The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

OPENING OF' A TEMPERANCE CAMPAIGN.,3

435

perance people, who had vainly striven to abate the horrible
nuisance, now took heart, and sought to bring their state
under the control of this beneficent law. The Connecticut
legislature decided to submit the question of the Maine
Liquor Law to the people, and the campaign began. Never
was a measure more hotly contested, - never was there a
campaign into which the people, men and women equally,
threw themselves with so much war-like ardor. The women
generally favored the Mfaine law. It was the exceptional
women, the low and foreign born, the illiterate, or those
whose husbands lived by the liquor traffic, who were its
opponents.
Mr. Livermore had always been a temperance man, and
his interest in the reform had deepened with his knowledge
of its need, and with increased experience in his parish
work, of the woes occasioned by intemperance. He decided
now to put the best there was in him into this campaign
until the election, and calling the leading men of the parish
together, he notified them of his purpose. It was a sorry
thing that the bitterest and most unscrupulous opposition to
the Maine Law came from his own people,- from men
holding office in the town, county, and state,- men of
means, intelligence, and influence, but who were owners of
hotels, and stockholders in distilleries. With this one exception they were men of character, large-hearted and
noble, and among themn were my husband's, warmest personal friends. They tried to dissuade him from his "1quixotic determination to fight windmills," as they called it, but
he was immovable. It was a matter of conscience with
him.