This is the principle upon which we have acted. The affording of relief to the victims of great disasters anywhere in the United States, is what the National Red Cross has proceeded to do, and it has confined itself strictly to its privileges, acting only in disasters so great as to be national. It never asks aid; never makes an appeal; it simply makes statements of the real condition of the sufferers, leaving the people free to exercise their own humanity through any medium they may prefer.
In the thirteen years of relief work by the Red Cross in the United States, every dollar and every pound that has been received and distributed by it, has been the free-will offering of the people, given for humanity without solicitation, and dispensed without reward. It has received nothing from the government. No fund has been created for it. No contributions have been made except those to be distributed as relief at its fields. Its officers serve without pay. There is not, nor ever was, a salaried officer in it, and even its headquarters meets its own costs. Among the various appropriations made by Congress for relief of calamities in the past years, as in great river floods, not a dollar so appropriated has ever been applied through the Red Cross, although working on the same field. I name these facts, not by way of complaint, or even comment, but to correct popular errors of belief, which I know you would prefer to have corrected. True to its method, this is simply a statement of the real condition of things, and left to the choice of the people—the Red Cross itself is theirs, created for them, and it is peculiarly their privilege to deal with it as they will.
The following list of calamities with the approximate value of material furnished, as well as money, will give you some appreciation of the services rendered in the cause of humanity by the American National Red Cross. Limit of time and space forbids even an attempt at description of its various fields. I can only name the most important, with estimated values distributed on each:
| Michigan Forest Fires, 1881, material and money | $ 80,000 |
| Mississippi Floods, 1882, money and seeds | 8,000 |
| Mississippi Floods, 1883, material and seeds | 18,500 |
| Mississippi Cyclone, 1883, money | 1,000 |
| Balkan War, 1883, money | 500 |
| Ohio and Mississippi Floods, 1884, feed for stock and people, clothing, tools, house furnishings | 175,000 |
| Texas Famine, 1885, appropriations and contributions on statements made upon personal investigation | 120,000 |
| Charleston Earthquake, 1886, money | 500 |
| Mt Vernon, Ill., Cyclone, 1888, money and supplies | 85,000 |
| Florida Yellow Fever, 1888, physicians and nurse | 15,000 |
| Johnstown Disaster, 1889, money and all kinds of material, buildings and furnishings | 250,000 |
| Russian Famine, 1891-92, mainly food | 125,000 |
| Pomeroy, Iowa, Cyclone, 1893, money and nurses | 2,700 |
| South Carolina Islands, 1893-94, money and all kinds of supplies and materials, tools, seeds, lumber, etc. | 65,000 |
| $946,200 |
Only about one-eighth of the above estimates represent cash; the balance represents material.
In each of these emergencies something has been added to the sum of human happiness, something subtracted from the sum of human woe; the naked have been clothed, the hungry fed, new homes have sprung up from the desolated ruins, crops revived, and activities and business relations resumed. In a neighboring State and its adjacent islands scarcely two hundred miles distant from this, could to-day be found several thousand human beings, living in their homes, enjoying their family lives, following their ordinary avocations, cultivating the ground, who, if asked, would unhesitatingly tell you that but for the help of the Red Cross, they would two years ago have been under the ground they now cultivate.
If the alleviation of human miseries, the saving of life, and the bringing of helplessness and dependence back to methods of self-sustenance and independence are counted among the philanthropic movements of the day, then to us, who have seen so much and worked so long and so hard among it, it would seem that the Red Cross movement has some “significance” in connection with philanthropy.
There remains but one question more. To whom is this movement due? Who instituted it? In what minds did it originate? I wish I could say it was all woman’s work; but the truth compels the fact that this great, humane idea originated with men; the movement was instituted by them. They thought it out, and they wrought it out, and it was only meet and proper that they should, for the terrible evil that made it necessary was theirs as well. Women as a rule are not war-makers. For centuries the caprices of men have plunged the world in strife, covered the earth’s surface with armies, and enriched its soil with the best blood that ever flowed in human veins. It is only right that at length, in the cycle of ages, something should touch man’s heart and set him humbly down to find out some way of mending as much of his mischief as he could. Perhaps he “builded better than he knew,” for in that one effort he touched the spring that sooner or later will mend it all. No grander or truer prophecy has ever been made than uttered in that first convention: “The Red Cross shall teach war to make war upon itself.” It is the most practical and effective peace-maker and civilizer in the known world. It reaches where nothing else can. If proof of this be wanting, study the action of Japan in its late war.
But is man doing this work alone? No—gladly, no! Scarcely had he made his first move, when the jeweled hands of royal woman glistened beside him, and right royally have they borne their part. Glance at the galaxy—the great leader and exemplar of them all, Empress Augusta of Germany, her illustrious daughter, the Grand Duchess of Baden, Eugenia, Empress Frederick, Victoria and Princess Louise of England, Margherita of Italy, Natalia of Servia and the entire Court of Russia, and to-day the present Empress of Germany, and the hard-working Empress of Japan, with her faithful, weary court, even now busy in the hospitals of convalescing Chinese. The various auxiliary societies of women of all the principal Red Cross nations are a pride and a glory to humanity.
These nations have all two important features in their movement, which, thus far, have not been accorded to us. Their governments have instituted laws protecting the insignia and name of the Red Cross from misuse and abuse as trademarks by unscrupulous venders, and appropriation by false societies for dishonest purposes. This lack, and this alone, has thus far rendered general organization in the United States impracticable and unsafe. For seven years the most strenuous efforts at protection have failed; the loss has been to the people in general.