Portraits of American Women: V. Frances Elizabeth Willard

Chronology FRANCES ELIZABETH WILLARD Born in Churchville, New York, September 28, 1839; Removed to Oberlin, Ohio, 1841; Removed to Wisconsin, 1846; At Milwaukee Female College, 1857; At Northwestern Female College, 18581859; Taught till 1874; Entered Temperance Work, 1874; President National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1879; President World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1888; Died February 17, 1898.

I

SHE had the great West behind her, its sky and its distances, its fresh vigor and its unexampled joy. Her father carried his New England traditions and his infant children from New York in the early forties, first to Ohio, then to Wisconsin; and Frances and her brother and sister were fed full on corn, pork, farming, and religion. She herself cites with entire approval her mother’s analysis of the child’s fortunate heredity: ‘The Thompson generosity, the Willard delicacy, the Hill purpose and steadfastness, the French element coming from the Lewis family, make an unique human amalgam.’ Whatever her heredity, she had a sane and healthy childhood. She lived with the animals, and raced and romped and rioted; she lived with the Bible and with high ideals and direct and pointed English; and she contracted an abhorrence of whiskey which supplied her for life with a more eager stimulant than whiskey could possibly have furnished her.

As a consequence of her breeding and surroundings, she had excellent health. Her mother said that in childhood Frances was the most delicate of all her children, and that she had an organism exceptionally susceptible to physical pain. She herself enlarges repeatedly upon the exquisite fineness of her sensibility. But fresh air, exercise, and ample sleep, maintained under even the greatest pressure of business, gave her a sound and vigorous body, and no doubt as much as anything else enabled her to say, near the very end of her career, ‘The chief wonder of my life is that I dare to have so good a time, both physically, mentally, and religiously.’ To have so good a time — remember it.

With the well-nourished body and the firm, sturdy muscles went an unfailing energy of purpose and of execution. She was no listless performer of household duty, no tame dishwasher or bedmaker, doing routine tasks from day to day, with no thought beyond them. Her mother says, ‘I wonder sometimes that I had the wit to let her do what she preferred, instead of obliging her to take up housework as did all the other girls of our acquaintance.’ Wit or not, it was a course admirably suited to Frances. She dodged the dishpan, milked the cows instead, rode the horses, rode the cows, too, if the whim seized her, held the plough at need, and in the intervals roved the fields and pastures, and let her soul rove even more widely than her feet did. Routine of all sorts she hated always, and shunned it when she could. ‘To be tied to a bell-rope,’ she says, ‘was an asphyxiating process from which I vainly sought escape, changing the spot only to keep the pain.’

Everything in her case, you see, favored the building up of a strong individuality, an ardent, independent will; and such was the result. She knew her own way and sought it, with tremendous persistence and astonishing success. She had a spice of temper, which she well recognized and fought and got the better of, but with immense struggle. When she was a schoolgirl, she had an amiable playmate whose amiability irritated her. She ‘just stepped on Effie’s toes at recess, to see if she would n’t frown, and sure enough she did n’t.’ All through life she felt an inclination to step on such amiable toes. Her willfulness showed in the inclination, and her will in keeping it under.

Souls of this positive, individual temper are not always successful in their relations with others; do not always care to mingle with others, or to frame their lives in conjunction with their fellow men and women. Miss Willard’s account of herself shows strong symptoms of this self-withdrawing disposition. She speaks of her painful shyness in youth, of her difficulties in meeting people and in adapting herself to them. She makes an interesting admission, also, which places her sharply in one of the two great classes into which social humanity is divided: ‘I have an unconquerable aversion to intercourse with my superiors in position, age, or education.’ Such an aversion, like its opposite, is the key to many lives, and furnishes a great help for understanding Miss Willard’s.

On the other hand, she had many striking social qualities. Her rush and furious abundance of spirits, her immense mental activity, naturally sought utterance with those who would understand her and appreciate her ardor. She had varied and sparkling wit, could tell excellent stories and did — stories that were remembered and repeated after her. She shone in conversation — real conversation apparently, that is, in which others did their part as well as she. Her comment upon Emerson’s well-known saying, ‘We descend to meet,’ is curious. She thinks that Emerson lived too early to know what true meeting was, and that the intercourse of advanced, emancipated women almost realized the privileges of celestial society. Yet, in a milder moment, she herself admits that wholly successful conversation is possible only with the very limited number who are akin to us. If she, who had talked with thousands and thousands, could write the following words, surely there is some excuse for those who find life a spiritual solitude. ‘I do not believe that six persons have ever heard me talk, and not more than three ever in private converse heard my vox humana, simply because they were not skilled musicians. . . . For myself, I know so little of perfect response, that only as a foretaste of heaven’s companionship do I think of such beatitude at all.’

However unsatisfactory Miss Willard may have found general society, there is no question as to her deep tenderness for her intimate friends and fellow workers. In her Autobiography, she gives a curious analysis of the passionate affections of her girlhood. They were marked by all the sensitiveness, all the confidence, all the jealousy of woman’s love for man.

Above all, from youth to age, Miss Willard felt this yearning, clinging affection for the members of her own family. Her father and brother were very dear to her. Her sister, Mary, whose brief life she commemorated in the little volume entitled Nineteen Beautiful Years, was even dearer. With her mother the relation was closest of all. Mrs. Willard reared her daughter to be a notable woman, made her worthy to be so, and lived to see her so, with infinite satisfaction. And Frances’s admiration and adoration for her mother continued and increased through life.

And how about men? It is evident enough that such a vivid, passionate nature had treasures of affection to bestow, if circumstances had favored it. She had lovers, too. At least, she says so, and I believe her. In the bitter, slightly over-bitter, analysis which she makes of herself, she says that she is ‘not beautiful, pretty, or even goodlooking.’ Others thought differently, and one enthusiast concludes from her appearance in age, that in youth she ‘must have possessed a rare and exquisite beauty.’ However this may be, I fancy she was liked even more for her words and spirit than for her looks. She implies that possibly, if the right man had wooed her, she might have been won. The right man never did. Meanwhile, her comments upon love and her own capacity for love and her rigid resistance to love are delicious. I wish I could quote the whole of them. ‘I have never been in love, I have never shed a tear or dreamed a dream, or sighed, or had a sleepless hour for love. . . . I was too cautious, loved my own peace too well, valued myself too highly, remembered too frequently that I was made for something far more worthy than to spend a disconsolate life, wasting my heart, the richest gift I could bestow, upon a man who did not care for it.’ This when she was little over twenty. Many years later she adds, ‘Of the real romance of my life, unguessed save by a trio of close friends, these pages may not tell.’ Oh, but I wish they might have told. What would she have said of the love she had, when she writes so ardently of the love she had not.

But love in her career was a mere phantom, a drifting rose-cloud. She had other things to think of that were, or seemed to her, more important. And what apparatus and equipment had she for thinking of them? She had a good background of intelligence and thought behind her, came of New England stock that was accustomed to deal with the abstract problems of life, as well as with the practical. She had a substantial and fairly varied education. She read very widely, even in her younger days. When she was eighteen, she placidly informed her father that, being of age, she was going to read novels, though he disapproved of them. She did. The list of books on her desk, when she was twenty, is portentous: Watts’s On the Mind, Kames’s Elements of Criticism, Niebuhr’s Life and Letters, etc. She was brought up on Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, and tried to put his precepts into practice. She digested the disillusioned maxims of Chamfort, and quotes with approval one of the most disillusioned of them: ‘In great matters men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are.’

And she had the natural thinking power, without which books, even disillusioned, obscure the spirit’s progress rather than help it. She made up her mind about things independently, made it up firmly, though she always recognized the possibility of change with a changing point of view. ‘This is my opinion now; will it change? It may seem wrong to others. It is my way of thinking, and I have a right to it. That right I will maintain.’ She analyzed everything fearlessly, analyzed her own heart, analyzed nature and the world, analyzed the men and women about her. Her analysis may not always have been perfect or profound. It was at least sincere, and, on the whole, free from prejudice. She analyzed life, and especially, with curious force and bareness, she analyzed death. How simple and direct is the account in her Journal of her feelings at the bedside of her dying sister: ‘I leaned on the railing at the foot of the bed and looked at my sister — my sister Mary — and knew that she was dead, knew that she was alive! Everything was far off; I was benumbed, and am but waking to the tingling agony.’ How vivid and poignant are the reflections suggested by the same scene in regard to herself: ‘Then, too, I am coming right straight on to the same doom: I, who sit here this bright morning, with carefully made toilet, attentive eyes, ears open to every sound; I, with my thousand thoughts, my steady-beating heart, shall lie there so still, so cold, and for so long! ’

If she applied such analysis to everything, and from her early childhood, how was it with religion. When did it take hold of her, how fully, how genuinely, how deeply? Her sensibility was keen enough to be much stirred by its emotional side. She was sensitive to everything. Art, indeed, did not come within her youthful range, and in later life she was too busy for it. But music she loved and felt, and music as the expression of religious feeling had an almost overpowering effect on her. The sense of mystery was present with her, too, always, even in the midst of common things. ‘I have the feeling of one who walks blindfold among scenes too awful for his nerves to bear, in the midst of which we eat and drink, wash our faces, and complain that the fire won’t burn in the grate, or that the tea-bell does n’t ring in season.’

But in early days her analytical temper reacted against religion, as against other things. The letter of doubt and questioning which she wrote to her teacher in the midst of a revival, with its unconscious reproduction of a wicked jest of Voltaire, — ‘O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul,’ — is a curious document. Nevertheless, she later accepted the orthodox faith in full, and with complete, though always enlightened, abandonment. Only religion to her was action — doing something for somebody, not dreaming or theological speculation. Her creed was broad enough to take in the whole world, but its essence was practice. In other words, her religion was not a science, but an art — the art she meant when one of her friends complained, ‘How can you think it right to give up your interest in literature and art? ’ and Miss Willard answered, ‘What greater art than to try to restore the image of God to faces that have lost it? ’

II

For she was above all, and more than all, a worker for humanity, and it is as such that the study of her character becomes profoundly interesting. Let us first consider her work objectively, as it were, — that is, in its effect upon others, — and then in its even more curious effect upon herself. From a child she wanted to do something in the world to make men happier and better and fitter for this life and for another. She realized intensely the miseries of existence, those unavoidable and those that might so easily be avoided. She heard the cries of suffering that all might hear, and her vivid imagination pictured the cries that were heard of none. ‘I wish my mission might be to those who make no sign, yet suffer most intensely under their cold, impassive faces.’ All through her youth she was restless, eager, longing, yet knew not what to do more than the daily task that came in her way. Then the temperance cause called her, with suffrage and the general advancement of women as adjuncts. She had found what she wanted, and she worked for it till death with every power that was in her. Thought of personal profit there was none; we may say it with absolute certainty. She liked comfort and she spent with freedom, but when she declares, ‘ I ’ll never lay up money, and I ’ll never be rich,’ we know it is true.

And what admirable powers she had for the work! Energy? Her energy was inexhaustible, and as well directed as it was tireless. She herself tells us so. ‘I have never been discouraged, but ready on the instant with my decision, and rejoicing in nothing so much as the taking of initiatives.’ But we know it without her telling us. Labor? She can labor like a machine. ‘ What it would be to have an idle hour I find it hard to fancy.’ She was careful as to sleep and regular as to exercise, but beyond that every minute was utilized. She traveled scores of thousands of miles, spoke often several times a day, answered every letter, some twenty thousand a year. She wasted no strength in worry or regret over lost opportunities. All the thought she gave to failure was to learn from it. ‘If it be ambitious to have no fear of failure in any undertaking, to that I must plead guilty. . . . I frankly own that no position I have ever attained gave me a single perturbed or wakeful thought, nor could any that I would accept.’

Other gifts besides effort are needed, however, to ensure the triumph of a great cause. Whatever they may be, Miss Willard had them. There is the gift of organization, of combining great bodies of men and women together for a clearly defined purpose, and making them work in unison till that purpose is achieved. When she was a child, she devised clubs and framed elaborate constitutions for them. When she became a woman, she did the same work efficiently, rapidly, and with eminent success.

And there is the gift of speech. So many great ideas and noble conceptions are lost in realization, because the initiators of them cannot put them into adequate words and fire the world. Just as a fluent and admirable power of the tongue is too often given to those who have nothing behind it. Miss Willard’s tongue had assuredly something behind it. But her power of expression was always ample, adequate, and either seductive or commanding, as she wished. She herself knew well what this gift of eloquence was, and used it to the full, and cultivated it. ‘The spoken word, with a life and character back of it, the spoken word, sped home by earnest voice, conversational tone, and punctuating gesture, is the final human factor in the progress of reform.’ Yet all testimony shows that her speeches were not oratorical, not rhetorical, not stuffed with formal figures or pompous trumpery. She went right to the heart, spoke as if her hearers were friends or brothers and sisters, unveiled her own feelings and experiences as if she were chatting at the fireside. ‘That was the most homey talk I ever heard,’ said an old farmer, after listening to her with tears.

This quality of simplicity in her public utterance was immensely emphasized by her appearance and manner. There was nothing imposing or dominating about her, rather an impression of frankness, gentleness, sympathetic and insinuating grace. One of her admirers, in endeavoring to describe her, says that her features refused ‘to be impressed separately in your memory.

Only her smile and voice abide. She envelopes you, permeates you, enfolds you.’ The general suggestion of grace, of graciousness, recurs and is reiterated in all attempts to reproduce her charm.

For she did charm. She charmed multitudes from the platform, made them, for the time at least, anxious to carry out her ideas and do her bidding. She charmed individuals, took them into quiet corners and whispered to them some spell of conviction which sent them out into the world to try to make life over, as she would have it. She entered into other peoples’ souls, put herself in their places, saw the world as they saw it. There was a certain amount of theory about this attitude on her part. Tact, adaptation, adjustment were all a matter of principle with her. For a child to have been brought up on the letters of Lord Chesterfield was no bad preparation for meeting the world, though one is rather surprised to find it on a Wisconsin farm. She preaches deference, courtesy, and consideration to everybody, no matter what their position in life. ‘ Who says a kind word to the man that blacks his boots, to the maid that makes his bed and sweeps his hearth? . . . Oh, we forget these things! ’ But with Miss Willard there was more to it than theory. She was interested in the lives of all men and women, curious about them. ‘I am somewhat of a questioner,’ she says. She questioned everybody and so got a peep into the heart. But back of the questioning were tenderness and sympathy and kindness, the desire not only to understand but to help, not only to analyze but to make over. And precisely in this combination of understanding with love lay her mighty power over men, the infinite tact which enabled her to identify other wills with her own, and so to persuade rather than to command, for the achievement of a great purpose.

Even in her early days of teaching, she formulated the method that later obtained such vast results. ‘ When you get them all to think alike and act alike by your command, you can do with them what you will.’ But I prefer the testimony of a simple heart, which elucidates the whole point. ‘A poor seamstress said the other day, “I go to sew at Miss Willard’s sometimes. I see very little of her, scarcely hear her speak, but why is it I always leave there saying to myself, ‘I must be a better woman, I must indeed’?”’ So the world said, when Miss Willard had done with it.

This is not the place to attempt more than to summarize briefly what the fullness of Miss Willard’s actual achievement was. It may be that her ardent admirers somewhat exaggerate it, as is natural. To say that in her work for American women ‘she has done more to enlarge our sympathies, widen our outlook, and develop our gifts, than any man, or any other woman of her time ’ is making a broad claim, though perhaps not too broad. It is, at any rate, certain that, as head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, she diminished almost incalculably the sum of human misery; and who would wish to have more said of her than that? One who knew her work well writes, ‘There are countless men and women all over the world to-day living useful lives, filling positions of trust and responsibility, who owe to Frances Willard all that they are, because her word first aroused their dormant powers and gave them faith in themselves.’ It is a just and noble eulogy.

Above all, in this year 1919, when, among a multitude of surprising and far-reaching events, few are more notable than the establishment of absolute prohibition in the United States of America, the name of Miss Willard deserves to be widely remembered and commemorated by her countrymen and countrywomen.

III

Yet I confess that I am even more, interested in what prohibition did for Miss Willard than in what Miss Willard did for prohibition. Here again, let us consider the external influences first, and then follow them to their spiritual results. To begin with, take the praise, the eulogy, the idolatry almost, which were necessarily and naturally poured upon her during the last years of her life. ‘ She has won a love and loyalty that no other woman, I think, has ever before possessed,’ says her biographer. It was immense, in any case. Huge audiences screamed with enthusiasm over her mere presence. Princes and potentates welcomed her, high functionaries bowed down to her, precious souls rescued from destruction hailed her as their savior. Children were named after her — so many that her secretary has to keep the record: over one hundred, she says. No exuberance of praise seems excessive, and one adorer assures us that ‘Frances Willard lived, literally, the Christ-life on earth.’ That ‘literally ’ is, I think, about as far as ecstasy can go. The mind that could not be affected by such treatment as this would indeed have something superhuman.

And besides the influence of unlimited applause, there is what I may call the platform habit, the peculiar and unavoidable effect of appearing constantly before multitudes of people and exhibiting one’s personality, one’s soul, to them, more or less unreservedly. Of course, every preacher is exposed to this to some extent, and few preachers wholly escape the consequences of it. But the ordinary preacher is limited in his audience and constrained to forget himself to some extent in his holy calling. The lecturer, the political orator, and, most of all, the reformer and the revivalist, are almost always moulded by this habit of public appearance in ways most curious to consider, and few have been exposed to the influence more overwhelmingly than Miss Willard.

The platform instinct was born in her. At three or four years old she was set up on a chair to recite hymns, and enjoyed it. Of one favorite she says, ‘Mother taught me how to speak it, where to put in the volume of sound and the soft, repressed utterance; and as for the pathos, I knew where to put that in myself.’ She always knew. And this instinct is not one that loses anything with the process of time. As years went on, publicity became existence to her; she thought in public, as it were, and all her inner life was lived in the presence of her faithful followers. Do not take this as in any way contradicting what I have said above about her charm and about her simplicity. There is nothing incompatible here. It was just because life in public was so natural and easy to her, because she faced it without shrinking and without embarrassment, that she was able to convey herself, all her enthusiasms and ideals, so directly to others. The stimulus of a crowd roused her to intenser thought and feeling, just as one sympathetic auditor rouses others of a different temperament. To her, vast numbers were just one sympathetic auditor. Hear how shrewd and vivid is her own statement of this: ‘To me, an audience is like a well-bred person, quiet, attentive, sympathetic, and, best of all, not in a position to answer back.’

And, as she felt the stimulus of an audience when it was before her, so she gradually came to carry one always in her mind, to feel that she was living before the vast audience of the world, and to put into every action the consciousness that it must be a lesson and example. An amiable hostess thoughtlessly invites her to take a glass of wine, when much fatigued. ‘The blood flushed in cheek and brow as I said to her, “Madam, two hundred thousand women would lose somewhat of their faith in humanity if I should drink a drop of wine.” ’ Think what it must be to feel the eyes of two hundred thousand women fixed upon you from the time you wake till the time you sleep again! This is the way Miss Milllard lived.

Perhaps the most curious illustration of the sense of exemplariness is her Autobiography. Here is a book of seven hundred closely printed pages, written by herself about herself, to be given to the world in her own lifetime, and the publishers inform us frankly that she originally wrote twelve hundred pages that had to be cut down. Assuredly no one ever turned themselves inside out more absolutely for the improvement of a hearkening world. And everywhere the necessity of setting an example is apparent. This becomes evident at once, when you compare the simple, natural journals of Miss Willard’s youth with the carefully prepared matter of the later narrative. Of course nothing is false, nothing is misrepresented. Yet the consciousness of edification, the overwhelming nearness of the lecture platform, are everywhere present.

Now let us analyze a little more fully the effect of this curious life upon the woman’s soul. To begin with, in the immense work she had undertaken of making over the world by the power of speech, did she experience alternations of hope and despair, enthusiasm and discouragement? Most men, and especially most women, one would think, would have had their hours of being exalted with the assured confidence of success, and hours again when blank depression would have made it seem as if they were fighting against a stone wall. Symptoms of such depression may perhaps be detected in Miss Willard’s Autobiography, but I have looked for them carefully, and I have found few indeed. She had splendid health, she had an even temper, and she had an unfailing faculty of hope. If she had dark moments, she concealed them, perhaps out of consideration for the two hundred thousand.

I have also enjoyed probing the personal motives that lay behind her tremendous and constant effort; for she herself, in the seven hundred close pages, has invited such probing too earnestly for anyone to resist it. We have already seen that she aimed to help mankind, set out to do a noble work in the world, no doubt mainly for the sake of doing it. Her one sole aim, says her enthusiastic biographer, ‘has been to do the will of God as far as she knew it.’ But to talk of the sole aim of anyone is perilous. We are not made so neatly of one piece. Besides her large philanthropy, Miss Willard had a lot of healthy human ambition, just plain common desire to be admired and spoken well of and generally famous. She admits this herself very freely. ‘I have been called ambitious, and so I am, if to have had from childhood the sense of being born to a fate is an element of ambition.’ She was keenly anxious to help on such fate also. In confessing her faults, she enumerates: ‘My chief besetments were, as I thought, a speculative mind, a hasty temper, a too-ready tongue, and the purpose to be a celebrated person.’ She even admits, with admirable frankness, that it hurt her to be excelled by others. ‘I have odious little “inwardnesses” of discomfort when distanced.’

Her ambition was as wide as it was intense. Politics? Oh, yes, certainly politics. ‘Next to a wish I had to be a saint some day,’ she tells an audience, ‘I really would like to be a politician.’ Literature? In youth she feels an overpowering desire to utter great thoughts and emotions, which she can never quite put into words. And all her life the same desire haunted her, so that the immense realized glory of her public achievement was never thoroughly satisfying. She would have liked to write something that the future would have read and read forever. One curious passage from her Autobiography is worth quoting at length, as an illustration of her mind and temper and also of her frankness of self-revelation.

Though she wrote vastly, it is not to be supposed that Miss Willard’s literary reputation is likely to be permanent. It was in the very different field of immediate personal triumph that she won successes huge enough to satisfy any ambition that could be satisfied at all. It is of the nature of these triumphs that they caress and excite and stimulate the soul more than any others, and the study of their effect on Miss Willard is everywhere extremely curious.

In other words, all through the immense length of her Autobiography I think we may perceive, cannot deny, a growing self-consciousness, which I would call vanity, if the word were not misleading. Do not suppose that this is inconsistent with power. Cicero was an enormous power in the world, and was one of the vainest of men. It would be folly to speak of Miss Willard as vain in comparison with Cicero. Nor is the vanity inconsistent with an almost childlike simplicity. On the contrary, it seems to go with it naturally. It did with Cicero. It did with Miss Willard. Simplicity and a singular charm are not incompatible with vanity at all. Nevertheless, by force of endeavoring to live all one’s life as an example, one runs a little risk of coming to regard one’s life as exemplary, and this danger Miss Willard did not altogether escape. This it is which leads her to expose her soul in page after page with such extraordinary frankness. She meant to do good, no doubt she might do good, and did do good; but one cannot wholly escape the impression of a naturally modest lady undressing in public.

Of course, through all the exposure and the stress upon precept there is a constant insistence upon humility. And no one can question for a moment that the humility is genuine. When Miss Willard wrote in her youth, ‘I think myself not good, not gifted in any way. I cannot see why I should be loved, why I should hope for myself a beautiful and useful life or a glorious immortality at its close,’ she meant it. When she wrote in age, ‘ I love too well the good words of the good concerning what I do; I have not the control of tongue and temper that I ought to have, . . . and the sweet south wind of love has not yet thawed out the icecake of selfishness from my breast,’ she meant it also, though she might have preferred saying it herself to having anyone else say it. Yet even in the humility the subtle and pervading influence of the exemplary life does make itself felt. I know few things more profitable than Miss Willard’s elaborate study of her own faults for the benefit of the public. After the most thorough and searching investigation, it would appear that she practically finds but two, and of those two, one runs eminent risk of finally turning out be a virtue.

I do not mean, however, to exaggerate this element of self-consciousness in Miss Willard, which was entirely natural and almost unavoidable in the life she led. But, no matter what may have been the effects of that life upon her character, there can be no question but that she enjoyed it. She herself tells us so. She had magnificent health, cherished by intelligent care and enduring through a long course of years. ‘Painless, in a world of pain,’ she says of herself; and what a qualification that is for hearty enjoyment! She adds further the notable sentence already quoted, ‘The chief wonder of my life is that I dare to have so good a time, both physically, mentally, and religiously.’ A good time she certainly did have. All the excitement of the ordinary public entertainer was hers — the actor, the singer, the performer to huge audiences generally. Everywhere she could count upon an attentive hearing, usually upon an enthusiastic one; and if she had to battle to make it so, the battle, to her temperament, was almost as delightful as the victory. But to the general excitement of the stage and the platform was added the far greater excitement of conscious benevolent motive. You were stirring all these crowds, winning all these plaudits, not for yourself, not for your personal glory, but for a great cause, for the advancement of good in the world, to hasten the splendid coming of the kingdom of God. Perhaps the psychology of the philanthropist, of the reformer, of the evangelist, has yet to be written with minute and analytical care, and he will never be the one to write it himself. But Miss Willard has supplied more curious information on the subject than anyone else.

Take the impressive and delightful incident, described by her and by others, of the attack on the Pittsburg saloon by a group of women, all standing in earnest, awed attention along the curbstone, while ‘a sorrowful old lady, whose only son had gone to ruin through that very death-trap, knelt on the cold, moist pavement and offered a broken-hearted prayer.’ No doubt these are the things that move the world, but they also afford an interest beyond any other for those who take part in them. Miss Willard, with the best intentions, wished to deny to everybody the excitement of alcohol. But she herself lived on the fierce excitement of doing good, beside which all other stimulants are pale and watery.

IV

I have thus emphasized the vast and varied enjoyment of Miss Willard’s life because so many of her admirers have called it a life of sacrifice. Of course she made sacrifices. Who does not? When she chose her philanthropic career, she gave up a prospect of assured ease and assured usefulness for a wild and stormy course which might lead nowhere. And at other times she gave up things which were hard to relinquish. But to call her life a life of sacrifice in comparison with some other lives, would be absurd. How many women go daily about city streets, to relieve suffering, to comfort misery, to cherish fainting hope, without any thought of reward or any stimulus of glory, worn, weary, and discouraged, sacrificing everything to the sense of duty and the pressure of conscience? How many women in far country homes live long lives of utter monotony, drudging over ugly cares, with nothing but grumbling and fault-finding about them, their habit of existence so inwoven with sacrifice that they cannot even imagine the possibility of anything else? Beside these, how can anyone talk of sacrifice in connection with Frances Elizabeth Willard? If she could have been convinced that she could bring the cause she served to immediate triumph by changing places with one of these women, I think so highly of her that I am sure she would have done it. But what ingenuity she would have shown in resisting the conviction!

Let me repeat, then, that she was a woman of noble character, of splendid and enduring power, one who left the world a legacy of accomplishment which is to-day maturing into the widest and most fruitful results; but she was neither a martyr nor a saint, and, heavens, how she did enjoy herself!