A time to keep silence, and a time to speak. Ecclesiastes.
I am reminded of what Theodore Parker used to say so piteously of himself—‘I can never talk but I talk too much.’
Clara Barton.
The following is an excerpt from a letter under date of Nov. 9, 1909:
THE STRICTEST SILENCE
“There has never been an occasion, nor a time, when I have so missed my old time privilege of speaking in behalf of a friend. I never before have so fully realized what a pleasure that privilege had been to me through half a century. It is a change to me, to come to feel that my only help must lie in the strictest silence; an expressed wish for any one would be fatal; not perhaps with President Taft personally, for I am of small importance to him, if he even knows me, but from the advice he would be sure to receive from those he does know. So I wait and hope....”
Excerpts from letter written under date of Dec. 14, 1909:
OVER THE MEXICAN LINE
May 31st, the date runs, and I know I never answered that letter, for I never in my life could have answered a letter like that, but still more, I never even tried to. Discouraged at the onset and gave up the encounter. A glimpse at the topics it handled were so far beyond any reply from the “likes o’ me.” “Great services unnoticed”—“Future remembrances when others are forgotten”—“To be told in story and sung in other lands”—poor little me who has never seen the present Ruler of her own country!
“Then let us hope, and although you may never escort me over the Mexican line, I have never lost sight of the darkness of the day when I proposed that you should.”