The Complete History of the Women's Suffrage Movement in U.S.. Jane Addams
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the law unconstitutional, after a few months' successful trial. Drinking, however, has not been as respectable since that time. We continued active work in our association until the inauguration of the Good Templars movement, in which men and women worked together on terms of equality.
Hannah M. Darlington.
Respectfully yours,
TEMPERANCE CONVENTION.
A Temperance Convention of Women of Chester County, met at Marlborough Friends' Meeting-house, on Saturday, the 30th of December, 1848, and was organized by the appointment of Martha Hayhurst, President; Sidney Peirce and Hannah Pennock, Secretaries.
Letters received by a Committee of Correspondence, appointed at a Convention last winter, were read; one, from Pope Bushnell, Chairman of the Committee on Vice and Immorality, to which temperance petitions were referred; and also from our Representatives in the Legislature, pledging themselves to use all their influence to obtain the passage of a law to prohibit the sale of intoxicating liquors as a beverage amongst us. The Business Committee reported addresses to the men and women of Chester County, which were considered, amended, and adopted, as follows:
To the Women of Chester County:
Dear Sisters:—Again we would urge upon you the duty and necessity of action in the temperance cause. Notwithstanding the exertions that have been made, intoxicating liquors continue to be sold and drank in our midst. Still, night after night, the miserable drunkard reels to that home he has made desolate. Still, wives and sisters weep in anguish as they look on those dearer to them than life, and see, trace by trace, their delicacy and purity of soul vanishing beneath the destroying libations that tempt them when they pass the domestic threshold.
We need not depict to you the poverty and crime and unutterable woe that result from intemperance, nor need you go far to be reminded of the revolting fact, that under the sanction of laws, men still make it a deliberate business to deal out that terrible agent, the only effect of which is to darken the God-like in the human soul, and to foster in its place the appetites of demons. The law passed the 7th of April, 1846, under which the sale of intoxicating drinks was prohibited by vote of the people in most of the townships in Chester County, has been decided by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional; and this decision, by inspiring confidence in the dealers and consumers of the fatal poison, seems to have given a new impetus to this diabolical traffic. Wider and deeper its ravages threaten to extend themselves; and to every benevolent mind comes the earnest question, What must now be done? It is too late for women to excuse themselves from exertion in this cause, on the ground that it would be indelicate to leave the sheltered retirement of home. Alas! where is the home-shelter that guards the delicacy of the drunkard's wife and daughter? We all recognize the divine obligation to relieve suffering and to cherish virtue as binding alike on man and woman. Our hearts thrill at the mention of those women who were "last at the cross and earliest at the grave" of the crucified Nazarine. We commend her whose prayers and entreaties once saved her native Rome from pillage. We admire the heroism of a Joan of Arc, as it is embalmed in history and song. We boast of virgin martyrs to the faith of their convictions, and we dare not now put forth the despicable plea of feminine propriety to excuse our supineness, when fathers, sons, and brothers are falling around us, degraded, bestialized, thrice murdered by this foe at our doors. No! we have solemn obligations resting upon us, and we should be unfaithful to the holiest call of duty, false to the instincts of womanhood and the pleading voice of love, if we should sit quietly down in careless ease while vice is thus spreading around us, and human souls are falling into the fell snare of the destroyer.
By meeting together and taking counsel one with another, we will become more alive to our duty in relation to this momentous subject. The more we prize the sweet privacy of happy homes, the more strong is the appeal to us to labor to make sacred and joyful the hearth-stones of others. If men will remain comparatively supine we must the more energetically sound the alarm, and point them to the danger. If rulers will devise wickedness by law, we must give them no rest, till, like the unjust judge, they yield to our very importunity, and repeal their iniquitous statutes. The temporal and spiritual welfare of many an immortal being is at stake, and we should esteem it a high privilege to labor in this holy cause with an earnest and, if need be, a life-long consecration. Let us, then, apply ourselves devotedly to the work, and a fresh and resistless impulse will be given to the temperance reformation. The electrical fervor of earnest spirits ever communicates itself to others, and the Legislature itself can not long resist our united efforts. In such a cause "we have great allies." God and humanity are on our side, our own souls Will be strengthened and elevated by the work; "failure" is a word that belongs not to us, since our efforts are in a righteous cause.
To the Men of Chester County:
Permit us once more to plead with you on behalf of temperance. We know that to some of you this may seem an old and wearisome subject, but we know also that the sorrow and crime caused by intemperance are not old; new, fresh cases are around us now. Its ravages are repeated every day, and we must beseech you to "hear us for our cause." We can not be silent while the grog-shop stands like the poisonous upas amongst us, and men openly deal out crime and wretchedness in the form of intoxicating drinks.
We need not in this place enlarge upon the danger ever attendant upon the use of those stimulants, nor will we now stop long to dwell upon the solemn fact, that whoever, at the demand of appetite, drinks even the sweet cider, weakens his own moral strength, becomes a tempter to the weak, and casts away the pure influence of an unsullied example. Reckless and guilty indeed is that man who, in the light of this day, dares to insult humanity and defy heaven by publicly putting the glass to his lips.
Men of Chester County! you possess the power to put a stop to the traffic in liquors, and we conjure you by the sacred obligations of virtue and humanity, as you hope to stand acquitted before the just tribunal of God, to arise in your might and banish it from the community; think, we beseech you, of the depths of pollution to which intemperance leads, of the bestial appetites it fosters, of all the unnameable impurities that revel in its abodes; think of the hearth-stones desolated, of the mothers and daughters whose earthly hopes and joys have been destroyed by that charnel-house, the tavern. The incendiary who applies the midnight torch to peaceful dwellings, the robber who commits murder to secure his prey, is not an enemy to society half so dangerous, as he who inflames all evil passions and scatters wretchedness through a community, by dispensing alcoholic poison. Oh! are there not sorrows enough in our best condition? have we not temptations strong enough within and without? Shall men progress too fast in the "onward and upward" road of virtue and happiness, that you leave before them these sinks of pollution, these trap-doors of ruin, these fatal sirens, enticing the unwary listener to destruction? Call us not fanatical. Indifference is crime; silence is fatal here. When the midnight cry of fire is sounded, you rush from your slumbers, and, heedless of danger, hasten to extinguish the flames; but here is a devouring element, burning on from year to year, consuming not mere shingles and rafters, but the priceless hopes and aspirations of immortal souls, leaving blackened ruins in the place of beauty; and we must continue to cry "Fire! fire!" until you hasten to stop the fearful conflagration. Tell us not of liberty and natural right, as a plea for this traffic. It is the liberty to rob innocent families and reduce them to pauperism; the right to break hearts and hopes, to reduce men to demons, to scatter vice and anguish and desolation around the land. Well may we exclaim with Madame Roland, when she was taken along the bloody streets of Paris, about to be murdered in the abused name of freedom, "Oh, Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!"
Fathers and brothers, shall woman in her agony, and man in his degradation, appeal to you in vain? Too long has this evil been borne, too long have minor points of public good taken precedence of this reform. It must not be that you will be content to dwell in quiet indifference, in the midst of a rum-selling community, and die, leaving your children exposed to the tempter's snare. It must not be endured that this infernal traffic, this shame to civilization, this slur on Christianity, shall continue amongst us. It must not be endured that men shall be clothed with the monstrous authority to demoralize neighborhoods and scatter the fire-brands of death and destruction. The power to arrest this horrible work is in your hands. Be vigilant, be active. There is resistless might in the energy of earnest wills devoted to a noble cause. Petition,