“Our paper has constantly increased in its hold upon the local unions, whose devotion to its interests augurs well for its future success.

“The number of documents scattered among our auxiliaries cannot be accurately stated, but is not less than twelve or fifteen thousand, and the correspondence of the officers by letter and postal-card, will not fall short of the same estimate.  To correct misapprehensions, it should, perhaps, be stated that no officer of the National Union has received a dollar for services or traveling expenses during the year.”

A WORKING ORGANIZATION.

To meet annually in convention and pass resolutions and make promises is one thing; to do practical and effective work all through the year is quite another.  And it is just here that this new temperance organization exhibits its power.  The women whom it represents are very much in earnest and mean work.  What they resolve to do, if clearly seen to be in the right direction, will hardly fail for lack of effort.  In their plan of work, one branch particularly embraces the children.  If the rising generation can not only be pledged to abstinence; but so carefully instructed in regard to the sin and evil of intemperance, and their duty, when they become men and women, to make war upon the liquor traffic, and to discountenance all form of social drinking, then an immense gain will be had for the cause in the next generation, when the boys and girls of to-day will hold the ballots, make the laws, give direction to public sentiment and determine the usages of society.

LOOKING AFTER THE CHILDREN.

To what extent, then, are the State and local unions looking after the children?  Writing, as we now are, before the third annual meeting of the National Union, and, therefore, without a general report of the year’s work before us, we are unable to give a statement in full of the important temperance work which has been done with and for the rising generation.  But, from official and other reliable sources of information, we are in possession of facts of a most gratifying character.  In the State of Minnesota, as the result of woman’s efforts, they have had for several years a “Sunday-School Temperance League,” and their last annual report gives seventeen thousand as the number of children already “pledged to abstain from all intoxicants as a beverage.”  Says their report for 1877, “We have carried the work into sixty-one new schools, held sixty-three anniversary meetings and temperance concerts, instigated about one thousand addresses in the Sunday-schools, secured six thousand six hundred and seventy-four signers to our pledges, and one thousand and fifteen to our constitution.”

In most of the larger towns throughout the United States where active local unions exist, juvenile unions, bands of hope or temperance associations by some other name, have been formed among the children.  These have, in many cases, a large membership; often as high as from five to six hundred.  In Rockford, Ill., the juvenile union numbers over eight hundred boys and as many girls.  The pledge taken by these children includes, in some localities, tobacco and profanity as well as intoxicants.