up hydrants to furnish a supply of pure water to the city. Both this place and Milwaukee have reading and lunch rooms in successful operation. At Ripon, the seat of Ripon College, the women visited the saloons, praying and singing, and, when forbidden to go in, held meetings on the street. At Whitewater they have succeeded in driving out the saloons, and no licenses are granted.

Book-shelves are being placed in the depots, to be supplied with temperance tracts and papers, that the travelling public may have their attention called to the subject.

Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, California, Oregon, all entered heartily into the crusade.

At Fort Scott, Kansas, a liquor-dealer advertised a free lunch, and the praying band brought twenty-one ragged and hungry children of drunkards to partake of it.

At Oakland, California, when the election was held under the local-option law, booths were erected at the polls and bouquets furnished all no-license voters. From sun to sue the brave women worked with hand and voice, and, when the votes were counted, the whole country rang with praises of the noble band who had saved the city. They were the first who dared set the example of working at an election, upon which such vital interests depended, and over which they had so earnestly prayed.

Maryland and some of the other Southern States were

active.

Massachusetts, always at the front in reforms, hesitated at first about adopting the Ohio plan, but a noble company adopted it in Worcester with marked success. The work has gone on here, as well as at some other places, with power.

Pennsylvania, close to the borders of Ohio, could not but be aroused from the very first. The women of Pittsburgh, led by Mrs. Judge Black, gained the sympathy and interest of the entire country by their arrest and imprisonment in a common jail for praying upon the streets. This only added fuel to the flames. In no city has the crusade been pushed more earnestly or continuously. Coffeehouse, reading-room, juvenile society of five hundred,

street-corner meetings, mothers' meetings, relief for drunkards' families, etc., have been carried forward with no diminution of enthusiasm.

Philadelphia held earnest mass-meetings, petitioned the common council for the closing of the saloons on Sunday, and succeeded. Mrs. Annie Wittenmyer, President of the Woman's National Christian Temperance Union, aided by other noble women, has kept the cause uppermost in the hearts of the people, not only of her own city and State, but throughout the country.

New York, always kept alive on the temperance question by the National Temperance Publication Society, whose indefatigable secretary, J. N. Stearns, keeps a fire kindled the glad light of which is seen the world over, became doubly stirred by the crusade of the West. Mass-meetings were held, addressed by Drs. Cuyler, Hepworth, Boole, Steele, and others. To the latter, Rev. W. C. Steele, the women are greatly indebted for collecting and preserving in book form the only printed records of the "Woman's Temperance Movement." A committee was appointed of two women from each of the forty churches. They began at once the circulation of pledges, etc. Under their earnest president, Mrs. Helen E. Brown, over one thousand visits. have been made to saloons, and meetings held repeatedly on Water Street, at Hopper Home, Magdalen Asylum, Bellevue Hospital, Sunday-schools, industrial schools, etc., and daily at Association Hall.

on.

In Brooklyn a wonderful crusade work is still carried Two thousand five hundred saloon-visits have been made the past year. Temperance meetings are held weekly at the jail, Inebriate Asylum, Fort Hamilton, penitentiary, etc. In fourteen months one thousand and ten saloons have been closed. The president, Mrs. Mary C. Johnson, is helping in carrying forward a similar work in England, and Mother Stewart in Scotland. Both are being singularly blessed.

Syracuse, Buffalo, Auburn, and other towns are doing a work that will tell for eternity. All over the State bands of praying women have visited the Excise Boards, urging

them not to grant licenses, and in hundreds of instances have been successful. Perhaps the women of no other State are doing more for the cause of temperance to-day than those of New York..

Not alone in America has the Woman's Crusade been an abiding power. England, Scotland, India, Japan, China even, are learning through the Christian women the terrors of the liquor-traffic and the power of Christianity brought to bear upon it. A young man, dying in an Ohio hospital, when asked by the praying band if he had signed the pledge, said: "Oh! yes. I signed it eight months ago for the temperance women over in China, who came to pray as you have come, and I have kept it."

The crusade has opened wide the doors of thousands of saloons, and the mothers and the wives of the country have looked into their wretchedness. Changing somewhat the form of the work, organizing themselves, the young people, and the children for the hard, strong battle of a lifetime, trusting in the God who was their Shekinah in the danger and the darkness of the crusade, they are praying, working, and the end is not yet.

46

THE CATHOLIC TOTAL ABSTINENCE UNION OF

AMERICA.

BY JAMES W. O'BRIEN, CORRESPONDING SECRETARY.

THE Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America was established on Washington's birthday in the year 1872, in the city of Baltimore, by the first Catholic convention ever held on this continent for the promotion of Total Abstinence; but its origin dates far anterior to that. In the Catholic Church, from its first institution upon the earth, the principle of abstinence has been recognized and enforced. Abstinence from flesh-meat on Fridays is a strict rule to which clergy and laity in all countries are bound. Abstinence from alcoholic drinks, on the part of persons addicted to their excessive use, is made a condition of approaching the sacraments of the church. The priest in the confessional had been administering the strictest total-abstinence pledge for centuries before Father Mathew was born. When Father Mathew commenced his work, he but went out from the confessional to give wider application among the masses to the principles he and his brother priests were enforcing at the tribunal of penance. He has been called the Father of Total Abstinence. He is not; he is only the father of its public agitation as one of the questions of • secular society or of the commonwealth.

The principle of abstinence existed in the church; it was agitated and popularized in the Father Mathew movement; it is organized in the present Catholic Total Abstinence Union. The church administered the pledge in her confessional, and inveighed against intemperance from the pulpit. Father Mathew gave the pledge in public halls, and sent abroad the motto of agitation among the millions: "We must cry down the vice and make it odious in the