Willard, Frances E. Home Protection Manual: Containing an Argument for the Temperance Ballot for Woman, and How to Obtain it, as a Means of Home Protection; Also Constitution and Plan of Work for State and Local W.C.T. Unions . New York: 'The Independent', 1879. [format: book], [genre: essay; guidebook]. Permission: Public domain
Persistent link to this document: http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/file.php?file=fewhome.html

"Home Protection."

Once more will the time-honored declaration be made to-day, by a thousand Fourth of July orators, that "the Americans are a free people." But I insist that we are governed by the most powerful king whose iron rule ever determined the policy, molded the institutions, or controlled the destinies of a great nation.

So pervasive is his influence that it penetrates to the most obscure and distant hamlet with the same readiness, and there wields the same potency as in his empire's capital; nay (with reverence be it said), he is like Deity in that his actual presence is coextensive with his vast domain. Our legislatures are his playthings, our congressmen his puppets, and our honored President the latest child of his adoption. We do not often call him by his name, this potentate of million hands and myriad voices; but. to my thinking, nothing is to day so vital to America as that we become better acquainted with our ruler. Let me then present to your thought his Majestic Highness KING MAJORITY, Sovereign Ruler of these United States.

Permit me now to introduce a different character, who comes to the court of King Majority as chief ambassador from the empire of his Satanic Majesty. Behold! I show you the skeleton at our patriotic banquet. It has a skull with straightened forehead and sickening smile; but bedecked with wreaths of vine, clusters of grape, and heads of golden grain — King Alcohol, present at court in radiant disguise. With a foaming beer-mug at his lips, he drinks the health of King Majority; and, placing at his feet a chest of gold labeled "Internal Revenue." he desireth conditions of peace.

Behold in these two figures the bewildering danger and the ineffable hope of the Republic! How can we rouse the stolid giant, King Majority? How light in those sleepy eyes the fires of a holy and relentless purpose? How nerve once more, with the resistless force that smote African slavery to death, the mighty sinews of the Republic's sleeping king?

How? Only by "sweet reasonableness"; only by ceaseless persuasion; only by noble examples: only by honest hard work based upon fervent and effectual prayer. Human heads and hearts are much alike. I remember that the great Temperance Crusade of 1874 found me with a beer keg in my cellar, a fatal haziness in my opinions, and a blighting indifference to the temperance reform upon my will. But how did its intense pathos melt my heart; how did its mighty logic tune the lax cords of opinion to concert pitch; how did its miracle of prayer bring thousands to their knees, crying: "Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?" For myself, I could never be the same after that. As woman, a patriot, a Christian, my heart is fixed in deathless enmity to all that can intoxicate. The same influences which so transformed one brain and heart are steadily at work to-day in a thousand quiet ways.

The sober second thought of the Woman's Temperance Crusade was organization. The voice of God called to them from the lips of his prophet: "Make a chain, for the land is full of bloody crimes and the city is full of violence." And so in every town and village we are forming these chains of light and of loving helpfulness, which we call "Women's Christian Temperance Unions." We have already twenty-three states organized, with thousands of local auxiliaries. Every day brings fresh accessions of women, translated out of the passive and into the active voice on this great question of the protection of their homes. Of the fifty-four thousand papers published in this country eight thousand have temperance facts and figures regularly provided by members of our societies. Temperance literature is being circulated; Our Union, the official organ of the Women's National Temperance Society, has a large subscription list; Sabbath-schools are adopting our plans of temperance instruction; and hundreds of juvenile societies are inscribing on their banners: "Tremble, King Alcohol! We shall grow up." Friendly inns and temperance reading-rooms are multiplying; Gospel meetings conducted by women are reaching the drinking class in hundreds of communities; the Red and Blue Ribbon Movements have attained magnificent proportions; and all this many-sided work is fast concentrating its influence to place the ballot in the hand of woman, and thus capture for the greatest of reforms old King Majority. Magnificent is the spectacle of these new forces now rallying to the fray. Side by side with the 500,000 men whose united energies are expended in making and selling strong drink, we are working day by day. While they brew beer we are brewing! public sentiment; while they distill whisky we are distilling facts; while they rectify brandy we are rectifying political constituencies; and ere long their fuming tide of intoxicating liquor shall be met and driven back by the overwhelming flood of enlightened sentiment and divinely aroused energy.

"To be sure, King Majority gave prohibition to Maine; but prohibition doesn't prohibit," interrupts Sir Sapient, whose remark furnishes a striking illustration of the power of the human mind to resist knowledge. Just take the spyglass of observation, and behold from Kittery to Calais the gleaming refutation of your error.

Less than thirty years ago they had four hundred open hotel bars and ten miles of saloons. To-day Dr. Hamlin, of Constantinople, tells us that, coming home, after forty years' absence, he finds his

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