the preacher of the Concio ad Clerum was fed on brandypunch to be on a more exhilarated level than his hearers. If a man caught sight of a grog-shop, he was as sure he had arrived in a Christian land as the shipwrecked sailor felt when he got sight of a gibbet. Dr. Crosby then had every man, lay and clerical, on his side in construing the Bible; whereas now we are in a healthy majority. Then a few scattered temperance tracts, like rockets in a night, only betrayed how utterly the world was in the desert on this subject; now a temperance literature, crowded with facts, strong in argument, filled with testimonies from men of the first eminence in every walk of life, in every department of science and literature, challenges and defies all comers. Then the idea of total abstinence was not so much denied as wholly unknown; now, if New England were polled to-day, our majority would be overwhelming. Then all men held liquors to be healthy and useful; now seventy men out of a hundred, whatever their practice, deny that claim, and the upper classes, well informed and careful of health, lead the way in giving up the use. Then the medical profession waded in the same slough of indulgence and ignorance as their patients; now the verdict of the profession is undoubtedly and immeasurably against the use of intoxicating drinks at all in health, and but seldom in favor of it in disease. We have driven the indulgence in drink into hiding places, and for the first time the Legislature is obliged and willing to prohibit the use of screens to hide rum-drinkers from the public view they dread. Is not this skulking evidence of weakening? Sixty years ago the Legislature passed a few formal laws perfunctorily, and dismissed the whole subject. But ten years ago Liquor gathered at the State-House all the experts of social science, the lights of the medical profession, all the famous science from Harvard College, and retained an ex-governor, at vast expense, to marshal this host, in order to resist Dr. Miner and a few Bible-twisters, whom Liquor seemed somehow to dread, although they had disgusted and repelled all the sensible men in the State. Of course this was before Dr. Crosby had communicated to the liquor-dealers the comforting fact that the temperance movement was a failure, and that they ought to be delighted with it and with Dr. Miner and his Bible-twisters, and that they were delighted with it, whether they themselves knew it or not! And far above all, set on a hill, a great State, Maine, challenges the world to show her equal in an intelligent, law-abiding, economical, and self-restraining population; while smaller examples cluster round her, here and across the Atlantic; and the haughty Episcopal Church, hardest and last to be roused to any reform, has put on record in its Convocations the most convincing and the most instructive array of facts and evidence on total abstinence that any ecclesiastical body ever contributed to social science. It is the ocean-wave kissing the Alps. You would weary if I continued the summary. Even if the statistics showed that the amount of liquor consumed increased as fast as our population and wealth do -which they do not show, but just the contrary-that would not be sufficient evidence to prove that our movement has failed. The proper comparison is between what we were in 1820 and what we should have been now had not some beneficent agency arrested our downward progress. These evils, left to themselves, increase by no simple addition, but in cubic ratio. Does Dr. Crosby fancy this active movement and vast mass of fact, opinion, and testimony can exist without beneficial influence in an age ruled by brains? He does not, then, understand moral forces or his own times. When, twenty-five years ago, Frederick Douglas was painting the anti-slavery movement as a failure unless we would load our guns, Sojourner Truth asked: "Frederick, is God dead?" When I see the doctor's unbelief in the efficacy of the moral power and the weight of this mass of conviction, I am tempted to ask him: Is your God dead?" Dr. Crosby closes by stating his plan and panacea. It is a regulated license. I will not delay you by criticising his or any other license plan. The statute-books in forty States are filled with the abortions of thousands of license laws that were never executed, and most of them were never intended to be. We have as good a license law in this State as was ever devised, and yet it leaves such an amount of gross, defiant, unblushing grog-selling as discourages Dr. Crosby and leads him to think nothing at all has been done. His own city, with license laws, is yet so ruled and plundered by rum that timid statesmen advise giving up republicanism and borrowing a leaf from Bismarck to help us. License has been tried, on the most favorable circumstances and with the best backing, for centuries-ten or twelve, at least; yet Dr. Crosby stands confounded before the result. We have never been allowed to try prohibition, except in one State and in some small circuits. Wherever it has been tried it has succeeded. Friends who know claim this. Enemies, who have been for a dozen years ruining their teeth by biting files, confess it by their lack of argument and lack of facts, except when they invent them. With such a record may we not say that, even if we have no claim to be considered Crosby Christians, we have a right to ask one fair trial of what has, at least, never been, like license, demonstrated a hundred times to be a failure? A REPLY ΤΟ Dr. Crosby's "Calm View of Temperance." BY MRS. J. E. FOSTER, of Iowa. An Address delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston, W HEN Zenobia, the Queen of the East, rode upon her white steed at the head of her armies to save Palmyra from the grasp of Roman avarice, she needed no new anointing. Palmyra was in danger and she was queen; she looked from the glittering domes of her proud capital to the hosts of Rome under its proud Aurelian, and, urged by royal impulse, she went forth. The women of America are queens, every one; from early girlhood they have been taught from pulpit, press, and platform that by virtue of their motherhood they held undisputed sway over the home. This kingdom in the home is undisputed by the pure and good. It is assailed by intemperance, it is threatened by the drinking customs of society, and in defence of the home woman has engaged in distinctive temperance work. Five weeks ago to-day a cultured Christian gentleman, the head of a great educational institution, a man called of God to preach the Gospel of his Son, and set apart by the Christian Church to do that work, stood on this platform and assailed the fundamental principles which underlie our defence of ourselves in this work and our appeals to all good people to aid us by their co-operation, or at least by their good wishes. Good and able men from this and other platforms, from many Christian pulpits and through the press, have answered what of argument the gentleman's address contained; they have mourned its arrogance and rebuked its assaults. They have done so on broad and general grounds, not in a spirit of partisanship or in defence of any narrower interests than those involved in the weal of our common humanity. I come to-day by invitation of the Boston Woman's Christian Temperance Union, by the permission of these honorable gentlemen, and by your sufferance, to review the address from a woman's standpoint, and to set forth the causes which have led the women of this land to take up arms against the drinking customs of society. Honored as I am, kind friends, by your presence, and realizing in what city I am, 'tis not you alone I see, but the faces of women in homes all over the land; some of these are beautiful as yours; some are very bare; some are among the hills of the East and some on the prairies of the West; some of them are sitting by the cradles of little children, some are bending over the washtub or before the sewingmachine. There is despair in some of their faces, sorrow in all, for they WEEP FOR THEIR CHILDREN, and will not be comforted because they are not, or, maddened by long-continued abuse and neglect, they have at last died to all joy or comfort, and only wait for the grave to give the rest that rum has cheated them out of here. These are not all I see, for close among the throng is the great company of husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers who are not wholly lost, who only circle in the outer rim of this terrible maelstrom of strong drink, but as the years go on will be carried faster and faster, nearer and nearer, to the vortex from which there is no escape; and near every one of these some woman watches, some woman waits. I hear the pleading voice, I see the tear-dimmed eye, I can almost feel the feverish breath upon my cheek. And little children, too, are in the foreground of this scene, not plump and rosy, not |