Woman's work in America

by Unknown

PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE.

Thus, glancing backward, and passing in hasty review what has been attempted and accomplished since 1830, we catch a glimpse of what is now waiting to be done, and the call is so imperative, that we must express our thanksgiving for the past by bringing all the force of combined action to bear upon needed reforms in the present. We believe that woman has special endowments for these lines of work, and that her absence from them has been a source of weakness and failure.

We must familiarize ourselves with the questions of penology, the relation of the State to its vicious and dependent classes; contract labor and the lessee system with their attendant evils; congregate and separate imprisonment; prison discipline, with reformatory measures and institutions.

We should demand the absolute separation of the sexes, and juvenile from older offenders; also matrons to care for women arrested or committed.

Visit unannounced police stations and courts, with county jails, where women are under care of men, or “left to themselves,” and compare their looks and manners with those in similar places where the right kind of matron bears sway with a firm hand and dignified presence. Women should be associated with men as prison inspectors, and women physicians on boards to care for women and children. Greater efforts should be put forth in the lines of reclamation, opening the way to a return to honesty and self-support; but double diligence should be given to removing the varied causes of crime, thus proving ourselves wise citizens in the truest sense of the word.

XV.
CARE OF THE INDIAN.

BY

AMELIA STONE QUINTON.

The work of women for the Indians within our national limits has been important and of many kinds. It would require much more than the space of a single volume at all fitly to describe the labor, self-sacrifice, and heroism of women in connection with the various missionary organizations in behalf of the red man. Some of the stories of such work read like heroic romance, are worthy to be recorded in an epic, and glow with delineations that reveal exalted unselfishness,[^[202]] divine self-devotement, and sometimes a success that seems a fitting crown for such labor, albeit the crown, as so often to high souls in any vocation, comes after the martyrdom.[^[203]] In the East, in the Southwest, and in the Northwest thrilling annals might be gathered from two centuries, oftenest of those unknown to fame and without even public recognition, who have laid down life in work for the Christianization of Indians, and of some women who as overworked secretaries or other officials have no less laid down life in labor to sustain such missionaries. But this is a realm for the biographer and for the historian of Christian missions, and must not be entered upon or even gleaned from in a sketch so limited as the present one must be.

In the educational work of various types done for the native Indians, noble women have been engaged, and this is notably true of the Hampton, Virginia, and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Indian schools, where gifted women of high culture have devoted some of their best years to the elevation of the red race. It would seem invidious to name a few where many have wrought so well, and this department of labor, like that of missionary effort, should be chronicled elsewhere.

A few women have made philological, ethnographic, and archæological studies among North American Indians and have added the results to the aggregate of scientific knowledge, doing also more or less to preserve Indian records and material objects of value connected therewith, thus increasing the sum of human interest in the red man, and, by the same, his self-respect and therefore his elevation and progress. But the request for this paper was for one regarding the late and general philanthropic work of women in behalf of Indians rather than for one giving the data referred to above, and which are less familiar to the writer.

The name of Helen Hunt Jackson deservedly stands first in the literary world as connected with modern effort by women for the deliverance of our native American Indians from oppression and injustice, as shameful as have been endured in any civilized land or by any race under the guardianship or power of any civilized government. The first letters and articles on this subject from her fascinating and popular pen were in the New York Tribune, the Christian Union, and other religious and secular newspapers and magazines, and were the outcry of a just and humane soul quivering with a poet’s intense feeling and outraged sensibility at the discovery and realization of the unspeakable suffering of a capable and naturally brave race in a position where, to put the case comprehensively, no human right is treated as sacred, and where greed and passion alternately rob and destroy among their victims. Her quotations, from government documents and of proved facts, startled thoughtful readers, and her appeals rang like clarions through the souls of those who really heard them, and with peals whose vibrations have not yet ceased. Soon after she seriously took up the subject she visited, in Philadelphia, the officers of the Women’s Indian Association, and expressed herself as delighted and still further inspired to find a group of earnest women already at work to make the facts of the Indian situation known, with the object of moving the people to demand of the government enacted justice for the wronged race. She wrote “A Century of Dishonor,”[^[204]] a book which every patriotic and intelligent American should read, a condensed library on the Indian question and largely made up of quotations from public and official records, and introduced the book to the press and pulpit of the country. She had a copy of it placed on the desk of every member of Congress the day but one before the second annual petition of the Women’s Indian Association, of which she became a member, was presented to that body, January 27, 1881, and the writer, at the time also a guest of Miss Seward, vividly remembers with what anxious interest she noted quotations made from her book in the Senate Speeches to which both listened during the four or five days which followed. But the reception of this book was a disappointment to its author, and she said, later, in letters to and in conversation with the writer: “It is not read as I hoped it would be; I can count upon certain thousands who will read what I write because it is mine; but not even all of these will read this book, and they must read something on the Indian question. I will write an Indian story.” To this resolve her facile pen, her poetic fire, and her genius for graphic delineation and clear, strong statement were given, and the story of “Ramona,” the data of which were procured among the Indians of California while she was a government inspector among them, was given to idyllic, classic romance, to the American conscience, and to the humane of all civilized society. She poured her heart into the story and her heart’s blood out through its pages. She put the labor of the working years of an average life-time into that half-decade of toil for a hunted race, and so it was again, as not infrequently in this world’s story, that the righteous zeal and the intense compassion of a quick spirit “ate up” the life, and another consecrated genius fell, another great heart broke. The massive cone of rocks, cast by loving hands from every State in our Union upon the lonely mountain grave which she asked for among the Indian haunts of Colorado, fitly marks the resting place of her dust, but her “soul is marching on,” still rallying, still inspiring unselfish souls to the cause she died for. The life given for others is a sacred life.

Another woman worker who has wrought with entire devotion and with the ability of genius for the Indian race, who began that work a year or two after “H. H.” felt her first inspiration, is Miss Alice C. Fletcher. Already a student accustomed to research she first went among Indians, in the summer of 1882, in the interests of scientific observation. Perceiving at once the wrongs and needs of the race, she became their enthusiastic friend, laid aside her scientific pen and pencil, and made a serious study of the situation of the people among whom her labors began, the Omahas of Nebraska. Representing their case to governmental authorities in Washington, and successfully awakening interest in their behalf among legislators, she drafted a bill and had the satisfaction of seeing its passage, and then of allotting their lands under it to these Indians in 1883–84. Nor was this all or even the chief part of her work. Her scientific researches since then, treating in monographs of Indian traditions, customs, ceremonies, music, and other subjects ethnographic, biological, or archæological, have been original and valuable. It was during the period covered by this work that she brought a party of thirty-six young Indians to the Carlisle and Hampton Indian schools, herself raising $1800 with which to meet the expenses of other Indians who begged to join the party and seek an education. She persuaded General Armstrong to undertake at the Hampton school, the training of young Indian married couples, in cottages built by funds she raised for their training, and by the success of this experiment introduced the department of Indian Home Building into the Women’s National Indian Association, of which she is an earnest member, and for which department she has raised in all more than two thousand dollars, since expended in building Indian homes, such loan-funds being in various instances returned to the association and reloaned to other Indian beneficiaries. An exhibit of civilized Indian industries for the Exhibition of 1884–85, at New Orleans, was also prepared by Miss Fletcher, and a diploma of honor was awarded her for this labor and for the lectures she gave upon the exhibit during the exposition. Her book, entitled “Indian Civilization and Education,” prepared in answer to a Senate resolution of February 23, 1885, under the direction of the Commissioner of Education, is an extended and valuable work, and was supplemented by her late journey to Alaska in behalf of Indian education there. Since that time she has, as a special agent of government, allotted lands in severalty to the Winnebagoes of Nebraska, and is at this date (January 1891) engaged among the Nez Percés of Idaho, having been first for such work an appointee of President Cleveland, July, 1887, and the only woman till recently so commissioned. In addition to these greater services she has rendered many others, such as starting the education of the first Indian woman physician,[^[205]] and of several Indian students at law or in some course of special training; inciting others to build here a chapel and there a school; doing with unstinted energy and enthusiasm the great service which lay before her, and letting no chance slip to render the smaller aid. Possessed of a quick scientific perception, keen sagacity, great executive ability, of undaunted and tenacious purpose, of clear judgment and strong mental grasp, her heroic labors have accomplished important and lasting results for the benefit of the Indian race.

But another chapter of Indian work began six months before “H. H.” commenced earnestly to think or write on the Indian question, as she herself told the writer, when a noble woman in Philadelphia, whose attention was just then specially called to the wrongs of the red race by items in the daily press, brought these facts to the notice of a small group of Christian workers. This was Mary L. Bonney,—later the wife of Rev. Thomas Rambaut, D.D., LL.D.,—whose life had been given to educational work, who had liberally aided many Christian and philanthropic enterprises, who had an important share in inaugurating the Women’s Union Missionary Society, and who had given largely for the training of young men, both white and colored, for the Christian ministry. President of a missionary circle,[^[206]] she brought to its monthly meeting, April, 1879, facts regarding the efforts of railroad companies having roads through the Indian Territory, and of western senators and others, to press Congress to open that Territory to white settlement, and to set up there a United States territorial government, though solemn treaties with the civilized tribes bound the nation never to do this without their consent. Her sense of justice was shocked, and she felt that so gross dishonesty must be a vast hindrance to Indian missions, as well as a great injury to the moral sense of our nation. The story of what followed is an interesting one as furnishing another marked illustration of the fact that the human family is but one, and that when any branch of it suffers, the others, upon knowledge of the fact, will rise to the rescue; and that leaders and groups of workers are separately and individually moved upon in accordance with one great over-plan and its clearly apparent, all-including, redemptive design. Miss Bonney printed a petition to the government, and copies were distributed in an anniversary meeting, but from pressure of business these were left unnoticed in the pews; the missionary circle adjourned for the summer, and there the matter seemed to end. But, as Miss Bonney states in a sketch of the beginnings of the movement, “she presented,” a month later, “the facts she had gathered to her friend,” and “the two entered into covenant” and “formed their plan of action.”[^[207]] Miss Bonney as the senior principal of the Chestnut Street Female Seminary of Philadelphia, one of the most excellent and widely-known educational institutions for young ladies in the country, originated by herself twenty-nine years before, and which became, in 1883, the Ogontz School, had little time for detailed investigation of wrongs to Indians or to use the avails of such study for arousing the public to their redress; but she had the means required and the heart generously to use these, while her friend the writer, deeply moved on behalf of Indians by the facts of their great wrongs, investigated the subject and gave herself to the work. Seven thousand copies of an enlarged petition,[^[208]] with a leaflet appeal to accompany it, were circulated during the summer in fifteen States by this volunteer committee of two, and those whom they interested, and the result in the autumn was a petition roll, three hundred feet long, containing the signatures of thousands of citizens. This memorial was carried to the White House, February 14, 1880, by Miss Bonney and two ladies, whom she invited to accompany her; Mrs. George Dana Boardman, who presented the petition to President Hayes, and Mrs. Mariné J. Chase, who arranged the interview, and it was presented by Judge Kelly in the House of Representatives the 20th of that month, with the memorial letter written by Miss Bonney, the central thought of which was the binding obligation of treaties. It said, “We would express that when a treaty is changed or modified the free consent of both parties is necessary”; and it urged faithfulness in the case, “because we are strong and the Indians are weak.” Both the petition and letter were placed upon the records of Congress. Another petition and various leaflets were prepared and circulated the next year, Miss Bonney at first meeting all expenses, her gifts to the cause during the first two years being nearly $500, while those of all others,—and all were at her solicitation,—were less than $200, and during the first four years amounting to nearly $1400, while those from all other sources were less than $2000. In May, 1880, at her suggestion, two other ladies, Mrs. Boardman and Mrs. Chase, were added by the missionary circle to the volunteer committee of two, the four being then appointed, as its minutes say, “a committee of ways and means to act in the distribution of the petitions and tracts.” At the first formal meeting of this committee,—this was in December, 1880,—its members, and the society indorsing them, having approved the plea of the writer that this work should be unsectarian and national, four other ladies of different denominations were invited to join it, and it became thenceforth undenominational and independent. At this first meeting, at Miss Bonney’s request, Mrs. Chase was made chairman, retaining the office for three months, Mrs. Boardman was elected treasurer, and the writer, secretary, reporting her work and the publications from May 1879. This previous work, according to the minutes of that date, “included the circulation of the petitions of 1879 and of the present year [1880]; the preparation and circulation of the literature published to accompany these petitions; the presentation of the aims and work of the committee in missionary and other meetings; at anniversaries, associations, and pastors’ conferences, in this and other States; the securing promises for two popular meetings and the presentation in them of our petition, with the general subject of Indian wrongs, and the preparing articles for the press, with other writing, traveling, and visiting in aid of some or all of these lines of work.”

The eight ladies of this committee were Miss Bonney, Mrs. Boardman, Mrs. Chase, Miss Fanny Lea, Mrs. Mary C. Jones, Mrs. Margaretta Sheppard, Mrs. Edward Cope, and the writer.

The second popular petition,[^[209]] then already gathered from all the States and several of the Territories of the Union, and representing fifty thousand citizens, was carried the next month, January, 1881, by the chairman and secretary of the committee to Washington, where, with the memorial letter prepared by the secretary,[^[210]] it was presented by the Honorable H. L. Dawes, United States Senator, to the Senate on the 27th of that month, and on the 31st, by the Honorable Gilbert De La Matyr, to the House of Representatives, all being placed upon the records of Congress, and the proceedings, with the speech of Senator Dawes being widely published.

In March, 1881, at the fourth meeting, Mrs. Chase resigning connection with the committee, Miss Mary L. Bonney, “the originator and most generous patron of the work, was,” as the minutes state, “unanimously elected chairman.” In June, 1881, with five additional members, the committee adopted its first written constitution and changed its name to “The Indian Treaty-keeping and Protective Association.” Adding other representative ladies, the work of organization, as foreshadowed and provided for in the constitution, went forward. The association was to be composed of this central executive committee and of consenting “Associate Committees” in the various States and Territories, and the writer, thenceforth designated the general secretary, with a carte blanche as always in lieu of instructions other than those suggested by herself, began her pilgrimage beyond State limits, seeking and finding individual and groups of workers, with editorial and ecclesiastical helpers for the cause, organizing thirteen associate committees in five different States before the year ended,—those in the ten great cities of the country having the rank of State committees,—addressing meetings large and small at Chautauqua, Ocean Grove, and other centers, where leaders for work in various places were found, corresponding with these and with government officers regarding the interests of Indians, publishing reports, appeals, and circulars, and closing the year with importunate requests for committees on editorial, financial, publication, and State work. At the opening of 1882, under the revised constitution, the associate committees were reorganized by the general secretary as permanent auxiliaries, and new ones were added in other States. The third annual petition,[^[211]] representing more than one hundred thousand citizens, was, with the memorial letter, presented to President Arthur, at the White House, by Mrs. Hawley, the devoted and lamented president of the Washington Auxiliary and wife of the Connecticut Senator; Mrs. Keifer, wife of the Speaker of the House, and the secretary of the association, the chairman of the committee. This was on February 21, 1882, and Senator Dawes introduced the petition and letter in the Senate on the same day, both being presented to the House of Representatives on the 25th, and the proceedings and debate on these occasions occupied several pages of the Congressional Record. The discussion of Senators, hotly expressing on the one hand Western impatience with Indians, and antagonism to Eastern sympathy, and on the other hand the moral sense of Christian men and women of many States, was closed by Senator Dawes in a brilliant speech of thrilling eloquence, giving telling facts of outrages upon Indians by the Government and white settlers, and the speech was received with prolonged applause. Later, the ladies of the committee were introduced to the speakers in the Marble Room, and the subject was there continued in an animated conversation representing both sets of speakers. Enthusiastic popular meetings in various cities were next secured, and the organization, already of national proportions, received many testimonies to and proofs of its power, and that it had really influenced legislation. Before the close of the year the name of the society was changed to “The National Indian Association,” and its intention soon to begin educational and missionary work among unprovided Indian tribes was announced.

At the end of 1883 the word “Women’s” was introduced into the name of the association in recognition of and compliment to the new “Indian Rights Association” of gentlemen, the amended constitution, substantially as it still remains, was adopted, and preparation was made for the new work of missions. An extract from the annual report of that year indicates the growth of the organization to that date: “During this history twenty-six auxiliaries have been gained, while we have still vice-presidents and helpers in States not organized. Besides circulating and presenting the three petitions named, a million pages of information and appeal have been circulated, many great and small societies, ministerial conferences, assemblies, and anniversaries have been visited and have responded, indorsing our work and appeals to Government, while hundreds of articles concerning our objects have been secured in the secular and religious press, and hundreds of meetings have been addressed by your secretary and others regarding justice to Indians.” The kind of work done by auxiliaries will be more fully seen by referring to the report of that year.[^[212]]

Miss Bonney’s presidency over the association closed November, 1884, but her ardent interest still remains, and she has continued to be largely the financial provider for the department of organization. Her noble character, broad spirit, wise counsels, generous gifts, wide reputation, and devotion to this as to all redemptive work, made her a constant power for the cause and association, and though her more active share in its labors ceased with her official duties, she is still its beloved honorary president.

The second chairman of the society was the accomplished and well-known writer, Mrs. Mary Lowe Dickinson, who, upon a unanimous election, accepted the presidency November, 1884, and for three years discharged the duties of her office with great ability. Possessing rare literary talents and culture, being a natural and enthusiastic leader and a charming speaker, and having a wide circle of friends, she brought much to the aid of the enterprise. Her thoughtful addresses, her strong articles in magazine and journal, her poems replete with deep religious feeling, her graceful presiding, her wise suggestions, tact, and, above all, her earnest interest in the cause of Indian emancipation and elevation constituted her a leader of unusual value, and it was with great regret that the association was forced, because of her then impaired health, to accept her resignation, October, 1887.

Upon the retirement of Mrs. Dickinson, the writer, who had continued to do the work of general secretary until that date, was, by the executive board, made president, receiving the unanimous election of the association at its following annual meeting, November, 1887; an office which she still holds, having been four times re-elected.

The later growth of the association is revealed in the following facts: The annual report of 1885 reported fifty-six branches in twenty-seven States, and $3880 raised for the cause; that of 1886 registered eighty-three branches, showing much advance for a yet unpopular cause, and that $6793 were expended. In the report of 1887 the collections had grown to $10,690; in 1888 to $11,336; in 1889 to $16,300, and in 1890 to $16,500. During one year the Connecticut auxiliary raised over $4000, and the Massachusetts association put into the treasury of the national association $3000, a third of which was designated for missionary purposes and the rest for loans for Indian Home Building, and gifts for educational and legal work. These two are the strongest auxiliaries, though there are now branches and helpers or officers in thirty-four States and Territories of the Union.

Nor has the advance of ideas been less marked than the increase of the numbers and receipts of the association. The first impulse of the first partnership of means and work, which began the active movement, resulting in the organization of a national society, was an impulse of protection for Indians and their lands from the robberies and horrors of enforced removals, and it voiced itself in pleas for treaty-keeping and the honest observance of all compacts with the Indians until their real consent to changes should be justly won. The impulse was one of common humanity, and recognized the manhood and womanhood of Indians, and their claims in common with all men because human beings. The facts gained from the first investigations, given in the first leaflets, and sent forth into many States, laid hold upon the minds of free white men and women by revealing to their consciences the responsibility of silence while our native Indians were still the victims of wholesale robbery by military ejectment from their own territory, often to be sent to unwholesome, non-supporting lands, into utter helplessness, or out of perishing need into wars for mere subsistence. The facts popularly made known that Indians were practically under the supreme control of the United States agent over them; that they could not sue or be sued,[^[213]] make contracts, sell their lumber, or work their mines; that they had no law; that it was legally not a crime to kill an Indian; that Indian women and girls could be and often were appropriated to become mothers of agricultural slaves to till their master’s soil,—all these facts, startling to republican minds, thrilling to humane hearts, and thundering out appeals to Christian consciences, led to this impulse of protection. But soon the question of “How most wisely to protect” led to still more thoughtful study of the situation, and to the rapidly grown conviction that only law, education, and citizenship could be the real cure of such oppressions. This conviction was embodied in petitions for law, land in severalty, education, and citizenship, while yet the popular idea was that Indians could not be civilized and were not worth civilizing, and while even some so-called Christian ministers still counseled treating them as Israel of old felt commanded to treat the Canaanites. That the quiet but far-reaching work of the association, as has often been said by those publicly and conspicuously devoted to Indian welfare, has probably done more than the work of any other one organization for Indian liberation and elevation, no one familiar with its quality and quantity can well doubt. Its members recall the many testimonies to this effect, and, with grateful pride, that the Honorable H. L. Dawes, Chairman of the Indian Committee of the United States Senate, author of the long-needed Severalty Bill which became law in March, 1887, and ever the faithful friend of the women’s work, stated in a public speech that the “new Indian policy,” to-day everywhere approved, was “born of and nursed by the women of this association.” And, indeed, all the features of the new policy are found in the early petitions[^[214]] and literature of the society. That the Indian Rights Association, the evening that it was organized, just as the women’s association, was ready to present its fourth annual petition, crystallized its plans of work, after reading the constitution of the women’s society, and adopted its lines and methods of work; that the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee, and that the new Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the present administration have but done and are doing, what the association’s literature and petitions have for years advocated is a sufficient testimony to the principles and aims of the association. That its leaders have been divinely led many humbly and gratefully feel, for, as said the venerable Bishop Whipple, “The women have builded better than they knew;” and as said Hannah Whitall Smith, now of London, England, well known on two continents as an uplifting writer and speaker on religious subjects, one of the early treasurers and still a patron of the association, “This Indian work is but the Christian motherhood of the nation obeying its instincts toward our native heathen.” It would require a portly volume to mention the names and deeds of the earnest and eminent women who have had share in this work for the aborigines of our country. Among its honorary officers and members, as seen in its annual reports and those of its auxiliaries, are names distinguished in the world of letters and in political and social circles, as well as those known in philanthropic and Christian work, while many in its corps of active officers and in its executive board are widely known and honored. But the temptation to catalogue these in this chapter, must manifestly be resisted or restricted to incumbents of the leading offices and to the chairmen of departments. Among those most active in State work, Mrs. Sara Thomson Kinney, president of the Connecticut auxiliary, and now first vice-president of the national association, has given very largely of time, thought, and labor, has compactly organized her State with branches in its leading towns, has inaugurated in her association a variety of important work and brought it to its present standard of excellence. Under Miss Fletcher’s inspiration she introduced Indian Home Building by loan funds and is chairman of that department in the national association, forty or fifty Indian homes having, under her management, been built or remodeled in civilized fashion, and among ten or fifteen tribes. Many smaller loans she has also made, enabling individual Indians to adopt civilized and self-supporting industries. Mrs. Elizabeth Elliot Bullard, president of the Massachusetts auxiliary, and chairman of the new national Committee on Special Education of bright individual Indians brought to her association influence and new friends, and has, with the aid of a corps of eminent women, achieved large results, having in her society more branches than are to be found in any other State, her association having been also the largest and most enthusiastic supporter of the Missionary Department. In New York City an admirable board of officers, led by the accomplished Mrs. Theodore Irving and Mrs. Edward Elliott, are supporting a new station of the Ramona Missions, and are meeting with other new successes, as is the Brooklyn association, which, under the leadership of Mrs. Lyman Abbott, assisted by the former president of that society, Mrs. Jerome Plummer, inaugurated the Kiowa Mission and is preparing to open a station among the Piegans of Montana. Miss Sarah M. Taylor, of Philadelphia, a devoted and far-seeing worker and generous giver, is now chairman of the Missionary Department which, in six years, has planted directly or indirectly, missions in twenty different tribes, building four missionary cottages and four chapels in these, transferring them, one after another, when well established, to the care of the permanent denominational societies. Miss Kate Foote, president of the auxiliary at the national capital, whose bright letters from that city and whose charming magazine articles are so widely enjoyed, is chairman of the Department of Indian Legislation, her racy reports of laws secured, and notices of the more numerous ones needed, having both a popular and legislative value, while her prescient watchfulness is constantly achieving other and important help for Indians. The supplemental work for Indian civilization at Crow Creek Agency, Dakota, for furnishing on the reservation, to returned Indian students, civilized employments and continued religious nurture, thus making them self-supporting and an aid to their entire tribes, led to the election of Miss Grace Howard, of New York, who originated, successfully inaugurated, and continues it, as chairman of the association’s department of Indian Civilization Work. The Young People’s Department has for chairman Miss Marie E. Ives, of New Haven, whose first effort so inspired a quartet of young girls in New York City that their first entertainment placed $327 in the treasury for the association’s new Seminole Mission, and, naturally, awakened large hope for the success of this important division of work. The chairman of the committee on Indian Libraries, Miss Frances C. Sparhawk, of Massachusetts, originated and is vigorously serving her own department, while the latest committee, that on hospital work, is led by Miss Laura E. Tileston, of Virginia, though the first hospital, for which funds are already in hand, will soon be built by the National Missionary Committee for the Omahas. The devotion of our corresponding secretary, Miss Helen R. Foote; of our late recording secretary, Mrs. Rachel N. Taylor; the generous service of our recent treasurer, Mrs. Harriet L. Wilbur, and of the present one, Miss Anna Bennett, and the labors of other workers in different sections of the country come up in remembrance, and it would be a pleasure to record the names of all these did space permit. Many women have wrought well during and since the inauguration of the new Indian policy, by the influence of which already more than one third of the forty-eight thousand Indian pupils are in the various government and other schools, and under which the people of more than twenty tribes are receiving lands in severalty. By the success of this policy, developed with the aid of all officials, individuals, and organizations friendly to them, the quarter of a million Indians of our country are, by taking individual farms or by adopting civilized avocations, at last really passing out of barbarism into civilization, and from the oppressions, disabilities, and helplessness of the reservation system into the freedom, protection, and development of United States citizenship. The work of the association for these ends has been pressed with all the vigor which its numbers and means permitted, and it has given its whole thought to the accomplishment of its purposes. Not contemplating a permanent existence, it has given small though adequate attention to mere form. One of its members, a poet, Indian educator, an able writer on Indian topics, and now a government superintendent of Indian schools, Miss Elaine Goodale, says: “This association stretches out sympathetic hands and loses itself in all other good work for the Indians so that the measure of its influence may not be expressed in any rows of figures however significant, or set down in any report however complete. The striking and hopeful feature, after all, of this Women’s National Indian Association is, as its president constantly reminds us, that it is not intended as a permanent organization. The women have undertaken to meet a particular crisis, to bridge a dangerous gap. As fast as the regular missionary societies are ready to accept its independent missions, these are placed entirely in their hands. As soon as our rich and powerful Government comprehends and faithfully discharges its duty to the Indians the women will cease to urge their needs and their rights, and the association will cease to exist. Its work will have been done. Its demand is not for its own honor or extension but that the object for which alone it lives may speedily be accomplished.”

Until this object is gained, The Women’s National Indian Association will not sound retreat nor its great company of consecrated workers disband. It is possible that its best and longest record may be made in the future and its work be finished by wholly new laborers. God grant that this may be so if the work, political, educational, industrial, and religious, still so imperatively demanded by justice for our native Indian Americans, cannot otherwise be done.

XVI.
WORK OF ANTI-SLAVERY WOMEN.

BY

LILLIE B. CHACE WYMAN.

Prudence Crandall, a Quaker school teacher in Canterbury, Conn., was the woman whose name we encounter in the earliest records of anti-slavery labor in this country. She took counsel with Mr. Garrison in 1833, and opened a school for colored pupils, which she bravely maintained for over a year, although she was subjected therefore to a great amount of persecution. She was arrested, and even thrown temporarily into jail, and her house and its inmates were made the mark for every species of insult and outrage which her neighbors dared to perpetrate. She married the Rev. Calvin Philleo, and still survives him, living in Kansas. The Legislature of Connecticut, a few years ago, granted her a pension in atonement for the wrongs she formerly suffered in that State.

Hatred of slavery was the motive which first called women in this country into public life. Sarah and Angelina Grimké were two sisters belonging to a prominent slaveholding family in South Carolina. As a child, Sarah was shocked by the cruelties practised upon the slaves around her, but her first deep interest in early life was in religious questions. The family were Episcopalians, and she remained for many years of the same faith. She made a visit to the North, came under Quaker influences, and finally joined the Society of Friends, and this led to her going to live in Philadelphia, in 1821. Angelina, who was twelve years younger than Sarah, remained in Charleston. She manifested, like Sarah, a tendency to extreme asceticism in dress and manner, and she became a Presbyterian. She detested the evils of slavery, but she does not seem to have thought slaveholding sinful in itself, till after she had visited Philadelphia in 1828, when she was twenty-three years old. After that, she grew to feel more and more keenly that she was living amid a great wrong, and she suffered intensely at the participation in it of her family. She entreated and argued, begged her brother to be merciful to his slaves, besought her mother and sisters to feel as she did. In May, 1829, she wrote in her diary, “May it not be laid down as an axiom, that that system must be radically wrong, which can only be supported by transgressing the laws of God.” A little later, she determined to leave her home, because of her inability to do any good there in regard to the slaves, and she writes, “I cannot but be pained at the thought of leaving mother.... I do not think, dear sister, I will ever see her again until she is willing to give up slavery.” In the autumn of 1829 she left Charleston and her mother, whom she never saw again.

She went to Philadelphia and joined the Society of Friends. After some years of comparatively quiet life, Angelina wrote in 1835 a sympathetic letter to Wm. Lloyd Garrison, which he published in The Liberator. She wrote next “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” a pamphlet which “produced,” says Mrs. Birney, “the most profound sensation wherever it was read.” Not long afterward “the city authorities of Charleston learned,” writes Mr. Theodore D. Weld, “that Miss Grimké was intending to visit her mother and sisters, and pass the winter with them. Thereupon the mayor called upon Mrs. Grimké and desired her to inform her daughter that the police had been instructed to prevent her landing while the steamer remained in port, and to see to it that she should not communicate, by letter or otherwise, with any persons in the city; and further, that if she should elude their vigilance and go on shore, she would be arrested and imprisoned until the return of the vessel.” Threats of personal violence were also made, should she come.

A year later Sarah published “An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States,” and the sisters began to address meetings of women on the subject of slavery. They proposed at first to hold parlor meetings, but found it necessary at once to engage the session room of a Baptist Church in New York. The gathering there was “the first assembly of women, not Quakers, in a public place in America, addressed by American women.” Two clergymen performed the opening ceremonies, offered prayer and made an address of welcome, and then left, so that none but women should hear women speak. Similar assemblies were held afterward, and in a letter dated “second month, 4th, 1837,” Angelina writes, that one man had got into the last meeting, and people thought he must be a Southern spy. She says, “somehow, I did not feel his presence embarrassing at all, and went on just as though he had not been there.”

After this, the sisters went to New England to pursue their labors. In Dorchester two or three men “slyly slid” into the back seats of the hall and listened to the speakers, and one of them “afterward took great pains to prove that it was unscriptural for a woman to speak in public.” From this time a few men were generally present at the gatherings, and on the 21st of July, 1837, Angelina wrote, “In the evening of the same day addressed our first mixed audience. Over one thousand present.” “The opposers of abolitionism, and especially the clergy, began to be alarmed,” says Mrs. Birney. The sisters were denounced, halls were refused them, the Society of Friends condemned their course, and violence was threatened; but Sarah writes, “They think to frighten us from the field of duty; but they do not move us.” Even some of the Abolitionists doubted the propriety of their labors, and the question of Womans’ Rights was fairly launched on the tide of the anti-slavery movement.

The General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts passed a resolution censuring the sisters, and issued a pastoral letter, containing “a tirade against female preachers.”

Sarah next published letters on “The Province of Woman.”

In February, 1838, Angelina addressed a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature on the subject of slavery. She wrote of this memorable occasion, “My heart never quailed before, but it almost died within me at that hour.” She was given two hearings, and she says “We abolition women are turning the world upside down, for during the whole meeting there was sister seated up in the speaker’s chair of State.”

Angelina was the more eloquent of the two sisters, and although Sarah spoke, she preferred to serve the cause by writing.

In May, 1838, Angelina married Theodore D. Weld, who was an earnest and eloquent abolition orator. After this marriage she spoke once again, and then was obliged to relinquish all public work on account of her health, while Mr. Weld’s loss of voice, prevented him from continuing his lecturing service. They never faltered, however, or relaxed in their principles. They were all three engaged in schoolwork and received colored pupils as readily as white ones. When the war came, and slavery was abolished, some peculiar family trials fell to the lot of the Grimké sisters, and old wounds were reopened. They bore these renewed sufferings with fortitude, and with patient and loving spirits. They succored their impoverished kindred, who had long been alienated from them, and they fulfilled some difficult and delicate duties which grew out of the old ties which their Southern relatives had discarded.

Lucretia Mott was a Quakeress, and a very beautiful woman. She exercised a singular power over people with whom she came in contact, influencing and inspiring them to all high and holy purposes. She became an Abolitionist in early life, and was sent as a delegate to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, in 1840.[^[215]] Like the other women who were delegates, she was refused admission to the body, and attended its sessions only as an outsider.

She was an eloquent and persuasive speaker in anti-slavery and religious meetings. She, with other Philadelphia women, used to attend the courts whenever a fugitive slave case was tried, in the hope that the silent protest of their presence, would have some effect on judges and juries, who were inclined to be subservient to the slave power. On one occasion, she and her companions sat all night in the court-room, the commissioner deferring his sentence, thinking that the women would be tired out, and would leave and, finally, unable to get rid of them, he availed himself of a legal quibble, and ordered the fugitive to be set free. Years later, when the Civil War came, the lawyer who acted in this affair on behalf of the slaveholder, and who had been an ardent supporter of the interests of slavery, wheeled around, and gave in his allegiance to the Union party. Some one asked him how he dared thus oppose all his former friends, and he replied that the man who had endured to sit all night before Lucretia Mott and knew what she was thinking of him all the time, would fear nothing else on earth.

She was herself brave, and once, when an old colored woman was refused a seat in a horse-car, and forced to ride on the front platform, exposed to a pelting winter storm, she went out and stood by her side, and rode for nearly an hour, in all the bitter weather.

She was very charming, and she retained her great personal beauty to the last, dying finally in 1880, at the age of eighty-seven.

Abby Kelley was a New England girl, a Quaker, and a school-teacher. She began her anti-slavery work by giving half of all she earned to the cause. Afterward she decided that it was her duty to lecture and talk to people about slavery. She received no salary from the anti-slavery societies for her labor, but went from town to town, staying with friends when it was possible, going by private conveyance if she could, getting up meetings, and everywhere, in season and out, pleading for the slave. When her clothes were worn out, she went to a sister’s and did housework, till she had earned enough money to get what she needed, and then she started again on her mission. She encountered great opposition from press and pulpit. Every epithet was hurled at her which was most calculated to wound the spirit of a sensitive woman. Nothing overcame her. The cry of the slave mother sounded in her ears and drowned the clamor about herself. She pursued her way, fighting, as it were, for every inch of the ground she traversed.

It is no exaggeration to say that what she did and suffered, has made the path easier for every woman, since her day, who has sought to work in any public manner in America. The Grimké sisters retired early from the field, and Abby Kelley bore the brunt of a long and painful contest with prejudice and opposition, which were directed not only against the anti-slavery cause, but against her personally, for doing what women had not till then done.

Abby Kelley married Stephen S. Foster, an Abolitionist, so resolute, unflinching and uncompromising as to be a fit mate for her. They established a home, but both of them often went from it on anti-slavery lecturing trips, until she had entirely worn out her voice, and was obliged to refrain from using it in public. Once in a while, however, in later life, she addressed some convention for a few minutes at a time, when the impulse to speak in behalf of something she thought right, proved too strong to be resisted. A hoarse whisper was all that remained to her from the young voice, with which she had once challenged the scorn of men and the timid contempt of women, but her listeners almost hushed their hearts to hear these faint breathings, remembering reverently all the sacrifice and pain she had endured.

Mrs. Foster lived in all respects a conscientious life. She was a careful housekeeper and a devoted wife and mother. She and her husband were ardent Woman Suffragists and they protested against the payment of taxes to a government which allowed her no representation. Their home was in Worcester, Mass., and they both lived to see slavery abolished. She survived him for several years, without abating her interest in the general principles to which their lives had been consecrated.

Sallie Holley was one of the later anti-slavery speakers. She was generally accompanied in her lecturing trips by a friend, Miss Caroline F. Putnam, and after the war the two went to Virginia to live and work among the freed people.

Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony were also anti-slavery speakers before the Civil War. Anna Dickinson made a few speeches in her very early girlhood as agent of one of the anti-slavery societies. There were also women employed by the societies as workers in other ways, such as circulating petitions, raising money, distributing tracts, and talking with people in private ways.

Miss Mary Grew, of Philadelphia, occasionally addressed meetings. Miss Grew was one of a large number of women all over the North, who gave all their energies to anti-slavery work. These women helped fugitive slaves, cared for Abolition speakers, raised money, arranged meetings, distributed papers and pamphlets, corresponded, wrote articles for newspapers, sewed for fairs, went without luxuries and even necessities so as to be able to give to the cause, and spent themselves in body and brain without stint, and without asking any reward but the achievement of the end they sought. Mrs. Sidney Lewis, of Philadelphia, kept the anti-slavery office in that city. It would be impossible to name the half of these silent workers.

Lydia Maria Child[^[216]] was one of the foremost literary women of her day, when she avowed herself to be an Abolitionist, and her popularity was greatly injured thereby. She edited the Anti-Slavery Standard for two years, and did noble work. During the war there was a last outbreak of pro-slavery fury in Northern cities, and mobs assaulted Wendell Phillips in Boston. One night, after an anti-slavery meeting, the crowd threatened to kill him, and she took his arm and walked serenely by his side through the raging multitude, and it was considered that her presence with him awed them to such an extent that she really saved his life.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”[^[217]] when public sentiment was beginning to turn against slavery, and the book went all over the world, and was translated into many tongues, to make all men feel the wickedness of an institution which needed that the Fugitive Slave Law should be enacted and enforced for its support. The effect of the book was incalculable.

Maria Weston Chapman and her sisters brought grace, beauty, and wit, in social circles, to the aid of the Abolitionists in the very first years of the long moral warfare. They became so unpopular in Boston, in consequence of their course, that Mrs. Chapman told a friend that she feared to walk alone on Washington Street, because the very clerks in the stores would insult her as she passed. She was very energetic in getting up anti-slavery fairs on a scale which seemed large in those days, and she enlisted the sympathy of people in England, and secured large contributions from them.

Ann Green Phillips, the wife of Wendell Phillips, was a life-long invalid, but she first converted him to anti-slavery opinions, and then inspired and sustained him, and from her sick bed sent him forth to do the work she could not do.

Helen E. Garrison, the wife of Wm. Lloyd Garrison, the shyest and most modest of women, encouraged her husband, and by her unselfish devotion at home, made it possible for him to use his time and strength combating the system which he held to be “the sum of all villainies.” When the mob dragged him through the streets of Boston, in 1835, and word was brought to this beautiful young woman, who was then a recent bride, that his life was in danger, her spirit rose at the tidings, and she proudly said, “I do not believe my husband will be untrue to his principles.”

XVII.
WORK OF THE W. C. T. U.

BY

FRANCES E. WILLARD.

Let me try to set forth the sequel of that modern Pentecost called the “Woman’s Crusade.” That women should thus dare was the wonder after they had so long endured, while the manner of their doing left us who looked on bewildered between laughter and tears. Woman-like, they took their knitting, their zephyr work, or their embroidery, and simply swarmed into the drink-shops, seated themselves, and watched the proceedings. Usually they came in a long procession from their rendezvous at some church where they had held morning prayer-meeting, entered the saloon with kind faces, and the sweet songs of church and home upon their lips, while some Madonna-like leader with the Gospel in her looks, took her stand beside the bar, and gently asked if she might read God’s word and offer prayer.

Women gave of their best during the two months of that wonderful uprising. All other engagements were laid aside; elegant women of society walked beside quiet women of home, school, and shop, in the strange processions that soon lined the chief streets, not only of nearly every town and village in the State that was its birth place,[^[218]] but of leading cities there and elsewhere; and voices trained in Paris and Berlin sang “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,” in the malodorous air of liquor-rooms and beer-halls. Meanwhile, where were the men who patronized these places? Thousands of them signed the pledge these women brought, and accepted their invitation to go back with them to the churches, whose doors, for once, stood open all day long; others slunk out of sight, and a few cursed the women openly; but even of these it might be said, that those who came to curse remained to pray. Soon the saloon-keepers surrendered in large numbers, the statement being made by a well-known observer that the liquor traffic was temporarily driven out of two hundred and fifty towns and villages in Ohio and the adjoining States, to which the Temperance Crusade extended. There are photographs extant representing the stirring scenes when, amid the ringing of church bells, the contents of every barrel, cask, and bottle in a saloon were sent gurgling into the gutter, the owner insisting that women’s hands alone should do this work, perhaps with some dim thought in his muddled head of the poetic justice due to the Nemesis he thus invoked. And so it came about that soft and often jeweled hands grasped axe and hammer, while the whole town assembled to rejoice in this new fashion of exorcising the evil spirits. In Cincinnati, a city long dominated by the liquor trade, a procession of women, including the wives of leading pastors, were arrested and locked up in jail; in Cleveland dogs were set on the Crusaders, and in a single instance a blunderbuss was pointed at them, while in several places they were smoked out, or had the hose turned on them. But the arrested women marched through the streets singing, and held a temperance meeting in the prison; the one assailed by dogs laid her hands upon their heads and prayed; and the group menaced by a gun marched up to its mouth singing, “Never be afraid to work for Jesus.” The annals of heroism have few pages so bright as the annals of that strange crusade, spreading as if by magic through all the Northern States, across the sea, and to the Orient itself. Everywhere it went, the attendance at church increased incalculably, and the crime record was in like manner shortened. Men say there was a spirit in the air such as they never knew before; a sense of God and human brotherhood.

But after fifty days or more, all this seemed to pass away. The women could not keep up such work; it took them too much from their homes; saloons reopened; men gathered as before behind their sheltering screens, and swore “those silly women had done more harm than good,” while with ribald words they drank the health of “the defunct crusade.”

Perhaps the most significant outcome of this movement was the knowledge of their own power gained by the conservative women of the churches. They had never seen a “woman’s rights convention,” and had been held aloof from the “suffragists” by fears as to their orthodoxy; but now there were women, prominent in all church cares and duties, eager to clasp hands for a more aggressive work than such women had ever before dreamed of undertaking.

Nothing is more suggestive in all the national gatherings of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, that sober second thought of the crusade, than the wide difference between these meetings and any held by men. The beauty of decoration is specially noticeable; banners of silk, satin and velvet, usually made by the women themselves, adorn the wall; the handsome shields of States; the great vases bearing aloft grains, fruits and flowers; the moss-covered well with its old bucket; or the setting of a platform to present an interior as cozy and delightful as a parlor could afford, are features of the pleasant scene. The rapidity of movement with which business is conducted, the spontaneity of manner, the originality of plan, the perpetual freshness and ingenuity of the convention, its thousand unexpectednesses, its quips and turns, its wit and pathos, its impromptu eloquence and its perpetual good nature—all these elements, brought into condensed view in the National Convention, are an object lesson of the new force and the unique method that womanhood has contributed to the consideration of the greatest reform in Christendom. It is really the crusade over again; the home going forth into the world. Its manner is not that of the street, the court, the mart, or the office; it is the manner of the home. Men take one line, and travel onward to success; with them discursiveness is at a discount. But women in the home must be mistresses as well as maids of all work; they have learned well the lesson of unity in diversity; hence, by inheritance and by environment, women are varied in their methods; they are born to be “branchers-out.” Men have been in the organized temperance work not less than eighty years—women not quite fifteen. Men pursued it at first along the line of temperance, then total abstinence; license, then prohibition; while women have already over forty distinct departments of work, classified under the heads of preventive, educational, evangelistic, social, and legal. Women think in the concrete. The crusade showed them the drinking man, and they began upon him directly to get him to sign the pledge and “seek the Lord behind the pledge.” The crusade showed them the selling man, and they prayed over him, and persuaded him to give up his bad business, often buying him out, and setting him up in the better occupation of baker, grocer, or keeper of the reading-room, into which they converted his saloon after converting him from the error of his ways.

But oftentimes the drinking man went back to his cups, and the selling man fell from his grace; the first one declaring, “I can’t break the habit I formed when a boy;” and the last averring, “Somebody’s bound to sell, and I might as well make the profit.” Upon this the women, still with their concrete ways of thinking, said, “To be sure, we must train our boys; and not only ours but everybody’s; what institution reaches all?—the public schools.” Under the leadership of Mrs. Mary H. Hunt they have secured laws requiring scientific temperance instruction in the public school system of thirty States.

To the inane excuse of the seller that he might as well do it since somebody would, the quick and practical reply was, “To be sure; but suppose the people could be persuaded not to let anybody sell? why, then that would be God’s answer to our crusade prayers.” So they began with petitions to municipalities, to legislatures, and to Congress, laboriously gathering up, doubtless, not fewer than ten million names in the great aggregate, and through fourteen years. Thus the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union stands as the strongest bulwark of Prohibition, State and national, by constitutional amendment and by statute. Meanwhile, it was inevitable that their motherly hearts should devise other methods for the protection of their homes. Knowing the terrors and the blessings of inheritance, they set about the systematic study of heredity, founding a journal for that purpose. Learning the relation of diet to the drink habit, they arranged to study hygiene also; desiring children to know that the Bible is on the side of total abstinence, they induced the International Sunday School Convention to prepare a plan for lessons on this subject; perceiving the limitless power of the Press, they did their best to subsidize it by sending out their bulletins of temperance facts and news items, thick as the leaves of Vallambrosa, and incorporated a publishing company of women.

It is curious to watch the development of the women who entered the saloons in 1874 as a gentle, well-dressed, and altogether peaceable mob. They have become an army, drilled and disciplined. They have a method of organization, the simplest yet the most substantial known to temperance annals. It is the same for the smallest local union as for the national society with its ten thousand auxiliaries. Committees have been abolished, except the executive, made up of the general officers, and “superintendencies” substituted, making each woman responsible for a single line of work in the local, State, and national society. This puts a premium upon personality, develops a negative into a positive with the least loss of time, and increases beyond all computation the aggregate of work accomplished. Women with specialties have thus been multiplied by tens of thousands, and the temperance reform introduced into strongholds of power hitherto neglected or unthought of. Is an exposition to be held, or a State or county fair? there is a woman in the locality who knows that it is her business to see that the W. C. T. U. has an attractive booth with temperance literature and temperance drinks; and that, besides all this, it is her duty to secure laws and by-laws requiring the teetotal absence of intoxicants from grounds and buildings. Is there an institution for the dependent or delinquent classes? there is a woman in the locality who knows that it is her duty to see that temperance literature is circulated, temperance talking and singing done, and that flowers with appropriate sentiments attached are sent to the inmates by young ladies banded for that purpose. Is there a convocation of ministers, doctors, teachers, editors, voters, or any other class of opinion-manufacturers announced to meet in any town or city? there is a woman thereabouts who knows it is her business to secure, through some one of the delegates to these influential gatherings, a resolution favoring the temperance movement and pledging it support along the line of work then and there represented. Is there a legislature anywhere about to meet, or is Congress in session? there is a woman near at hand who knows it is her business to make the air heavy with the white, hovering wings of prohibition for the better protection of women and girls, for the preventing of the sale of tobacco to minors, for the enforcement of the Sabbath or for the enfranchisement of women. Thus have the manifold relationships of the mighty temperance movement been studied out by women in the training-school afforded by the real work and daily object-lessons of the W. C. T. U. Its aim is everywhere to bring women and temperance in contact with the problem of humanity’s heart-break and sin, to protect the home by prohibiting the saloon; and to police the State with men and women voters committed to the enforcement of righteous law. The women saw, as years passed on, that not one, but three curses were pronounced upon their sons by the nineteenth century civilization; the curse of the narcotic poisons, alcohol and nicotine; the curse of gambling; the curse of social sin, deadlier than all; and that these three are part and parcel of each other. And so, “distinct like the billows, but one like the sea,” is their unwearied warfare against each and all. They have learned, by the logic of defeat, that the mother-heart must be enthroned in all places of power before its edicts will be heeded. For this reason they have been educated up to the level of the equal suffrage movement. For the first time in history the women of the South have clasped hands with their Northern sisters in faith and fealty wearing the white ribbon emblem of patriotism, purity and peace, and inscribing on their banners the motto of the organized crusade, “For God and Home and Native Land.”

“No sectarianism in religion,” “no sectionalism in politics,” “no sex in citizenship,”—these are the battle cries of this relentless but peaceful warfare. We believe that woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, and that she will enter every place on the round earth. We believe in prohibition by law, prohibition by politics, and prohibition by woman’s ballot. After ten years’ experience, the women of the crusade became convinced that until the people of this country divide at the ballot box, on the foregoing issue, America can never be nationally delivered from the dram-shop. They therefore publicly announced their devotion to the Prohibition party, and promised to lend it their influence, which, with the exception of a very small minority, they have since most sedulously done. Since then they have not ceased beseeching voters to cast their ballots first of all to help elect an issue rather than a man. For this they have been vilified as if it were a crime; but they have gone on their way kindly as sunshine, steadfast as gravitation, and persistent as a hero’s faith. While their enemy has brewed beer, they have brewed public opinion; while he distilled whisky, they distilled sentiment; while he rectified spirits, they rectified the spirit that is in man. They have had good words of cheer alike for North and South, for Catholic and Protestant, for home and foreign born, for white and black, but gave words of criticism for the liquor traffic and the parties that it dominates as its servants and allies.

While the specific aims of the white ribbon women everywhere are directed against the manufacture, sale, and use of alcoholic beverages, it is sufficiently apparent that the indirect line of their progress is, perhaps, equally rapid, and involves social, governmental and ecclesiastical equality between women and men. By this is meant such financial independence on the part of women as will enable them to hold men to the same high standards of personal purity in the habitudes of life as they have required of women such a participation in the affairs of government as shall renovate politics and make home questions the paramount issue of the State, and such equality in all church relations as shall fulfill the gospel declaration, “There is neither male nor female, but ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

The cultivation of specialties, and the development of esprit de corps among women, all predict the day, when, through this might-conserving force of motherhood introduced into every department of human activity, the common weal shall be the individual care; war shall rank among the lost arts; nationality shall mean what Edward Bellamy’s wonderful book, entitled “Looking Backward,” sets before us as the fulfillment of man’s highest earthly dream; and Brotherhood shall become the talismanic word and realized estate of all humanity.

In concluding this portion of my article I cannot better express my view of what we are, and what we may be, than by the following quotation from my address before the Woman’s Congress at its meeting in Des Moines, Ia., 1885:

Humanly speaking, such success as we have attained has resulted from the following policy and methods:

1. The simplicity and unity of the organization. The local union is a miniature of the national, having similar officiary and plan of work. It is a military company carefully mustered, officered, and drilled. The county union is but an aggregation of the locals and the district of the counties, while each State is a regiment, and the national itself is womanhood’s “Grand Army of the Republic.”

2. Individual responsibility is everywhere urged. “Committees are obsolete to us, and each distinct line of work has one person, called a superintendent, who is responsible for its success in the local, and another in the State, and a third in the National union. She may secure such lieutenants as she likes, but the union looks to her for results, and holds her accountable for failures.

3. The quick and cordial recognition of talent is another secret of W. C. T. U. success. Women, young or old, who can speak, write, conduct meetings, organize, keep accounts, interest children, talk with the drinking man, get up entertainments, or carry flowers to the sick or imprisoned, are all pressed into the service. There has been also in our work an immense amount of digging in the earth to find one’s own buried talent, to rub off the rust and to put it out at interest. Perhaps that is, after all, its most significant feature, considered as a movement.

4. Subordination of the financial phase has helped, not hindered us. Lack of funds has not barred out even the poorest from our sisterhood. A penny per week is our basis of membership; of which a fraction goes to the State, and ten cents to the National W. C. T. U. Money has been, and I hope may be, a consideration altogether secondary. Of wealth we have had incomputable stores; indeed, I question if America has a richer corporation to-day than ours; wealth of faith, of enthusiasm, of experience, of brain, of speech, of common sense—this is a capital stock that can never depreciate, needs no insurance, requires no combination lock or bonded custodian, and puts us under no temptation to tack our course or trim our sails.

5. Nothing has helped us more than the entire freedom of our society from the influence or dictation of capitalists, politicians, or corporations of any sort whatever. This cannot be too strongly emphasized as one of the best elements of power. Indeed, it may be truly said that this vast and systematic work has been in no wise guided, molded, or controlled by men. “It has not even occurred to them to offer advice until within a year, and to accept advise has never occurred to us, and I hope never will. While a great many noble men are ‘honorary members,’ and in one or two sporadic instances men have acted temporarily as presidents of local unions at the South, I am confident our grand constituency of temperance brothers rejoice almost as much as we do in the fact that we women have from the beginning gone our own gait and acted according to our own sweet will. They would bear witness, I am sure, to the fact that we have never done this flippantly, or in a spirit of bravado, but with great seriousness, asking the help of God. I can say personally what I believe our leaders would also state as their experience, that so strongly do good men seem to be impressed that the call to Christian women in the Crusade was of God, and not of man, that in the eleven years of my almost uninterrupted connection with the National W. C. T. U. I have hardly received a letter of advice or a verbal exhortation from minister or layman, and I would mildly but firmly say that I have not sought their counsel.” The hierarchies of the land will be ransacked in vain for the letterheads of the W. C. T. U. We have sought, it is true, the help of almost every influential society in the nation, both religious and secular; we have realized how greatly this help was needed by us, and grandly has it been accorded; but what we asked for was an indorsement of plans already made and work already done. Thus may we always be a society “of the women, by the women,” but for humanity.

6. The freedom from red-tape and the keeping out of ruts is another element of power. We practice a certain amount of parliamentary usage, and strongly urge the study of it as a part of the routine of local unions. We have good, strong “constitutions,” and by-laws to match; blanks for reports; rolls for membership; pledges in various styles of art; badges, ribbons, and banners, and hand-books of our work, are all to be had at “national headquarters,” but we will not come under a yoke of bondage to the paraphernalia of the movement. We are always moving on. “Time cannot dull nor custom stale our infinite variety.” We are exceedingly apt to break out in a new phase. Here we lop off an old department, and there we add two new ones. Our “new departures” are frequent and oftentimes most unexpected. Indeed, we exhibit the characteristics of an army on the march rather than an army in camp or hospital.

The marked esprit de corps is to be included among the secrets of success. The W. C. T. U. has invented a phrase to express this, and it is “comradeship among women.” So generous and so cherished has this comradeship become that ours is often called a “mutual admiration society.” We believe in each other, stand by each other, and have plenty of emulation without envy. Sometimes a State or an individual says to another, “The laurels of Miltiades will not suffer me to sleep;” but there is no staying awake to belittle success; we do not detract from any worker’s rightful meed of praise. So much for the “hidings of power” in the W. C. T. U.

There are two indirect results of this organized work among women, concerning which I wish to speak.

First. It is a strong nationalizing influence. Its method and spirit differ very little, whether you study them on the border of Puget Sound or the Gulf of Mexico. In San Francisco and Baltimore white ribbon women speak the same vernacular, tell of their gospel meetings and petitions, discuss the Union Signal editorials, and wonder “what will be the action of our next annual convention.”

Almost all other groups of women workers that dot the continent are circumscribed by denominational lines, and act largely under the advice of ecclesiastical leaders. The W. C. T. U. feels no such limitation. North and South are strictly separate in the women’s missionary work of the churches, but Mississippi and Maine, Texas and Oregon, Massachusetts and Georgia, sit side by side around the yearly camp-fires of the W. C. T. U. The Southern women have learned to love us of the North, and our hearts are true to them; while to us all who fight in peaceful ranks unbroken, “For God and Home and Native Land,” the Nation is a sacred name.

Second. Our W. C. T. U. is a school, not founded in that thought or for that purpose, but sure to fit us for the sacred duties of patriots in the realm that lies just beyond the horizon of the coming century.

Here we try our wings that yonder our flight may be strong and steady. Here we prove our capacity for great deeds; there we shall perform them. Here we make our experience and pass our novitiate that yonder we may calmly take our places and prove to the world that what is needed most was “two heads in counsel” as well as “two beside the hearth.” When that day comes the nation shall no longer miss, as now, the influence of half its wisdom more than half its purity, and nearly all its gentleness, in courts of justice and halls of legislation. Then shall one code of morals—and that the highest—govern both men and women; then shall the Sabbath be respected, the rights of the poor be recognized, the liquor traffic banished, and the home protected from all its foes.

Born of such a visitation of God’s spirit as the world has not known since tongues of fire sat upon the wondering group at Pentecost, cradled in a faith high as the hope of a saint, and deep as the depths of a drunkard’s despair, and baptized in the beauty of holiness, the Crusade determined the ultimate goal of its teachable child, the W. C. T. U., which has one steadfast aim, and that none other than the regnancy of Christ, not in form but in fact; not in substance but in essence; not ecclesiastically, but truly in the hearts of men. To this end its methods are varied, changing, manifold; but its unwavering faith these words express: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”

The Woman’s National Christian Temperance Union has a publishing house in Chicago that in 1889 sent out 130,000,000 pages of temperance literature; employs 146 men and women, mostly women; pays a dividend of seven per cent. on money invested; is the proprietor of its own presses and of its machinery, including an electrotyping department. It publishes the Union Signal, organ of the World’s and National W. C. T. U., with a weekly circulation of 85,000 copies; also four other papers for the young people, children, and Germans; and has connected with it a large job office for general printing. 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.[^[219]]

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 departments 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 “section,” 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 stepping-stone, 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 physically, 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 and sick of armies. The Red Cross means, then, the people’s help for suffering through military necessities (a help hitherto mainly ignored), and it is the result and the direct outgrowth of an international treaty, entered into by the civilized nations of the world for the mitigation of the sufferings from war, by first eliminating from its code all needless cruelties and old-time barbarities; and, secondly, by rendering neutral and exempt from capture all disabled soldiers requiring aid, all appliances, all material, and all personnel designed for them.

It is to be borne in mind, and not for an instant lost sight of, that while other methods leading up to these points have been always the outgrowth of the grandest human sentiments of mankind, they still remained sentiments, usually individual, and, beyond this, binding on no one; or, if organized for the moment, were lost as soon; while the Red Cross, embodying all these humanities, organizes and pledges the entire world, through its governments, to the one purpose and effort, and binds the whole by the stern sacredness of an international treaty, which no government will ever be found reckless and indecent enough to violate. The non-fellowship of the world would follow such an act. Indeed, no nation has a treaty it would hold so sacred in time of need.

Following a preliminary conference of 1863, a convention, composed of delegates appointed by and representing the heads of all the governments of the world, was held at Geneva, Switzerland, for the purpose of considering some method for mitigating the horrors of war, if wars must be.

And however disdainfully we at the present moment may curl our lips over the uselessness of such a consideration in the light of better methods, however scorn every thought of any effort in behalf of the woes of those who consent to deluge the world in blood, it is to be remembered that we ourselves at that moment were not altogether exempt from the perplexing problem of war, and did not, as now, present to the world the grand and beautiful “Christian example” of arbitration and peace, of which we are at present the most advisory and conspicuous of advocates. Indeed, whoever will take down from the shelves one of the volumes of decisions of our then Minister of State, Mr. Seward, will find there recorded that the reason given for the United States having declined official representation in the Convention of Geneva was not on the ground of high moral elevation, advanced views and consequent disapproval, but rather in this wise, that we were ourselves in the midst of a cruel and relentless war, which did not admit of time for considerations of that kind. This decision was the first block over which a woman ungracefully stumbled, when, thirteen years later, an attempt was made to officially call the attention of our government to the knowledge even of the existence of such a treaty among other nations.

This convention, which occupied several days, discussed as never before the great question of an international agreement for the neutralizing of certain departments of all fields of battle, and the protection of all the personnel and material designed for them.

The establishment, as it were, of a goal in the midst of the most relentless field of animosity and strife, where those who could no longer run could touch and be safe; as if, in the midst of the wildest storm at sea, a haven could be established in mid-ocean where the disabled ships might find a harbor and rest.

The councils of this convention resulted in the formulation of a code of ten articles, which, upon solemn acceptance by the heads of each government, became the treaty of Geneva. These articles were as follows:

Article 1. Ambulances (field hospitals) and military hospitals shall be acknowledged to be neutral, and as such shall be protected and respected by belligerents so long as any sick or wounded may be therein. Such neutrality shall cease if the ambulances or hospitals should be held by a military force.

Article 2. Persons employed in hospitals and ambulances, comprising the staff for superintendence, medical service, administration, transport of wounded, as well as chaplains, shall participate in the benefit of neutrality while so employed, and so long as there remain any to bring in or to succor.

Article 3. The persons designated in the preceding article may, even after occupation by the enemy, continue to fulfill their duties in the hospital or ambulance which they may have, or may withdraw in order to regain the corps to which they belong. Under such circumstances, when the persons shall cease from their functions, they shall be delivered by the occupying army to the outposts of the enemy. They shall have specially the right of sending a representative to the headquarters of their respective armies.

Article 4. As the equipment of military hospitals remains subject to the laws of war, persons attached to such hospitals cannot, on withdrawing, carry away any articles but such as are their private property. Under the same circumstances an ambulance shall, on the contrary, retain its equipment.

Article 5. Inhabitants of the country who may bring help to the wounded shall be respected and shall remain free. The generals of the belligerent powers shall make it their care to inform the inhabitants of the appeal addressed to their humanity, and of the neutrality which will be the consequence of it. Any wounded man, entertained and taken care of in a house, shall be considered as a protection thereto. Any inhabitant, who shall have entertained wounded men in his house, shall be exempted from the quartering of troops as well as from a part of the contributions of war which may be imposed.

Article 6. Wounded or sick soldiers shall be entertained and taken care of to whatever nation they may belong. Commanders-in-chief shall have the power to deliver immediately to the outposts of the enemy soldiers who have been wounded in an engagement, when circumstances permit this to be done, and with the consent of both parties. Those who are recognized, after they are healed, as incapable of serving, shall be sent back to their country. The others may also be sent back on condition of not again bearing arms during the continuance of the war. Evacuations, together with the persons under whose directions they take place, shall be protected by an absolute neutrality.

Article 7. A distinctive and uniform flag shall be adopted for hospitals, ambulances, and evacuations. It must on every occasion be accompanied by the national flag. An arm badge [brassard] shall also be allowed for individuals neutralized, but the delivery thereof shall be left to military authority. The flag and arm badge shall bear a red cross on a white ground.

Article 8. The details of execution of the present convention shall be regulated by the commanders-in-chief of belligerent armies, according to the instructions of their respective government and in conformity with the general principles laid down in this convention.

Article 9. The high contracting powers have agreed to communicate the present convention to those governments which have not found it convenient to send plenipotentiaries to the international convention at Geneva, with an invitation to accede thereto; the protocol is, for that purpose, left open.

Article 10. The present convention shall be ratified, and the ratification shall be exchanged at Berne, in four months, or sooner if possible.

The nations adopting the Treaty are:

France, September 22, 1864.

Belgium, October 14, 1864.

Italy, December 4, 1864.

Sweden and Norway, Dec. 13, 1864.

Baden, December 16, 1864.

Great Britain, February 18, 1865.

Prussia, June 22, 1865.

Wurtemberg, June 2, 1866.

Bavaria, June 30, 1866.

Portugal, August 9, 1866.

Russia, May 22, 1867.

Roumania, November 30, 1874.

San Salvador, December 30, 1874.

Servia, March 24, 1876.

Chili, November 15, 1879

Peru, April 22, 1880.

Bulgaria, March 1, 1884.

Luxembourg, October 5, 1888.

Switzerland, October 1, 1864.

Netherlands, November 29, 1864.

Spain, December 5, 1864.

Denmark, December 15, 1864.

Greece, January 17, 1865.

Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Mar. 9, 1865.

Turkey, July 5, 1865.

Hesse Darmstadt, June 22, 1866.

Austria, July 21, 1866.

Saxony, October 25, 1866.

Pontifical States, May 9, 1868.

Persia, December 5, 1874.

Montenegro, November 29, 1875.

Bolivia, October 16, 1879.

Argentine Republic, Nov. 25, 1879.

United States, March 1, 1882.

Japan, June 5, 1886.

The United States of America was the thirty-second in order. This treaty has changed not only the methods of procedure of the medical and hospital departments of all armies, but their insignia, flags, etc. There is but one military hospital flag in the world to-day. The commander who knows his own, knows that of the enemy, and he breaks an international treaty if he knowingly turns even a gun or a stray shot upon it. The convoy of prisoners under escort bearing that sign is safe; no officer can fire upon that unarmed and defenseless body of men by “mistake”; no “mistake” can be made nor pretend to be made. No captured men can longer suffer for lack of food; the world is pledged to supply this want, and the way is opened to do it. No fields nor hospitals can lack attendance, nursing, nor the necessaries of life; to this relief the way is opened. No wounded men can lie unattended upon a field, and no attendant upon them can be captured. No distinction can be made in the care of the sick and wounded. By the articles of the treaty, all are non-combatants, all neutrals, and hence one common relation for all.

At the conclusion of the convention, the body of gentlemen of Switzerland who had convened it were designated by choice of the governments as the international head by whom all general intercourse between nations upon the subject of war-relief should be directed, and through whom all communications should be made. This is the “International Committee of Geneva.”

The first action of a country after the adoption of the treaty, is to form a National Society, or committee, through which the International Committee may communicate with the government of that country. To this National Society is committed the care of all communications from the International Committee to the government of a country, whether relating to the work of war relief in other nations, or to their methods of advancement, e.g. to observe if the provisions of the treaty are duly regarded by its military departments; if the suitable orders are given for the spread of such knowledge among the troops at the field; if the appropriate insignia is worn by them; the arrangement for attendance upon international conferences in which the government is represented, and reports to foreign powers on such occasions. Naturally, but one National Society or body of administration in a country is, or can be, recognized, either by the government at home, or the international authorities abroad, on the same principle that but one Department of War, or State, could be recognized. To this body is submitted the direction of such aid as shall be rendered by its country for the relief of suffering from the calamities of war in other countries, such aid always passing through the neutral hands of the “International Committee” for application; thus wisely avoiding national jealousies. The best inventions and most improved machinery and methods for the convenient handling, nursing, and treatment of disabled persons from whatever cause, in either military or civil life, for the last twenty-five years, are directly traceable to the thought and endeavors of the Red Cross, through its wise encouragement thereof, and the necessities revealed upon the fields of war which it sought to relieve.

To turn now to the little part taken by our government and people in this world-wide humanity, we shall find ourselves subjects for the adage of the “short horse soon curried.” As previously remarked, it was thirteen years, namely, from 1863 to 1877, before the attention of our government was awakened to the existence of such a treaty among nations, and its adhesion seriously recommended. Our great commissions, sanitary and Christian, had died and passed into history, and it was not realized that their embalmed memory would not be sufficient for all future exigencies,—old Egypt, relying upon its catacombs, great, but silent and past! It required five other years, namely, from 1877 to 1882, to bring the government to a clear comprehension of the subject, when, by a unanimous vote of both Houses of Congress, the Treaty of Geneva of 1864 was adopted and became a law, immediately receiving the signature of President Arthur, fully carrying out the decision of his lamented predecessor, Garfield, who had recommended it in his first message to Congress. The treaty was next sent to the Congress of Berne, Switzerland, which, by consent of all governments, is made the ratifying power for the treaties of the nations as they adhere. When ratified, it was proclaimed by the President of the United States, and directions duly given to the departments of the government to take the necessary steps for conforming to its provisions.

It is this which has changed all military hospital flags in our country to a red cross on a white ground; the same for ambulances, supplies, and attendants, and has instituted this insignia throughout the medical departments of the regular army, and gives the present impetus to the movement of the National Guard in that direction as well. Previous to the actual adoption of the treaty by the United States, but in view of it, our National Society had been founded at the instance of President Garfield, and the honor of its presidency unanimously tendered to him. This courtesy was declined by him in favor of its present president, who, without change of original officers, and with their concurrence, has conducted the affairs of the society from that time, July, 1881. In forming the constitution of the National Society of the United States, it was decided by the framers, in view of our liability to great national calamities, and non-liability to the exigencies of war, to ask of the ratifying powers of the treaty to accept the National Society of America, with power to extend its scope to the relief of great national calamities other than war. This was granted, constituting the only national society under the treaty having such privilege, and known among other nations as the “American Amendment to the Red Cross.” It is under this provision, or grant, alone, that the work of the Red Cross in national calamities in this country during the last nine years has been done. Within that time it has afforded relief at twelve fields of national distress. And while these scenes of active labor constitute mainly all that appears to the public eye as the work of the society, they are in reality the smaller and by far the less difficult and painstaking. The over-laden desks, translations from all languages, international correspondence, advices sought, and decisions to be wisely and delicately rendered, tell a different tale to the thought-burdened, weary officers at Red Cross headquarters.

In the early days, a few societies were allowed (but never invited) to form as auxiliaries, more for the purpose of familiarizing the people with the subject than for aid really expected; for after all, it is the entire people whom the Red Cross is designed to serve; they have direct and individual access to it; it is their servant at the moment of woe, which falls on all alike. With a National Red Cross on a field, the way is open to all; no special avenues are needed; and the capable personages as individual aids the country over, which it is constantly gathering to itself, ready for instant response to any call, leave no lack of help even for a day. However well auxiliary societies might do, and some have done grandly, it was the people at large, over the entire country, who solicited the Red Cross to become the almoner of their bounties in Johnstown. The great manufacturing companies which asked of it to put their tens of thousands of dollars worth of new furniture into the homes which had not one article left, were not Red Cross societies. The great lumber companies, shipping the material thousands of miles to construct new homes almost before the old ones had reached the bottom of the stream which bore them away, were not Red Cross societies nor ever sought to be. They wished to serve humanity, wanted their gifts to reach the needy in some direct and practical way, and chose their avenue. In this same spirit of self-forgetfulness, the Red Cross accepted and applied, faithfully we know, and acceptably we hope, with the only desire, under heaven, of safely and wisely transmitting those substantial tokens of sympathy and love from a pitying world to a homeless, bereaved, and terror-stricken people as a present help in time of trouble. It went to them in the same spirit, with the same regulations, and under the same discipline as if those thousands had fallen in human rather than elemental conflict. It found the military at the field, and reported for duty the same as at a field of battle. The relations thus at once established were incalculable in their benefits. Every courtesy from headquarters was extended; as by right, not favor; all passes, countersigns, and facilities of movement of any kind were given without asking. The character of the work was from the first understood to be in accord with the government and discipline of the field, and not a separate dynasty set up in its individual or ambitious and unskilled effort, to be guarded against, lest it commit some egotistical indiscretion which could not be tolerated. The same advantages over unrecognized aid were realized here as are enjoyed by the Red Cross on a field of battle. The work of the Red Cross in this country has thus far been rather a test than otherwise of its efficiency, usefulness, and possibilities; and so fully has it met, and even surpassed, all early expectations, that any limited description like the present seems rather an annoyance, leaving the subject where its best interests should commence; and although in our land we may never have need of its protecting arm on the fields of human warfare, it is enough for us to know that we have needed it as no words can tell. Only the low lonely graves, the desolate homes speak more eloquently than words.