uestion, What must now be done? It is too late for women to
excuse themselves from exertion in this cause, on the ground that
it would be indelicate to leave the sheltered retirement of home.
Alas! where is the home-shelter that guards the delicacy of the
drunkard's wife and daughter? We all recognize the divine
obligation to relieve suffering and to cherish virtue as binding
alike on man and woman. Our hearts thrill at the mention of those
women who were "last at the cross and earliest at the grave" of
the crucified Nazarine. We commend her whose prayers and
entreaties once saved her native Rome from pillage. We admire the
heroism of a Joan of Arc, as it is embalmed in history and song.
We boast of virgin martyrs to the faith of their convictions, and
we dare not now put forth the despicable plea of feminine
propriety to excuse our supineness, when fathers, sons, and
brothers are falling around us, degraded, bestialized, thrice
murdered by this foe at our doors. No! we have solemn obligations
resting upon us, and we should be unfaithful to the holiest call
of duty, false to the instincts of womanhood and the pleading
voice of love, if we should sit quietly down in careless ease
while vice is thus spreading around us, and human souls are
falling into the fell snare of the destroyer.

By meeting together and taking counsel one with another, we will
become more alive to our duty in relation to this momentous
subject. The more we prize the sweet privacy of happy homes, the
more strong is the appeal to us to labor to make sacred and
joyful the hearth-stones of others. If _men_ will remain
comparatively supine we must the more energetically sound the
alarm, and point them to the danger. If rulers will devise
wickedness by law, we must give them no rest, till, like the
unjust judge, they yield to our very importunity, and repeal
their iniquitous statutes. The temporal and spiritual welfare of
many an immortal being is at stake, and we should esteem it a
high privilege to labor in this holy cause with an earnest and,
if need be, a life-long consecration. Let us, then, apply
ourselves devotedly to the work, and a fresh and resistless
impulse will be given to the temperance reformation. The
electrical fervor of earnest spirits ever communicates itself