Woman and Temperance Author:Frances Elizabeth Willard Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. PRELIMINARY. The W. C. T. U. compared with other Societies—" Without a pattern and without a peer." I SHALL try to sketch, in the most practic... more »al manner, a subject of transcendent interest and importance. More than any other society ever formed, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union is the exponent of what is best in this latter-day civilization. Its scope is the broadest, its aims the kindest, its history the most heroic. I yield to none in admiration of woman's splendid achievements in church work and in the Foreign Missionary Society, which was my first love as a philanthropist, but in both instances the denominational character of that work interferes with its unity and breadth. The same is true of woman's educational undertakings, glorious as they are. Her many-sided charities, in homes for the orphaned and the indigent, hospitals for the sick and asylums for the old, are the admiration of all generous hearts, but these are local in their interest and result from the loving labors of isolated groups. The same is true of the women's prisons and industrial schools, which are now multiplying with such beneficent rapidity. Nor do I forget the sanitary work of women, which gleamed like a heavenly rainbow on the horrid front of war; but noble men shared the labor as they did the honor on that memorable field. Neither am I unmindful of the Woman's Christian Association, strongly intrenched in most of our great cities, and doing valiant battle for the Prince of 40 PRELIMINARY. Peace; but it admits to its sacramental host only members of the churches known as " Evangelical." Far be it from me to seem indifferent to that electric intellectual movement from which have resulted the societies, literary and aesthetic, in which women have combined to study classic h...« less