“We know that we utter the voice of the majority of the women of the State when we plead the cause of prohibition—­and the women of Massachusetts outnumbers its men by more than sixty thousand.  It is women who are the greatest sufferers from the licensed dram-shops of the community—­and we pray you, therefore, voters of Massachusetts, to take such action that the law which protects these drinking shops may be blotted from the statute book at the next election.”

This appeal from the Christian women of Massachusetts is signed by Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, President, and Mrs. L.B.  Barrett, Secretary of the State branch of the Woman’s National Temperance Union, and shows the animating spirit of that body.  No one can read it without a new impression of the wickedness of a traffic that curses everything it touches.

But not alone in Massachusetts are the women of the “Union” using their efforts to shape public opinion and influence the ballot.  In all the States where unions exist, this part of the work is steadily prosecuted; and it cannot be long ere its good results will become manifest at the polls in a steadily increasing anti-license vote, and, ultimately in the ranging of State after State with Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire on the side of prohibition.

INFLUENCE ON THE MEDICAL PROFESSION.

In still another direction important gains have been realized.  But for the efforts of the Woman’s National and State Temperance Unions we should scarcely have had the declaration of the International Medical Congress of 1876, adverse to the use of alcohol as food or medicine.  Early in their work, the women of the “Union,” seeing how largely the medical prescription of alcohol was hurting the cause of temperance, and being in possession of the latest results of chemical and physiological investigation in regard to its specific action on the body, sent delegations to various State medical associations at their annual meetings, urging them to pass resolutions defining its true status as a food or a medicine and discouraging its use in the profession.  With most of these medical associations they found a respectful hearing; and their presentation of the matter had the effect of drawing to the subject the attention of a large number of medical men who had not, from old prejudices, or in consequence of their absorption in professional duties, given careful attention to the later results of scientific investigation.  As a consequence, many physicians who had been in the habit of ordering alcoholic stimulants for weak or convalescent patients, gave up the practice entirely; while those who still resorted to their use, deemed it safest to be more guarded in their administration than heretofore.

ACTION OF THE INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CONGRESS.

But the crowning result of this effort to induce the medical profession to limit or abandon the prescription of alcohol, came when the International Congress, one of the largest and ablest medical bodies ever convened, made, through its “Section on Medicine,” the brief, but clear and unequivocal declaration already given in a previous chapter, and at once and forever laid upon alcohol the ban of the profession.