These bare statements of fact do not give a hint of the vast labor, sacrifice, and expenditure of time, brain, and money which have been put into the woman’s cause during the last quarter of a century. Hundreds of noble men and thousands of earnest women have toiled, unsparing of themselves and their substance, to bring in the day when, for women, law and justice shall be interchangeable terms. Many have died in the harness, reconciled to their discharge from the battle, because they saw from afar the victory which is to infold unborn millions in its benefactions. Others have dropped away from the work from failing health, the pressure of other duties, and some from cessation of interest. But the vacant places have been filled by new recruits, unweary and zealous, who have brought versatile abilities to the service, and have kept the ranks more than full. Other organizations, formed for various purposes, have adopted our cause as their own, and have again and again rendered all women their debtors by their generous aid. Chief among these is the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, with a membership of nearly two hundred thousand, whose greatly beloved president, Frances E. Willard, is as earnest an advocate of the ballot for woman as a temperance measure, as she is for prohibition.[168] Before she was elected the president of the National Woman’s Temperance Union, she had presented a petition with one hundred and eighty thousand signatures to the Legislature of Illinois, asking for the women of the State the right to vote on the question of license or no license in their respective districts. Under her grand leadership that great organization has become a mighty factor in the work for women’s enfranchisement. Its large membership, its perfect organization, its loyalty to its president, its relations to the church, its successful publishing house, its ably conducted official paper, _The Union Signal_, with a subscription list of eighty thousand,—all these combined advantages enable it to wield an influence in woman’s behalf more effective than all other agencies united. It has pushed through the legislatures of thirty-seven States and Territories the laws that now compel, in all public schools, instruction in the nature and effect of alcoholic drinks and narcotics on the human system. It has successfully engineered other legislation in many States, concerning other matters in which it is interested—notably the passage of laws forbidding the sale of tobacco to minors under sixteen years of age. It lent a hand toward the enactment of the petition-vote in Texas, for school officers, and in Arkansas and Mississippi, for and against liquor license. What may not be expected of this grand body of women, when it becomes more firmly welded, has grown even more skilled in its work, and more fully conscious of its great power!