“Finally, dear sisters, let me present to you a plan which is the outgrowth of my special studies in
this most eventful year.... I visited the opium dens of San Francisco and was appalled by the
degradation resulting from a poison habit that curses the victim more, but his home less, than does
the frenzy of the alcohol dream. Meanwhile missionaries to the Orient assured me that since the
Crusade a great temperance work is going on in the cities of India, China and Japan, among the
English-speaking population, and letters from our Connecticut president, Mrs. Treadwell, now
traveling upon the continent of Europe, assure me that leading pastors of Paris are anxious to have a
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union organized in that metropolis of the whole world. I knew our
British cousins across the line and across the sea would heartily cooperate in the movement, and
so resolved to urge my sisters to signalize the epoch we rejoice in by the formation of an
International Woman’s Christian Temperance Union that shall belt the globe and join East and West
in an organized attack upon the poison habits of both hemispheres. We can do no more at this convention than to authorize the initial steps of such a movement. For a year or two the work must be wholly carried on by correspondence and through the press. Few have as yet the
international spirit.... I suggest little more today than that the prestige of our great society be the fulcrum for a preliminary lift in this splendid enterprise.”
Soon after, Frances Willard wrote the Polyglot Petition, the first world-wide request made to world leaders to take a stand against the alcohol traffic and opium trade. The Petition was circulated by Mary Clement Leavitt who accepted the challenge to be the first round-the-world WWCTU missionary. She began with a visit to the Sandwich Islands, Hawaii and went on to Australia, India, China and Japan. She carried the Polyglot Petition and organized WCTUs. In seven years of travel Leavitt logged 97,308 miles, formed 6,623 Local Unions (WCTUs), and talked in 47 languages through 228 interpreters. Over 7,500,000 men and women from 50 countries, and in 49 languages, signed the Polyglot Petition.
Pictured on the left is Lady Henry Somerset of England with Frances Willard and the Petition
This mammoth petition made its first public appearance at the first convention of the World’s WCTU in Boston in 1891. It was festooned about the entire hall and large rolls of it stood upon the platform. At the second WWCTU Convention, held in Chicago in 1893, the petition had a place of honor, and a section was taken across the Atlantic ocean for the third convention in London, in 1895. In Toronto, in 1897, it was also a prominent feature of the decorations. However, the immense cost of transportation made it impossible to continue taking it to conventions, but in Boston, October 17-21, 1906, a section of the famous petition was again on exhibition.
