Our Junior Red Cross will bring to you opportunities of service to your community and to other communities all over the world and guide your service with high and religious ideals. It will teach you how to save in order that suffering children elsewhere may have a chance to live. It will teach you how to prepare some of the supplies which wounded soldiers and homeless families lack. It will send to you through the Red Cross Bulletins the thrilling stories of relief and rescue. And best of all, more perfectly than through any of your other school lessons, you will learn by doing those kind things under your teacher’s direction to be future good citizens of this great country which we all love.
And I commend to all school teachers in the country the simple plan which the American Red Cross has worked out to provide for your coöperation, knowing as I do that school children will give their best service under the direct guidance and instruction of their teachers. Is not this perhaps the chance for which you have been looking to give your time and efforts in some measure to meet our national needs?
(Signed) Woodrow Wilson,
President.
September 15, 1917.
How do you suppose the school children of the United States felt when they read this letter from the President?
It is a wonderful letter. It does not read like a letter from a great man to little children.
It is different from most of the letters which grown people write to children, for the President writes to the children asking for their help, just as if they were grown up.
Indeed, when the grown people read the letter they wished that they could be school children again, because there was no Junior Red Cross when they were young, and they had to wait to grew up before they could help the Red Cross do golden deeds.
You see, when they were young, everybody thought, “When the children are grown up they will help us.” Then they waited for them to grow.