Charles Sumner Young

“ In brute history there have been no wars. Facing human record, the record of 3,400 years, there have been 3,166 years of war, and only 234 years of peace; facing the picture of which history makes no mention and which in the wake of armies she had seen, Clara Barton says: “Faces bathed in tears and hands in blood, lees in the wind and dregs in the cup of military glory, war has cost a million times more than the world is worth, poured out the best blood and crushed the fairest forms the good God has ever created.” ”

“ Efface from memory the twenty, or fewer, immortals of Carthage, of Greece, of Rome, of Italy, of France, of Germany, of England, of America, then in the centuries hence over the tomb of every such nation only could be written “Nation Unknown.” In all the world destroy a score of “the Immortals” respectively in religion, in literature, in science, in art, in the heroic,—a hundred names and their influence,—and wealth greater to the human race shall have been destroyed than if were destroyed every public structure possessed by one billion six hundred millions of people now living. ”

“ In all human history did woman have such experience as had Clara Barton through that two days of human carnage—carnage on one of America’s most famous battlefields in the most infamous fratricidal war in history? Frail Clara Barton! “The most timid person on earth!” The same Clara Barton who fainted at the killing of an ox? Can it be? Let hers be the explanation: “I was always afraid of everything except when someone was to be rescued from danger or pain. Human endurance has its limits;—God gives strength and the thing that seems impossible is done.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the great international sittings of the Red Cross in Geneva, in Carlsruhe, in Vienna, in St. Petersburg,—Clara Barton, the only woman officially representing any government among the representatives of forty nations. As the unpretentious woman of five feet three comes into the hall, the great men of the earth rise to their feet,—eyes eager, handkerchiefs in air, then huzzas that echo the heart throbs of a world humanity greet the ear and touch the heart of the “lonesomest-lone-woman” as she walks down the aisle of the auditorium to take her seat among the great world-humanitarians. ”

“ All organization is difficult; Clara Barton organized. She brought into existence the machinery of the organization and her master mind, unerring, directed the movements of every part of the machinery, “in a way that the people knew what she had done and are more than satisfied.” Without a title she occupied such a position as now must be filled by the male executive of a great nation. In qualities feminine, in sympathy tender, shrinking from publicity as no other woman in history, she filled a public-service position as no man could fill it. ”

“ A pleasant illusion is better than a harsh reality. The picture of Maltese Tommie, painted by Antoinette Margot, is still one of the historic art-treasures on the walls of the Clara Barton Glen Echo home.
Those who think of Clara Barton only as the “war woman” within the battle smoke, or on the rostrum addressing literary audiences, or on state occasions as the cynosure of all eyes, or as the guest of honor among the crowned heads of Europe—as masculine and not feminine—have not seen the daily life-picture of Clara Barton. ”

“ There is Second Bull Run, and Chantilly, and Antietam, and Fredericksburg, and Petersburg, and Strasburg, and Sedan, and Paris, and Johnstown, and Santiago, and Galveston,—there on tablets of memory her heroism is inscribed, there to remain forever. Neither will the millions forget, nor cease to cherish, The American Red Cross and The American Amendment and The National First Aid,—forever theirs and their children’s, through the constructive genius of the American philanthropist. ”

“ What legacy to a nation could be greater than to have inherited the name and influence of a Homer, a Socrates, a Michael Angelo, a Queen Victoria, a Washington, a Franklin, a Lincoln, a Florence Nightingale, a Clara Barton? ”

“ Truth crushed to earth again and again will appear; and, when Clara Barton’s Gethsemane appears with all its delineations in a picture complete, there will be none so poor to do reverence to Clara Barton’s character assassins, nor to the Clara Barton ghouls who desecrate her tomb and use the United States mails to traduce the dead.
Sentiment is the soul of action. The highest tribute to mortal is the angel-sentiment—the tribute to self-sacrificing woman that blazes her “path where highways never ran.” ”

“ Whether as the ruler of a nation or the ruler of a cottage, a woman’s mind rules in its own inimitable way. In the realm of heart, woman is the queen and in that realm there can rule no king. Of our many great American heroes and statesmen, only one has been honored in having had accorded to him the heart of woman—all Americans worship at his shrine. ”

“ After a careful perusal of the enclosure on the subject of a tablet for Miss Clara Barton, I find it my duty to say to you that I am profoundly astonished that an officer of your rank would lend himself to the publication of such an unseemly screed against one who is esteemed the greatest of American women.
As one who served as a soldier in the least of capacities, I am astonished that a distinguished soldier should have a shame in belittling and accusing the dead—not simply the ordinary and common dead, but a glorious woman who has departed. ”

“ So much of the time, under all the persecution it has seemed to me I could not remain in the country, and have sought the range of the world for some place among strangers and out of the way of people and mails—and longed for some one to point out a quiet place in some other land; my thoughts have fled to you, who would at least tell me a road to take, outside of America, and who would ask of the authorities of Mexico if a woman who could not live in her own country might find a home, or a resting place, in theirs. ”

“ Blessed be it for ‘the greatest of these is charity.’ Leave it to do its work in its own way.
“But out of this has come to us another feature of human beneficence, having its foundation in knowledge; when one shall know, not only how to give, but how to do, and possibly prevent; when every man may understand his wounded brother’s need and how to meet it; when the mother shall know how to save her child in accident; when even the child shall be taught how to lessen the pain or to save the life of its playmate—then comes the real help. ”

“ No country is more liable than our own to great overmastering calamities, various, widespread and terrible. Clara Barton.
Seldom a year passes that the nation, from sea to sea, is not by the shock of some sudden, unforeseen disaster, brought to utter consternation and stands shivering like a ship in a gale, powerless, terrified and despairing. ”

“ Clara Barton was a nurse, but only as Lincoln was a rail-splitter. As an executive, Clara Barton is accredited as the greatest man in America, by one of America’s greatest statesmen; as the greatest woman in the world, by one of America’s greatest generals; as having done more for humanity than any other woman since the time of Mary of Galilee, by a great State Executive. By a great writer, it is said that through reading everything is within one’s reach. Clara Barton’s mental reach into national and world problems at least widens and heightens the possibilities of womankind. ”

“ Human ghouls are lurking, preying upon the helpless. The “lone woman” is in their midst, going in and coming out of houses where lay the dead and dying, walking through the streets and alley ways, on her mission. A knight-errant in his saddle, with hat in hand graciously bowing, gallops up to her, admonishing that she is in great danger and offering her the City’s protection. Pointing to the thousands of boys wearing the blue, she answered: “No, Marshal, I think not; I am the best protected woman in the United States.” ”

“ To an audience of women in Boston, another self-sacrificing woman who would serve the human race, said: “Clara Barton is an epitome in her life and character of all that is best in woman; she is what we would all like to be.” ”

“ His impulse to write is not fame; it is sentiment, a love-sentiment for a woman whom all the world loves and whose “life gives expression to the sympathy and tenderness of all the hearts of all the women of the world.” ”

“ Hard facts are here; war is here; war is the outgrowth, indicator and relic of barbarism. Civilization alone will do away with it, and scarcely a quarter of the earth is yet civilized, and that quarter not beyond the possibilities of war. It is a long step yet to permanent peace.... Friends, was it accident, or was it Providence, which made it one of the last acts of James A. Garfield, while in health, to pledge himself to urge upon the representatives of his in Congress assembled this great national step for the relief and care of wounded men? ”

“ That which must live longest and best serve the race is the highest ideal, realized. American philanthropy, the realized ideal obtained through “a movement the most philanthropic of the age and an intrinsic part of world-civilization,” is the nation’s chiefest moral asset. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that the memorial tributes to the Founder and petitions by the people be heeded,—the schemers discredited officially—that the record of untruth may not stand against this nation through envy of “one of God’s noblest.” ”

“ A woman without effort may receive a “windfall,” in wealth; but success is achieved through personal qualities, by effort. Said a writer: “The life of Clara Barton should be familiarized to every child. Her history and work should be as well known to the young of the nation as those of the great Presidents. Her history should be taught in the public schools for the enlightenment of all pupils, boys and girls, that they may realize how great a task for humanity was undertaken and accomplished, by a weak woman.”
It was at Fredericksburg. ”

“ At a meeting of the American Suffrage Association held in Washington, D. C., in language most caustic and argumentative, in part in a public address Clara Barton said:
A woman shan’t say there shall be no war—and she shan’t take any part in it when there is one; and because she doesn’t take part in the war, she must not vote; and because she can’t vote she has no voice in her Government. And because she has no voice in her Government she is not a citizen; and because she isn’t a citizen she has no rights, and because she has no rights she must submit to wrong ”

“ Having “the brain of a statesman, the command of a general and the heart and hand of a woman” no man, as indicated by Lincoln, could have become world-adored through services such as were rendered by Clara Barton.
Equipped a leader among women, she became no Zenobia with thirst for fame; no Cleopatra, with Cæsars and Anthonys at her beck and call; no Catherine the Great, with political and military support; no Joan of Arc, with a frenzied and despairing soldiery at her heels; no Elizabeth nor Victoria, with an Empire to acclaim her reign ”

“ Nature that springs from the soil decays and dies; deeds that spring from the soul never die. Nature’s foliage that ornaments is destroyed by the frosts of winter; the spiritual foliage that ornaments is perennial. The American Red Cross whose bud, in 1881, opened to the sunlight in the forests of Michigan is now the sheltering tree for the world’s millions ”

“ Moving over the smooth waters of the Bay that Angel with her cospirits thrilled the ear with the patriot’s song “My Country ’Tis of Thee;” and there too the little band of crusaders, while nearing the holy wreckage they would rescue, touched the human heart with the grandest of all hymns of gratitude, “Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow.”
As on the Island of Corsica nearly three decades before, again there goes in spirit to Heaven the prayer of Clara Barton: “And I pray, Oh! how earnestly, once more to battle with error; to help sever the shackles of the oppressed of every name and kind ”

“ But George Washington was a fighter; Clara Barton, a woman of peace. The Red Cross President was as patient as was the first martyred American President, under persecution, and who then said “I am nothing, but truth is everything.” She was as innocent and unsuspecting as was our last martyred American President, who said “I have never done any man wrong, and I believe no man will do me one.”
Man, political, cowardly-man constructed the apparatus;—the tongue of woman, the sender; the ear of woman, the receiver. Of all the God-given good of earth, one woman is the best ”

“ The true history of Clara Barton should not leave out the work of The National First Aid Association of America, Clara Barton’s last work. If so, the history of the great philanthropist becomes an unfinished record. The association stands today as a working memorial to Clara Barton. It continues to serve the American people under her name. Without ostentation it continues its humane service, making friends, sending forth efficient graduates, and carrying systematic and organized First Aid instruction to every part of the country. ”

“ I have watched the beautiful island since independence came to it as a proud, careful mother watches her child; have seen the steps, at first uncertain, grow to the sturdy strides of manhood, and the gem of the sea become a nation among nations and its destinies held by the same strong patient hands that so struggled for its life. ”