I do not know how much my speaking out against Klu Klux had to do with arresting the outlawry that made the roads rattle with the clatter of the hoofs of horses at midnight raids, but I do know young Byron was the last man hanged by the Klu Klux in Madison county, and may I not hope the unpremeditated protest made in that Sunday evening address, helped in some measure to bring about the transformation, and contribute a mite to the public sentiment that has made Richmond a saloonless place in which to live.
You cannot tell what seed will grow. Already out of the new woman movement has come a host led by such women as Frances E. Willard, Mary A. Livermore, Clara Hoffman, Dr. Anna Shaw, Jane Addams, Maude Ballington Booth, Susan B. Anthony, and in our own state, Frances E. Beauchamp. These and many more have been springing the bolts that have barred woman from spheres of great usefulness.
Allow me to say, I have no patience with the mannish woman (and about as little use for a feminine man); but if this old world is ever to be redeemed it is because He who sitteth on the throne has said: “Behold I make all things new.”
Oh! for a new man, who will stop the waste of wealth and destruction of morals to which I have referred. Oh! for the day when “each sex will be the equal of the other in the average, each above the other in specialties; when each can see in the other a source of inspiration,” and both worthy to have been created in the beginning a “little lower than the angels” and in the end to be crowned with glory and honor.
V
THE SAFE SIDE OF LIFE FOR YOUNG MEN. A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE AND A BETTER LIFE.
I do not assert that everyone who drinks intoxicating liquor as a beverage will become a drunkard, but I do come before this audience to hold up total-abstinence as safer and better for practice. Drunkards are made of moderate drinkers; drunkards are never made of total abstainers. One may drink and never get drunk; one cannot get drunk who never drinks. Take away every drunkard from the earth today and moderate drinking will soon create another supply; but sweep all drunkenness from the world, let total-abstinence be the absolute rule and the last drunkard will have debased his body, ruined his character, and doomed his soul.