THE FOREWORD

The author undertakes to produce a few pen pictures of a personal friend—humanity’s friend. They are pictures of sentiment, pictures of reality—pictures of humanity.

Although precluded the use of data left by Clara Barton for her biography the author, nevertheless, is conforming to the sentiment of her oft expressed wish that he write the story of her life. Recognizing thewish to be a sacredly imposed trust, for the past six years he has gleaned what he could for his sketches from public documents, from her personal friends in California, New England, New York, Washington and elsewhere, as well as from his memory of facts developing through the years he enjoyed her confidence and received from her highest inspirations.

The author assumes not a rôle literary—has herein no aspirations, literary. 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.” His motive in writing is to point a moral in “a passion for service”; to limn scenes, vivid, along “paths of charity over roadways of ashes”; to depict for the lesson it teaches a career, a career the memory of which must remain a rich heritage to the American people.

In life’s drama, wherein Clara Barton played the leading rôle, there appear faces to inspire, faces to instruct, but also the faces of intrigue. In the closing incidents of a life-heroic time’s detectives disclose the plotters, and the motive in their plot to destroy—

Like a led victim to my death I’ll go,And, dying, bless the hand that gave the blow.

Like a led victim to my death I’ll go,

And, dying, bless the hand that gave the blow.

Except now and then in dim outline, the faces of intrigue in thetragicscene do not appear. These faces are un-American—inhuman—and would mar humanity’s picture.

The Divine Humanitarian forgave His enemies, but the picture of the crucified on the cross ever suggests the Pontius Pilate and the executioners. Clara Bartonalso forgave her enemies, and yet some day a literary artist may portray the Judasette Iscariot, or possibly the plotting Antony and Cleopatra, to make a Clara Barton picture historically and tragically complete.

In biography is the world’s history. If, in human logic, the silencing of truth in biography be an imperative virtue, then literature should be relegated to the ash-heap of forgotten lore. As “in a valley centuries ago grew a fern leaf green and slender,” leaving its impress on what have become the rocks of the centuries, so truth leaves its impress imperishable on what become the tablets of history. 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.”

Ever the blind worldKnows not its angels of deliveranceTill they stand glorified ’twixt earth and heaven,

Ever the blind world

Knows not its angels of deliverance

Till they stand glorified ’twixt earth and heaven,

and yet more powerful than armies is the soul-sentiment that protects fame,—the fame of the Florence Nightingales, the Clara Bartons and the Edith Cavells.

Her “friends” say time will vindicate Clara Barton. The more such “friends” the more’s the pity. It’s not time, it’s truth, that vindicates. “Procrastination is the thief of time.” The thief of time must not be permitted to steal from the present, even under pledge to disgorgein the future. The present is ours to possess, ours to enjoy. It’s not that the millions can do something for Clara Barton; instead, the Clara Barton spirit can do something for the millions. The plotter may revile the Red Cross Mother; the Red Cross Artist may picture the cross of red on the breast of a fictitious “Greatest Mother in the World;” the self-constituted autocrat in Red Cross literature may suppress, and belie, truth; but the spirit of Clara Barton is the Mother-Spirit still, the real spirit of the American Red Cross, the Red Cross spirit in all Christendom. The fighting sons of America on the “Western Front” may not have read of Clara Barton in recent Red Cross literature but, trooping under the Red Cross peace-banner that Clara Barton brought here from Europe, were more millions of her followers in America than in the world war there were soldiers marshalled under the military banners in all the armies in Europe.

Grant was “Grant the Great” at Appomattox; Lincoln was more than “six feet four” when in the home of Confederate General Pickett he stooped down to kiss the brow of “Baby George” Pickett; Stephen A. Douglass was more than “the little giant” when at the inauguration on the east steps of the capitol he held the hat of Abraham Lincoln; Clara Barton was more divine than human when, with love for her enemies, in her last world prayer she gave expression to the forgiving sentiment of the Divine Humanitarian.

Clara Barton said that the bravest act of her life was crossing the pontoon bridge under fire at Fredericksburg. The historian will say that the bravest act of her life was snatching her Red Cross child from the social—political—fat-salaried-swiveled-chair clique atWashington, and handing over her best beloved unharmed to the country for which in the smoke of battle and terrors of disaster she had many times risked her life. The historian will further say that in refusing to accept a pension of $2500 for life and Honorary Presidency of the Red Cross from that “clique” as the price of her child, and suffering persecution for life as the penalty, there was shown the true mother spirit that must commend her for all time to those who respect the spirit of self-sacrificing Motherhood.

President Warren G. Harding, the president also of the Red Cross, “entertains the highest sentiment regarding the splendid service of Miss Barton.” Ex-President Woodrow Wilson—also ex-president of the Red Cross—has voiced the sentiment of the American people in no uncertain sound as has a second Clara Barton,—the soldier-angel Margaret Wilson. General John J. Pershing has not been silent in his admiration of the great woman, nor have the hundreds of thousands of American boys on the “Western Front” been unmindful in gratitude to the Founder of the American Red Cross; and, if signs fail not, from the American Congress there will come to America’s greatest humanitarian a testimonial—accompanied by an acclaim that will be heard around the world.

On a certain state occasion the statement was made that there is less to censure, and more to commend, in the public life of Clara Barton for the twenty-three years she was President of the Red Cross than in the public life of any one of the twenty-eight Presidents from George Washington to Woodrow Wilson. There commenting on the statement, America’s beloved Mrs.General George E. Pickett significantly said: “Yes, that’s true, but Clara Barton was a woman.” But woman is coming into her own, and Clara Barton said, “My own shall come to me.” Never was prophecy more certain of fulfillment. With hundreds of thousands of Americans receiving the benefits of “First Aid”; with more than thirty thousand brave American nurses, ten thousand of these following the illustrious example of Clara Barton by going to the battlefield; with more than thirty millions of Americans serving the Red Cross in time of war; with more than a billion of human beings making use of the Red Cross American Amendment in times of peace and war, Clara Barton already has come into her own.

The American nation will come into its own, as did respectively two great nations of Europe, when she wipes out from the scroll of history its foulest blot,—by giving national recognition to a national heroine; the American Red Cross will come into its own when it shall repossess the name Clara Barton; the American people will come into their own when they patriotically recognize, and sacredly cherish, that immortal Mother-Spirit which, after a half century of heroic sacrifices in the war of human woes, passed triumphant through the archway ’twixt earth and heaven.

If these pen pictures give to the boys and girls of America inspiration to loftier patriotism and higher ideals in achievement; if truth in the biography give renewed impulse to American Red Cross philanthropy; if through this volume immortal deeds, and a name unsullied, be treasured for world-humanity then Clara Barton’s dying message to the author shall not have been in vain.

CHARLES SUMNER YOUNG

The only picture of myself that I have cared anything about at all is the one taken at the time of the Civil War (1865), in which I am represented in the uniform of a nurse. If my friends had let me have my way, I would never have had another picture taken. (Frontispiece)

Clara Barton.

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