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-seven years of its life thus far (1920) has been the growth of a giant. Territorially, on Chautauqua Lake, it has enlarged at successive stages from twenty acres to more than three hundred and thirty acres, impelled partly by a demand of its increasing family for house-room, educational facilities, and playgrounds, partly from the necessity of controlling its surroundings to prevent occupation by undesirable neighbors. There has been another vast expansion in the establishment of Chautauquas elsewhere, until the continent is now dotted with them. A competent authority informs the writer that within twelve months ten thousand assemblies bearing the generic name Chautauqua have been held in the United States and the Dominion of Canada. There has been a third growth in the intellectual sweep of its plans. We have seen how it began as a system of training for teachers in the Sunday School. We shall trace its advancement into the wider field of general and universal education, a school in every department and for everybody everywhere.