Temperance Union.

D. A. R. Continental Memorial Hall, Washington, D. C.

WILL

By E. H. Blichfeldt

LL not the good ladies of the W. C. T. U. find themselves at a loss when the drink traffic is finally abolished? More than one person has asked this question with acumen gleefully aware of itself; and there is a grain of truth in what it implies. Of most agitators against the saloon, or against any particular evil, it is true that the saloon, or whatever the particular evil is, did not make agitators of them. They were born agitators, or they became such on general principles before ever they hit upon the special object of their endeavors. They can no more keep from agitating than if they had St. Vitus's dance; it is only a question to what they shall devote their energies of protest and reform. Conceivably such persons might be as lonesome and ill at ease if their one favorite foe were done away with as is the professional soldier when there is

no war.

Frances Willard, however, by what has become familiarly known as her "do everything policy," forefended any such danger to the W. C. T. U. She was much too philosophical to think that alcohol was the primal cause of human error, and that all the ills of society would disappear on its removal. She was discerning enough to know that the adherents of her society were foreordained to the endless task of making the world better, and that the saloon was but a special phase of all that to which they must be forever opposed. She and other influential women recognized this even while they took from the workings of the saloon their specific impulse toward organization and saw in it the most palpable shape, the most institutionalized and most aggressive agency among all the enemies of the home. They knew they were enlisted in a war to which there is no end. "Our purpose," they said, “is to make the world more homelike;" and so the W. C. T. U. has forty departments.

A meeting held at Chautauqua, in August, 1874, de