WOMEN: In Detroit

The 51st Convention of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union assembled in Detroit with great enthusiasm. Miss Anna Gordon,* who for ten years has presided over its destinies, but wishes now to retire to her work asW. C. T. U. World President, opened the meeting:

“Let us ever gratefully bear in mind the encouraging truth that our work for world sobriety is a major contribution to the program for international and interracial friendliness and a warless world.

“The Occident today must better exemplify to the Orient the Christianity it professes. It must deal justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God; it must produce a cleaner journalism, less concerned with details of crime and more with the essence of the Christ-spirit so evident in our philanthropies and in the growth of our service and social conscience in community, state and Nation.

“On every hand law violation obtrudes its hideous head and blatant voice. A wet press and unfriendly magazine writers wrongly charge to prohibition scores of crimes and deplorable conditions; in any locality petty violations of the prohibition law can be greatly minimized if local sentiment expresses itself in prompt, constructive community action against them, rather than dissipating its energies in passive bewailing and garbled gossip.”

Another high spot of the meeting was the declaration by Mrs. Nelle G. Burges, President of the Missouri branch of the Union:

“We are told that 65% of the crime of today is committed by youth between the ages of 16 and 21. Our jails and schools of correction are rapidly filling with these youthful criminals.

“What is the antidote? The Bible in the public schools which will reach 27,000,000 children who receive no moral training in any other place. With 620,580 teachers in the United States, each one devoting ten minutes a day to the reading of the Bible and moral instruction, a wave of morality and good citizenship would be started which would reach every part of our Nation!”

*A graduate of Mt. Holyoke College, she is author of the White Ribbon Hymnal.