the laugh of scorn, and the church made no defence of the wronged and broken-hearted. And so the money that ought to have come to them to buy new clothing, went into the tills of the liquor-dealers, and they stayed at home till the home was gone, and mended garments till there were no garments to mend. No pen can portray the utter hopelessness of the women into whose homes the drink curse had come. The men who had sworn at the altar to protect and honor them had become demons from whom they fled in fear; the white-souled children they had nurtured with tenderest care, and cradled with prayer and Christian song, had become loathsome sots, too low and brutish for companionship. They had been robbed of all--property, social position, brothers, husbands, sons, love and hope.

Nor were their more fortunate sisters free from care. The gulf of ruin was near each door, and an undefined dread, an awful foreboding, was in the heart of every thoughtful wife and mother lest all she loved should be swallowed up in its black depths.

Countless unspoken prayers went up to God. Women weeping and praying through the long night-watches appealed their cause, lost in so many of the courts of earth, to the _Supreme Court_ of Heaven.

Suddenly the world was startled by a flash of heavenly light. Hands of faith had touched the hem of power, and a mighty spiritual swirl came down upon the people. Christian women, many of whom had never spoken or prayed in their own churches, under this Pentecostal baptism went into the streets and saloons preaching the gospel of Christ, and the people gathered by thousands to listen to the truths that fell from their lips.

The air seemed surcharged with spiritual forces. The angel of the Lord that John the Revelator saw was before the altar, “and there was given him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense which came with the prayers of all saints ascended up before God out of the angel’s hand.

“And the angel took the censer and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth, and there were voices and thunderings and lightnings and an earthquake.”

The whole nation was stirred. Never before had men so trembled under the power of prayer, or stood in such awe of the fierce lightnings of God’s wrath. Never before had society been so shaken by a moral earthquake.

The women who kept step with God in his grand onward marching were calm and serene. To them the thunder and lightning was but the roll and rumble of God’s artillery turned against their enemies, and the earthquake the tread of their Captain and his mighty hosts. Inspired by a heaven-born heroism, they went into the saloons, and facing the liquor-dealers in the midst of their deadly work, entreated them in God’s name to give up their business and seek pardon and salvation in Christ.

Delicately nurtured women, who had not felt the awful evil in their own homes, and who had passed by on the other side and hardly ventured to look toward the dens where their neighbors’ children were being murdered by the slow tortures that kill soul and body, marched boldly into the saloons and on into the back rooms where the awful secrets of sin and debauchery are hid away, and preached to the spirits in prison there. Men who walked among the tombs heard through them the voice of the Master and were delivered.

Public attention was directed to the liquor traffic as never before. A calcium light had been turned upon it, and the mass of the people were horrified at what they saw and heard.

Liquor-dealers writhed under this close scrutiny--under this blaze of light--like serpents in the fire, spitting forth their venom and stinging themselves in their fury. But when Mrs. Thompson and the seventy women who followed her went out of the Presbyterian Church at Hillsboro’, Ohio, singing,

“Give to the winds your fears;
Hope and be undismayed:
God hears thy sighs and counts thy tears:
God will lift up thy head--”

they heralded a new dispensation in the temperance work--a union of the moral forces of earth with the invincible forces of heaven, and victory was assured.

The Crusade, then, was God’s method of arousing public sentiment and consolidating the moral forces of the land, and women His chosen instruments for this important and unusual work.

OHIO.

THE BEGINNING OF THE CRUSADE.