THE LESSON OF THE CRUSADE.

Tuapeka Times, Volume VII, Issue 368, 27 June 1874, Page 3

THE LESSON OF THE CRUSADE.

BY MABK TWAIST. The women's crusade against the rumsellers continues. It began in an Ohio village early in the year, and has now extended eastwardly to the Atlantic seaboard, 600 miles, and westwardly (at a bound, without stopping by the way)' to San Francisco, 2,500 miles. It has scattered itself along down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers southwardly some ten or twelve hundred miles. Indeed, it promises to sweep, eventually the whole United States, with the exception of the little cluster of commonwealths which we call New England. Puritan New England is sedate, reflective, conservative, and very hard to inflame, The method of the crusaders is singular. They contemn the use of force in the breaking up of the whisky traffic. They only assemble before a drinking shop, or within it, and sing hymns and pray, hour after hour — and day after day, if necessary — until the publican's business is broken up and he surrenders. This is not force, at least they do not consider it bo. After the surrender the crusaders march back to headquarters and proclaim the victory, and ascribe it to the powers above. They rejoice together awhile, and then go forth again in their strength and conquer another whisky shop with their prayers and hymns and their staying capacity (pardon the rudness), and spread that victory upon the battle-flag of the powers above. In this generous way the crusaders have parted with the credit of not less than three thousand triumphs, which some carping people say they gained their ownselves, without assistance from any quarter. If I am one of these, I am the humblest. If I seem to doubt that prayer is the agent that conquers these rumsellers, I do it honestly, and not in a flippant spirit. If the crusaders were to stay at home and pray for the rumseller and for his adoption of a better way of life, or if the crusaders even assembled together, in a church and offered up such a prayer with a united voice, and it accomplished a victory, I would then feel that it was the praying that moved heaven to do the miracle; for I believe that if the prayer is the agent that brings about the desired result, it cannot be necessary to pray the prayer in any particular place in order to get the ear or move the grace of the Deity. When the crusaders go and invest a whisky shop and fall to praying, one suspects that they are praying rather less to the Deity than to the rum-man. So I cannot help feeling (after carefully reading the details of the rum sieges) that as much as nine-tenths of the credit of each of the 3,000 victories achieved thus far belongs of right to the crusaders themselves, and it grieves me to see them give it away with such spendthrift generosity. I will not afflict you with statistics, but I desire to say just a word or two about the character of this crusade. The crusaders are young girls and women — not the inferior sort, but the very best in the village communities. The telegraph keeps tho newspapers supplied with the progress of the war, and thus the praying infection spreads from town to town, day after day, week after week. When it attacks a community it seems to seize upon almost everything in it at once. There is a meeting in a church, speeches are made, resolutions are passed, a purse for expenses is paid tip, a " praying band " is appointed ; if it be a large town, half-a-dozen praying bands, each numbering as many as a hundred women, are appointed, and the working district of each band marked out. Then comes a grand assault in force all along the line. Every stronghold of rum is invested ; first one and then another champion ranges up before the proprietor, and offers up a special petition for him ; he has to stand there meekly behind his bar, under the eyes of a great concourse of ladies who are better than he is and are aware of it, and hear all the secret iniquities of his business divulged to the angels above, accompanied by the sharp sting of wishes for his regeneration, which imply an amount of need for it which is in the last degree uncomfortable to him. If he holds out bravely, the crusaders hold out more bravely still — or at least more persistently ; though. I doubt if the grandeur of the performance would not have been considerably heightened if one solitary crnsader were to try praying at a hundred rumsellers in a body for a while and see how it felt, to have everybody agamstfier instead of for her. If the man holds out, the crusaders camp outside his place and keep up the siege until they wear him out. In one case they besieged a rumshop two whole weeks. They built a shed before it, and kept up praying all night and all day long, every day for the fortnight ; and this in the bitterest weather too. They conquered. You may ask if such, an invesment and interference with a man's bnsiness (in cases where he is "protected" by a license) is lawful ? * By no means. But the whole community being with the crusaders, the authorities have usually been overawed and afraid to execute the laws, the authorities being, iv too many cases, mere little politicians, and more given to looking to chances of re-election than fearlessly discharging their duty according to the terms of their official oaths. Do you consiler the conduct of these crusaders justifiable ? I do -thoroughly justifiable. They find them selves voiceless in the making of laws and election of officers to execute them. Born with brains, born in the country, educated, having large interests at stake, they find heir tongues tied and their hands fettered, while every ignorant whiskey drinking !oreign-born savage in the land may hold, office, help to make the laws, degrade the dignity of the former and break the latter at their own sweet will. They see their fathers, husbands, brothers, sit inanely at home and allow the scum of the country to assemble at the " primaries," name the candidates from their own vile ranks, and, unrebuked, elect them. They live in the midst of a country where there is no end to the laws and no beginning -to the execution of them. And when the laws intended to protect their sons from destruction fromintemperance, lietorpld and without'sign of life year after year, they recognise that here is a matter which interests them personally — f- matter which comes straight home to them. And since they are allowed to lift no legal voice against the outrageous state of things they suffer under this regard. I think it is no wonder that their patience has broken down at last and they have contrived to pursuade them3s«sv'fiß that they are justifiable in breaking the law of trespass when the laws that should make the trespass needless are allowed by '"the voters to lie dead and inoperative I can. not help, glorying in the pluck of these women,&lLg<|,.as it is to see them displaying th^iwelres* in these unwomanly ways ; sad 'as itjg Jewwe them carrying their grace and their^pterify into places which should never knoif their presence j and sadder still as it ia

to see them trying to save a set of men who, it seems to me, there can be no reasonable object in saving. It does not become us to scoff at the crusaders, remembering what it is they have borne all these years, but it does become us to admire their heroism — a heroism that boldly faces jeers, curses, ribald language, obloquy of every kind and degree — in a word every manner of thing that pure-hearted, pure-minded women such as these are naturally dread and shrink from, and remain steadfast through it all, undismayed, patient, hopeful, giving no quarter, asking none, determined to conquer, and succeeding. It is the same old superb spirit that animated that other devoted, magnificent crusade of six hundred years ago. The sons of such women as these must surely be worth saving from the destroying power of rum." The present crusade will doubtless do but little work against intemperance that will be really permanent, but it will do what is as much, or even more, to the purpose, I think. I think it will suggest to more than one man that if women could vote they would vote on the side of morality, even if they did vote and speak rather frantically and furiously ; and it will also suggest that when the women once made up their minds that it was not good to leave the all powerful "primaries" in the hands of theives, loafers, and^ pernicious little politicians, they would not sit indolently at home, as their husbands and brothers do now, but would hoist their praying banners, take the field in force, pray the assembled political scum back to the holes and slums where they belong, and set up some candidates fit for decent human beings to vote for.