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

by Charles Sumner Young

’Tis not the house and not the dress,

That makes the saint or sinner,

To see the spider sit and spin,

Shut with her walls of silver in,

You would never, never, never guess,

The way she gets her dinner.

Had she entered the spider’s web of the society “remonstrant”; had she accepted the proposed annuity—and proposed honor of Honorary President, and thrown her child to the sharks, Clara Barton’s frail bark would have been towed into port, in peace. Instead, with her never failing courage she took to the life boat, on a stormy sea, and survived the storm to hand over her Red Cross child not to an unworthy, but to her Country and humanity.

LXXXIV

No cynic will find a flaw in what Miss Barton did.

Boston (Mass.) Record.