Clara Barton: A Centenary Tribute to the World's Greatest Humanitarian / Founder of the American Red Cross Society, Author of the American Amendment to the International Red Cross Convention of Geneva, Founder of the National First Aid Association of America

by Charles Sumner Young

THE STRICTEST SILENCE

“There has never been an occasion, nor a time, when I have so missed my old time privilege of speaking in behalf of a friend. I never before have so fully realized what a pleasure that privilege had been to me through half a century. It is a change to me, to come to feel that my only help must lie in the strictest silence; an expressed wish for any one would be fatal; not perhaps with President Taft personally, for I am of small importance to him, if he even knows me, but from the advice he would be sure to receive from those he does know. So I wait and hope....”

Excerpts from letter written under date of Dec. 14, 1909: