The Red Cross: Some Facts Concerning Clara Barton’s Work
Booklet
By Walter P. Phillips
Bridgeport, Conn.
1903

Page 5 of 8

Transcript:
“and her assistants, and their noble acts of charity while in Galveston during the dark days following the storm of the 8th of September, 1900.”
But in the face of the above it has continued to be asserted that Miss Barton is in her decadence, whereas the truth is that she is stronger, abler, clearer and more far-sighted, more economical of her strength and better fitted to make a fight against disease than any woman twenty-five years her junior.  She has been ready and willing for more than ten years to husband her constantly depleting income by surrendering the Red Cross into competent hands, but no one has yet appeared, excepting an occasional poseur, who would have anything to do with its management, while every ambitious man and woman who thought the presidency of the Red Cross might help them socially, in Europe as well as here, ahs vanished as the mist of the morning upon learning that the presidency of the Red Cross carries with it a penalty in the shape of cash which has to be provided for its maintenance and extension.  The only point involved in the matter is that having created the Red Cross in America by her own unswerving bravery and with her own money, Miss Barton naturally reveres the product of her efforts and the objects to making a disposition of the organization that might result in its dismemberment and eventual dissolution.  Whenever the proper person, man or woman, or an aggregation of them in the shape of a committee, come forward with the ability to take up the work and preserve the autonomy of what she has brought forth, she will retire gracefully and with a grateful heart.  She feels that she owes it to the people, to the Government, to the numberless Red Cross societies in other lands and, more than all to herself, to conserve what she has brought into being and to take no step that does not contemplate the safety and further development of her beneficent undertaking.  This has been her attitude of mind since as early as 1893, and she expressed herself clearly and with absolute truth when she spoke as follows at the annual meeting of the members of the Red Cross, held at the Arlington Hotel in Washington on July 16th, 1900:
‘Now friends, faithful, well-chosen and beloved, I have but a word to add – the one request of my life to make of you.  At one time or another you have all come at my call – some long ago and grown weary in the work, others new and fresh to take it up.  The longest service of all has been mine, and it has not been easy.  Added to the home duties, with a correspondence equal to a Bureau, with no revenue, no dues, no fund – have been seventeen fields in nineteen years; every one carries through – its work finished, it communities rescued, its lives saved, prompt acknowledgement to every contributor rendered, the accounts of each closed at the end and a public report made, if here were something left to make it with.  But of all these fields, we know of only three where the balance of cost was not entirely against us….”

Clara Barton National Historic Site, CLBA 4497