Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/194

 MISS WILLARD

WORK DONE FOR HUMANITY*

(1890)

Bom In 1839, died In 1898; graduated from Northwestern Female College at Evanston, Illinois, in 1859; taught and traveled until 1874, when she became Secretary of the Women's Christian Temperance Union; in 1883 founded the World's Women's Christian Tem- perance Union.

I WISH we were all more thorough students of the mighty past, for we should thus be rendered braver prophets of the future, and more cheer- ful workers in the present. History shows us with what tenacity the human race survives. Earthquake, famine, and pestilence have done their worst, but over them rolls a healing tide of years and they are lost to view; on sweeps the great procession, and hardly shows a scar. Rulers around whom clustered new forms of civilization pass away; but greater men succeed them. Nations are rooted up; great hopes seem blighted; revolutions rise and rivers run with the blood of patriots ; the globe itself seems headed toward the abyss ; new patriots are born ; higher hopes bloom out like stare; humanity emerges from the dark ages vastly ahead of what

' From an address before the Seventeenth Convention of the World's Women".s Christian Temperance Union at Atlanta, Georgia, in 1890.

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