Her address, “History of the Red Cross; Its Origin and Progress,” is all comprehensive, showing research, scholarship, logic. Her “Address to the President, Congress and People of the United States” on “The Red Cross—A History of This Remarkable Movement in the Interest of Humanity” is as overwhelmingly convincing, as to the necessity of adhesion by this Government to the Treaty of Geneva, as was Webster’s historic reply to Hayne, in advocacy of the perpetuity of the Union. Her address on “What is the Significance of the Red Cross in its Relation to Philanthropy” is hardly less meritorious. Her address at Saratoga on “International and National Relief in War” is more than a literary gem; it is a compendium of humanitarian history—of Red Cross philosophy. No similar humanitarian address even approximates it, in wisdom and argument.
Through seven years, in the field of letters and politics, there raged a war against woe, a war led by a Master Spirit. Humanity won—won through that Master Spirit. That Master Literary Spirit, says another great woman, has “won the hearts of the women of the world.” She not only “walked like a benediction of her God amid the desolate, the stricken, the hungry and despairing,” but she walked and talked and lived “in pulses stirred to generosity.” Her pathos of sentiment and elegance of diction won the hearts of the American people, won Congress, won the President, won the Red Cross for America. And “the Red Cross in its great and human principles, its far-reaching philanthropy, its innovations upon long established and accepted customs and rules of barbaric cruelty, its wise practical charity, stands forever next to the immortal proclamation of freedom to the slaves that crowns the name of Abraham Lincoln.”
Clara Barton got the preliminary experience which led to the foundation of the Red Cross work, on the battlefields of the Civil War. I have a high regard for her devotion, her organization ability.—IDA M. TARBELL. ]
Even a casual observer can not fail to see in Clara Barton’s work a unity peculiar to itself—a work which has grown out of a character, and which no one but herself could have done.—LUCY LARCROM. ]
Clara Barton has given us a constant lesson in thrift; a worker from infancy, taking neither vacation nor recreation. ]