ing.

The directors of this great establishment are all women, and the editors women. No one can hold stock except a white ribbon woman that is a member of the W.C.T.U. This enterprise constantly enlarges because it has a sure foundation in the ten thousand local unions of the W. C. T. U.

The National W. C. T. U. has also founded a woman's temperance hospital in Chicago, conducted throughout by women, its object being to prove experimentally that alcoholics have no necessary place in medicine.

A woman's temperance temple, to cost over a million of dollars, was projected by Mrs. Matilda B. Carse, president of the W. C. T. U., of Chicago, and is now in course of erection. While the national society is in no wise responsible for this movement, it has done much to help it forward, and hopes in the course of time to have headquarters here for its publishing department, etc., a large hall for public meetings, a kindergarten, restaurant, and all the paraphernalia of a great temperance headquarters. Besides this it expects to realize from the rentals, as the building is located in the heart of the city, a large annual endowment for its various lines of work.

A Woman's Lecture Bureau has been established in Chicago, which is constantly sending out speakers to all parts of the United States and Canada. These speakers may be men or women, but the management is in the hands of white ribboners.

Some local unions do as much work as a whole State society: for instance, the Chicago Union, which last year sheltered 60,000 friendless men in its great lodging house; which maintains a temperance restaurant, an anchorage for degraded men and women, where 5,000 were cared for last year, a kindergarten, daily gospel meetings, and many other forms of Christian philanthropy.

In 1883, on the suggestion of the National President of the W. C. T. U., a World's Union was projected, and Mrs. Mary Clement Leavitt, of Boston, started out to organize all civilized countries. She has now (1890) been seven years absent, and is reaching a greater variety of nationalities than any woman who ever lived. She has thus far traveled over fifty thousand miles; held over a thousand meetings; more than eleven thousand pages have been written; she has spoken, through interpreters, to people in twenty-three languages. Other missionaries are constantly being sent to follow Mrs. Leavitt, and the white ribbon is acclimated in every country in the world. Its methods are the universal circulation of a pledge against the legalizing of the sale of brain poisons, including of course,

and chiefly, alcoholics and opium. This is to be presented to all governments by a deputation of women to which the petition will be entrusted when the number of signatures reaches two millions, and they will carry it round the world. The methods of the National W. C. T. U. have been universally adopted, of which the principal ones are total abstinence for the individual, and the effort to secure total prohibition for the State. The noon hour of prayer is everywhere observed, asking God's blessing on the work and workers. The white ribbon-emblem of purity, prohibition, patriotism, and philanthropy is the badge worn, and the motto, " For God and Home and Every Land."

The first president of the World's W. C. T. U. was Mrs. Margaret Bright Lucas, sister of John Bright, and president of the Woman's Temperance Association of Great Britain. The second and present president is Frances E. Willard.

Australia is organized, also Japan, China, Ceylon, Madagascar, the civilized portions of Africa, Scandinavia, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. In continental Europe the progress is slow, as drinking habits are well nigh universal; but much progress has been made in Switzerland, also in Berlin. In the former country through the efforts of Miss Charlotte Gray, in the latter city through Mrs. Mary Bannister Willard, of the Home School for Girls.

A World's W. C. T. U. convention is to be held in connection with the World's Fair in Chicago, in 1893.

Wherever white ribboners are found, will be found friends of woman's complete enfranchisement and admission to all professions and trades, on the ground that no artificial barrier should be thrown in her way, but that she should be freely permitted and welcomed to enter every place where she has capacity to succeed. Perhaps no motto of the W. C. T. U. is more frequently quoted than the following: "Woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, and she will enter every place."

XVIII.

THE ORIGIN AND APPLICATION OF

THE RED CROSS.

BY

CLARA BARTON.

In no way, perhaps, is more clearly proven the just necessity for some explanation concerning the subject of the Red Cross than by the fact that I am asked to make these explanations as a contribution to woman's work, when, in fact, every original idea of the humanities sought to be organized, and the methods of relief ordained, were, like the terrible and needless cruelties which led to them, the work of men, and have largely continued to be such.*

It would scarcely be conceded that, because many women have found a place to work, and work well, in the United States Treasury, Patent, and Pension Bureaus, that these de

*I have steadily refrained from adding biographical notes on the authors of the chapters of this book, notwithstanding the fact that they themselves, in having accomplished so very much on the very lines of progress which they have set about to describe, have deprived us of much that could have been gracefully added, had they been less fully identified with their subjects. Between the lines, however, much may be gleaned; and to relate the lives of such women is to presume ignorance on the part of the reader; a presumption of which a discreet editor would never be guilty.

But when, through excess of modesty, the ignorance of the editor of this book is delicately held up as a proof of the lamentably universal ignorance on the subject of the Red Cross, the awful dignity of the editor is aroused ! Without the following explanation or extenuation, moreover, I do not see how the chapter in question could have any place in the book. "Woman's

Work in America can hardly be made up of histories of work which is emphasized as "the work of men," no matter how gracefully apologized for. Therefore the following little sketch of a woman's work in the direction of originating and applying the methods of the Red Cross in this country, written by one connected officially with the society is presented, with the editor's apologies to the modesty of the President of the Red Cross: "It is with great pleasure I am permitted to add a few words of explanation to Miss Barton's story of the Red Cross, and in as brief a space as possible

partments themselves should be exclusively classed as woman's work.

If, in our rapid march of progress over newly acquired territory, we should be found appropriating to ourselves some of the old landmarks and strongholds, a philosophical solution. may perhaps be found in the familiar principles of the angles of incidence and reflection. It might be added that, presumably, the circumstance of the leadership (if so presumptuous a term may be allowed) of the Red Cross in this country having incidentally fallen to a woman's hands has had a tendency to mislead in this direction.

Considering how very little has yet been definitely comprehended of the characteristics of this young child of their adoption, the tones of parental kindness and good feeling in which it is spoken by the people of the entire country, is touching to us who watch its course and destiny. Their very natural endeavors to square its habits and methods by those of ordinary charitable organizations, are not unfrequently perplexing to them and embarrassing to us; and their consternation at times, when this strange duckling suddenly takes to the water, is suggestive of other scenes.

The mass of correspondence constantly pouring in, asking how one shall become a member of the "order," or proposing to organize a "chapter," or a "branch," or corps," or sec

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present the colossal magnitude of this remarkable woman's work on Battlefield, in Hospital, amid Cyclone, Fire, and Flood; Standing ‘alone' among women even as a Napoleon or a Lincoln does among men.

"Endowed by nature with a dual being, as it were; possessing the strong, reasoning, powerful brain of a leader and the gentle, tender, loving heart of the most delicate of women, Clara Barton stands before us a symbol of what woman might be when she bursts the bonds that dictate to her 'woman's work

"Confined in this note to the relation of Miss Barton with the 'Red Cross work,' I still consider it fitting to suggest that the services rendered by her in the war for the Union, in organizing, conducting, and leading the service of field nurses upon actual battle-fields, in directing hospital organization, in managing other details of field relief, and, more than all, in conceiving and carrying out the great work of tracing and recording the fate of many thousands of missing soldiers, were naturally and necessarily a proper prelude to the great service she has since rendered in European combat, in presenting the Geneva Treaty to her own government, and in so broadening its field of service as to include that of help in great natural and national calamities.

"Miss Barton has herself explained the object of the Geneva International Committee; and has given an account of the long-delayed acceptance of the Treaty by the United States.

In 1870 Miss Barton joined the Red Cross workers in the Franco-Prus

tion," independent, for special use, calling for copies of the constitution and by-laws of the national to aid in forming their own, so they can go on by themselves, reveals a vagueness of ideas concerning the subject which a few words might serve to render more clear and definite. First, the Red Cross is not an "order," and has no tendency in that direction any more than the medical department of an army, which it was instituted to assist, is an "order"; or the great movement toward the general peace of mankind through arbitration and kindly fellowship, to which it is both an advance guard and a steppingstone, is an "order." It is not a "secret society "any more than is the Association of Charities and Correction, Adams Express, the Western Union Telegraph, a railroad corporation or a fire company, all of which the nature of its work at times assimilates. While societies, as usually existing, seek the advancement of ideas and the general progress of the world intellectually, morally, or religiously, mainly by expression of thought and opinions analogous to their subject, the Red Cross, by its relation, must deal in active ways, mentally and physic ally, with people direct, and become responsible for their welfare as for funds and material for their use; and while it may properly have been designated as the culmination of the best humanities of the warring agencies of the past, finding possible expression in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it still needs to be explained that this medium of expression was the Treaty of Geneva of 1864 for the relief of the wounded

sian War. We see her leading in beneficence in Strassburg; working day and night organizing the rightened and bewildered women and children; not doling out charities, but vitalizing and making them self-reliant by work; presenting the truest of all ways of helping themselves by helping others. In sober words, Miss Barton's work in Strassburg was the founding of workshops and the employment of women and others to labor therein. So successful was she that when Metz passed into German hands. with loaded cars, bearing clothes and ccd, she entered that city again to help the stricken inhabitants; afterward in Paris, at that awful hour when the Commune fell,' and the streets were black with fire and red with blood, we see this American woman reaching the stricken city with her train of garments, ready for the naked; hope and comfort following in her path; healing and binding wounded bodies ud minds. She was called on by Monsieur Thiers himself, and honored as few men are. The cross of the Legion of Honor should be among her rewards, but the law governing its bestowal is that it be formally solicited by the one by whom it might be received.

"Clara Barton has never sought it. In 1873, invalided and entirely prostrated, Miss Baion returned to America, promising to use her influence with the government to open the Red Cross treaty. Her health entirely failing her, it was 1877 when she was able to call for the documents lying unused in