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499 and practice the author has for years maintained. In 1883 she published, as a memorial of her sister, who died in 1881, a volume of poems, "One or Two" (St. Louis), her sister's and her own alternating.

But Mrs Meriwether's real call to public work came less than ten years ago from a friend in Arkansas, who demanded that she should go and help in a Woman's Christian Temperance Union convention. She went and found, to her surprise, that she could speak, and she has been speaking with growing power and eloquence ever since. Almost immediately after going into the field she was elected president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Tennessee, a post which she has continued to fill by the unanimous vote of its members. Under her leadership and remarkable executive ability the union has grown greatly in size and undertakings and has seen stirring times, having gone through the arduous fight for constitutional prohibition, in which they came much nearer victory than they had anticipated. From her interest in the temperance work naturally grew up a still more ardent interest in woman suffrage, of which league also, she has become State president, and to which she has devoted her ablest efforts. On both subjects Mrs. Meriwether is a fine speaker. It was her breadth of character which won her instant recognition, in her first notable speech before the National Woman Suffrage Convention, as being of the same stuff as the old leaders of the movement.

MERRICK, Mrs. Caroline Elizabeth, author and temperance worker, born on Cottage Hall Plantation, East Feliciana parish, La., 24th November, 1825. Her father was Capt. David Thomas, who belonged to a prominent South Carolina family.

She was thoroughly and liberally educated by governesses at home, and at an early age she became the wife of Edwin T. Merrick, an eminent jurist, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana for ten years before the Civil War, and reelected under the Confederacy. Their family consisted of two sons and two daughters. Mrs. Merrick devoted the first twenty years of her wedded life to maternal duties. While pondering deeply on the manifold responsibilities motherhood involves, she was led to look long and anxiously into the evils as well as the benefits of society. Having an original mind, she reasoned out vexed problems for herself and refused to accept theories simply because they were conventional. At that time the temperance cause was being widely agitated in the South, and, though its reception on the whole was a cold one, here and there women favored the movement. She became at once president of a local union, and for the last ten years has filled the position of State president for Louisiana. She has written extensively on the subject, but her chief talent is in impromptu speaking. She is a very successful platform orator, holding an audience by the force of her wit and keen sarcasm. Again her sympathies were aroused upon the question of woman suffrage, and for years she stood comparatively alone in her ardent championship of the cause. She was the first woman of Louisiana to speak publicly in behalf of her sex. She addressed the State convention in 1879, and assisted to secure an article in the Constitution making all women over twenty-one years of age eligible to hold office in connection with the public schools. It required considerable moral courage to side with a movement so cruelly derided in the South, but, supported by her husband, she has always worked: for the emancipation of women with an eloquent and fluent pen, defining the legal status of woman in Louisiana, and is a valued correspondent of several leading woman's journals. In 1888 she represented Louisiana in the Woman's International Council in Washington D. C, and also in the Woman's Suffrage Association, which