and discomforts of those early days--travel, baggage, no
hotels nor boarding houses, a crowded dining hall with a hungry
procession outside perhaps in the rain waiting for seats at the tables,
the food itself none of the best--it is surprising that some thousands
of people not only found the Assembly, but stayed to its conclusion,
were happy in it, lived in an enchanted land for a fortnight, and
resolved to return the very next year! More than this, they carried its
enthusiasm and its ideals home with them and in hundreds of places far
apart, the Sunday Schools began to assume a new and higher life. Some
time after this, but still early in Chautauqua's history, a prominent
Sunday School man expressed to the writer his opinion that "people who
came home from Chautauqua became either a mighty help or a mighty
nuisance. They brought with them more new ideas than could be put into
operation in ten years; and if they couldn't get them, one and all,
adopted at once they kicked and growled incessantly."

Before we leave the Assembly of 1874, we must not forget to name one of
its most powerful and far-reaching results--the Woman's Christian
Temperance Union. This assembly was held soon after the great crusade
of 1874 in Ohio, when multitudes of women, holding prayer meetings on
the sidewalk in front of liquor saloons literally prayed thousands of
them out of existence. While the fire of the crusade was still burning,
a number of women held meetings at Chautauqua during the Assembly, and
took counsel together concerning the best measures to promote the
temperance reform. They united in a call signed by Mrs. Mattie McClellan
Brown, Mrs. Jennie Fowler Willing, Mrs. Emily Huntington Miller, and
others, for a convention of women to be held in Cleveland, Ohio,
November 17, 1874. At this convention, sixteen States were represented,
and the national Woman's Christian Temperance Union was organized, an
institution which did more than any other to form public sentiment, to
make State after State "dry," and finally to establish nation-wide
constitutional prohibition. It may not be generally known that this
mighty movement began at the first Chautauqua Assembly.

CHAPTER V

THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT

CHAUTAUQUA was a lusty infant when it entered upon life in 1874, and it
began with a penetrating voice, heard afar. Like all normal babies
(normal seems to be the right word just here) it began to grow, and its
progress in the forty-se