WOMEN TORCH-BEARERS The Story of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union ELIZABETH PUTNAM GORDON " NATIONAL WOMAN'S CHRIstian Temperance Union PUBLISHING HOUSE Evanston, Illinois 970 Dedicated to the home-loving and progressive members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Their activities for fifty years have made possible a Golden History and a Golden Prophecy. 582804 FOREWORD A Bible seer must have included The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in his prophetic utterance when he declared "The women that publish the tidings are a great host." For fifty years a multitude of American white ribbon women have proclaimed the gospel of total abstinence, purity, peace and prohibition and are now sending to the ends of the earth the glad tidings of national victory over the thraldom of the liquor traffic. In writing "The Story of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union," the historian could include only such names and statistics as are needed to make the account graphic and helpful. Principles and facts are emphasized that the oncoming generation may catch the spirit of the marching mothers of the Crusade and realize the high historic points of the national and international growth of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. One of the outstanding results of the education, agitation and organization of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, from Crusade to Jubilee days, is the steady growth of public opinion in support of the fundamental principles of total abstinence for the individual and prohibition for the state and nation. Hence, it is essential to the history of the W. C. T. U. that high authorities in science, social economy, the church and the government should be cited. This is as joyous a feature of the story of fifty years as is the victorious culmination in the writing of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. The phenomenal history of fifty years cannot be compressed into one volume. A chronological summary given in the Appendix furnishes dates and data for handy reference. Fortunately the names of hundreds of noteworthy white ribboners who nobly and ably laid the foundations of the National W. C. T. U. are given in state histories, in state and national annual reports, The Union Signal, and in The Brief History prepared by Katharine Lent Stevenson. May we not reverently say that they are also recorded in "The Manuscript of God." The book is published under the direction of a sub-committee of the National W. C. T. U. Jubilee committee. E. P. G. |