Organization of the children into Loyal Temperance Legions is also a branch, and numbers two hundred and fifty thousand Seniors and Juniors. Organization among colored people has secured nine separate State unions and many members. Organization among the Indians is well begun in the Indian schools and among the more civilized adult Indian women. The department of organization among foreign-speaking people circulates literature in eighteen different languages, and keeps a missionary at the port of New York. It is not unusual for a national organizer to travel ten thousand miles m one year. This work is largely missionary. In 1883 Miss Willard and Miss Gordon visited every State and Territory in the
Union, and completed an itinerary which included every city of ten thousand or more inhabitants by the census of 1870. Eight round-the-world missionaries have been sent by the National W. C. T. U.
Through Miss Willard the National was instrumental in organizing the World's W. C. T. U., which now includes fifty-eight different countries and five hundred thousand members.
The W. C. T. U. originated the idea of scientific temperance instruction in the public schools, and has secured mandatory laws in every State in the Union and a federal law governing the District of Columbia, the Territories, and all Indian and military schools supported by the government. Under these laws twenty million in the public schools receive instruction as to the nature and effects of alcohol and tobacco and other narcotics on the human system. Sixteen million children receive temperance teaching in the Sunday-schools, and two hundred and ninety-six thousand nine hundred and sixty-four of these are pledged total abstainers. The W. C. T. U. was an important factor in securing the insertion of the quarterly temperance lesson in the International Sunday-school Lesson Series, 1884, and in securing a world's universal temperance Sunday. Two hundred and fifty thousand children are taught scientific reasons for temperance in the Loyal Temperance Legions, and all these children are pledged to total abstinence and trained as temperance workers. The educational value of the W. C. T. U. to its own members through courses of study and practical work is immense. Before any other temperance society had taken up mothers' meetings, the W. C. T. U. had organized in thirty-seven States and Territories, and two thousand meetings were held in Illinois in one year. W. C. T. U. schools of methods are held in all Chautauqua gatherings. Indiana held a W. C. T. U. school of methods in every one of its counties in 1900.
The W. C. T. U. has largely influenced the change in public sentiment in regard to social drinking, equal suffrage, equal purity for both sexes, equal remuneration for work equally well done, equal educational, professional, and industrial opportunities for men and women. Through its efforts thousands of girls have been rescued from lives of shame, and tens of thousands of men have signed the total abstinence pledge and been redeemed from inebriety. The several States distributed nine million four hundred and forty-four thousand three hundred and fifty pages. The National W. C. T. U. printed and distributed in 1901 fifty-five thousand annual leaflets of sixty-six pages each, which, with its annual reports and other literature given away, amounts to over five million pages.
The Union Signal, the official organ for the National and World's W. C. T. U., a sixteen-page weekly, has a large circulation. The Crusader, a sixteen-page monthly, the official organ of the Loyal Temperance Legion, has a large and increasing circulation. One thousand columns are filled weekly in other newspapers by two thousand eight hundred and sixteen superintendents. Thirty-two States publish State papers devoted entirely to W. C. T. U. interests.
The W. C. T. U. has been the chief factor in State campaigns for statutory prohibition, constitutional amendments, reform laws in general, and those for the protection of women and children in particular, and in securing anti-gambling and anti-cigarette laws. It has been instrumental in raising the age of protection for girls in every State but two. The age is now eighteen years in thirteen States, sixteen years in nineteen States, and from twelve to fifteen years in the other States. Through its
