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

Memorial address delivered at the Annual Reunion of the Twenty-first Massachusetts Regiment,—held at Worcester, Mass., August 23, 1921

By Comrade Charles Sumner Young

(Honorary Member of the Regiment)

Comrades of the Twenty-first Massachusetts:

This year is the centenary of the birth of a Daughter of the Regiment. Three score years today that regiment left Worcester for fields of frightful carnage. Regiment and daughter shared in scenes tragic that the Union might live.

At the close of the war the war-service of the regiment ended, but not the public service of the daughter. Continuous thereafter she served the human race. She served in disaster;—in fire and flood and famine and

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
The President, March 4, 1909–March 4, 1913.
President American Red Cross Society, January 8, 1905–March 4, 1913
Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, 1921——.

cyclone and earthquake and yellow-fever and massacre. She served in two succeeding wars. She served in the camp, in the hospital, and on the firing-line. She was on the firing-line in the Civil War, in the Franco-Prussian War, in the Spanish-American War;—she was on the “firing-line” for half a century in the War of Human Woes.

It was fifty years after his passing that the American people fully appreciated the heart and public services of Abraham Lincoln. Long before half a century shall have lapsed into history world-recognized will be the world-services of the Daughter of the Regiment. An oft recital of her deeds is the best tribute that mortal man can pay to her. But there are now of record tributes to her by powerful influences; tributes by eleven American presidents, including ex-President Wilson and President Harding; tributes to her by nine foreign rulers, by eleven foreign nations, by several American States, and Cities, and by more than fifteen hundred thousand American citizens. At the laying of the corner stone of the Red Cross Building, in March, 1915, at Washington, D. C., Acting Secretary of War Henry Breckinridge of her said: “Hers is an immortal American destiny, the greatest an American woman has yet produced.” General John J. Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, in November, 1919, said, “The accomplishments of the Red Cross during the past four years constitute an historical monument to the memory of this noble woman.”