Page:Orange Grove.djvu/55

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and physically, to pass it safely. Her constitution gradually gave way, and after four years of great unhappiness she died. Thus ended these two lives, a sacrifice to the fell spirit of Mammon, which, like a desolating scourge, annually sweeps its thousands of victims from the strength and pride of the land, the whole extent of which will never be known until the grave shall be endowed with the marvellous faculty of speech.

Who is responsible for this state of things? To whom shall be addressed the question, Where is thy brother? Not alone to him whose avarice has cased his feelings in a rock of adamant, or who indirectly contributes his influence by permitting these wholesale traffickers in the ruinous poison to walk unblushingly into the ranks of respectable society, but to that other half of the human race who have hitherto been the unresisting sufferers, the silent victims from whose dark and fathomless abyss of deep and bitter woes should arise an appeal to the feelings and conscience of that ever shifting, but ever ruling element, public opinion, thereby gaining access to the various channels through which it is moulded into law, and, speaking in the name of all that is pure and holy in womanhood, demand that it shall no longer be desecrated by permitting that Gorgon of pollution to rear its head under the name of respectability and success, as it now does at the ballot-box.