With your usual sagacity you timed your letter just to the moment. It was Christmas Eve, five o’clock, cold as Greenland. I had sent my assistants home the day before to enjoy a few days of leisure with their friends. I sat writing at the farthest end of my large room, from which only a range of white curtains separated and enclosed me in my little “counting-room.” The postman’s rap at the door caused me to look up, and through the curtains I could discern a singular glimmer of lights like stars, but moving from point to point, as if the firmament were not satisfied with the arrangement of its luminaries, and sought the opportunity to rearrange. Startled at first, I rose from my seat to rush out, but suddenly remembering the evening and the occasion it occurred to me that my presence at that especial instant might not be desirable and I reseated. After a minute more of shifting and fluttering, my little domestic Emily appeared between the curtains, “Here are two letters, and will you please to walk out.” The letters were from you and Fannie Atwater, and the walking out revealed a Christmas tree in full blaze all for myself. It had been arranged and left by my good ladies before they had departed, with instructions to the domestics to produce and light it at five o’clock in the evening. It abounded in fruit and flowers and mosses, and some little nice things which their good hearts had dictated for my comfort. And so, in the delicate shadows falling like tracery upon the snow which spread beneath its branches, I sat me down and read your dear, welcome letter. Although you did not intend a word of sentiment in it, nor a touching sentence, I could not truly say that my hand did not sometimes brush across my eyes as I read; it was so like old times to receive a whole letter from you, all from you, and all for me. I knew I did not deserve it. I have been so remiss in writing, and I don’t know how it happens. I can only account for it on your own grounds, that when we are occupied and feel that there is something to say there is no time to say it, and when unoccupied we become listless and there seems to be nothing to say. I am always disgusted at this state of things in the human economy, but I can neither reconstruct nor mend it. It is a little more than a week since I posted a long letter to Sally all about myself, selfish as could be, and I must not inflict a similar chapter on you, as you will be compelled to go over that when it arrives. I am rejoiced to hear from yourself that you are better than when I left.

The greatest obstacle I meet in the way of a full restoration of strength is the utter inability to get sleep enough; an average of five hours is the maximum. If I by chance succeed in getting a half-hour beyond this one night, I have it “docked off” the next. When I was stronger this would do me; I could run my machine at full speed all day upon this power, and did it for years; but now the belts are slack and the wheels slip and I lose so much power that my pond is all drawn off. I should be so glad if I could adopt your plan of a nap in the afternoon, but I cannot get it unless by mere accident once in a great while. But I, too, am so much better than when we last saw each other that I feel I should never mention the subject of health and strength again while they are as good as at present.

I thank you for mentioning to me Mrs. Livermore’s lectures. I know she was a favorite in Worcester; you know she was always a favorite with me, although I never met her. Madame de Gasparin’s appeal for peace has found a warm and strong advocate in Mrs. Howe. I hope some good may come of it. All that you say upon the subject is true, and it is no small amount of “picking up” that women have to do in consequence of these reckless fellows; from boyhood to manhood and from manhood to age, it is all the same. I can never see a poor mutilated wreck blown to pieces with powder and lead without wondering if visions of such an end ever flitted before his mother’s mind when she washed and dressed her fair-skinned baby. Woman should certainly have some voice in the matter of war, either affirmative or negative, and the fact that she has not this should not be made the ground on which to deprive her of other privileges. She shan’t say there will be no war, and she shan’t take any part in it when there is one, and because she doesn’t take part in war she mustn’t vote, and because she can’t vote she has no voice in her government, and because she has no voice in her government she isn’t a citizen, and because she isn’t a citizen she has no rights, and because she has no rights she must submit to wrongs, and because she submits to wrongs she isn’t anybody. What does she know about war? Because she doesn’t know anything about it, she mustn’t say or do anything about it. “Three blind mice—cut off their heads with a carving knife—three blind mice.”

I pray for peace, and all that may promote it, and if there be a power on earth which can right the wrongs for which nations go to war, I pray that it may be made manifest, but when I think I fear. How supreme an international court must it have been to be able to induce the Southerners to liberate their slaves or to convince them that the “mudsills” and “greasy mechanics” and “horned Yankees” were a people entitled to sufficient respect to be treated on fair international ground! And how much legislation would it have taken to convince the world what a worthless bubble of assumption was France, so utterly unworthy the leadership she assumed, and to have laid her in all respects so open before the world that it should with one voice repudiate her leadership and refuse to follow her as heretofore in frivolity, immorality, folly, fashion, vice, and crime! She seems to me to have been only one great balloon, and now that the bayonets and bombs have pierced it full of holes it sends out tens of thousands of little balloons in its collapse. It is bad for France, but I am not certain but the lesson will be beneficial to the rest of the world. I don’t know if we may always trust councils—we had one at Rome not half a year ago that voted a dogma which turned backward the progress of enlightened thought two centuries, and how great a power of legislation would have been required to overthrow that decision! But I suspect the fear of Victor Emmanuel’s bayonets have seriously interfered with it. Oh, I don’t know; it is such a mystery, and mankind the greatest mystery of all! I shall never get it right in this world, whatever may happen in the one that sets this right. But how prosy I am—and it all comes of that five hours’ sleep. You know Beecher says, “If the preacher doesn’t sleep, his hearers will.” I hope you reserved the reading of this till you were ready for your nap.

Soon after the fall of Paris, Miss Barton determined to make her way thither, but before leaving Strassburg she placed before the authorities of that city her views of the kind of organization which should be permanently established there for the relief of those who were suffering by reason of the war. That letter shows how thoroughly she understood the problem of administering relief without pauperizing the beneficiaries:

Monsieur Bergmann
Membre du Comité de Secours Strasbourgeois
Monsieur:

Your very courteous request, that I would present something of my ideas in reference to the subject of employment for the poor of your stricken city, demands, perhaps, that I explain, first, the reason and origin of my own presence here. A long and familiar acquaintance with the calamities of war led me to direct my steps to the gates of your besieged city the first day that it was possible to enter, viz., September 29th. Not as a matter of curiosity, for bombarded cities had long ceased to possess any novelty for me, but to ascertain if there were any service I could render.

My earliest visit was to your civil hospital, and its wards of wounded women, which were indeed a novelty in the history of the world. Seeing no better way of serving them, I took a written account of each woman at her bedside, what she had suffered, and what she had lost, and, carrying the sad record, placed it personally in the hand of Her Royal Highness, the Grand Duchess of Baden, which, I trust, contributed a little toward directing to your afflicted city the immediate and active sympathy of that Court and Capital.

This accomplished, I returned with my present excellent and efficient assistant, Miss Zimmermann, to learn what further could be done. A few days’ observation convinced me that, in the majority of instances, the actual loss of property which had been sustained by the class of persons who came to demand charity was of less real importance to them than the total loss of their customary remunerative occupation; that while the first merely reduced them to want, the latter would make of them permanent beggars and vagrants, thus doing for their moral, all that the bombardment had done for their physical, condition.

With the somewhat forlorn hope of being able to arrest in a few individual instances these disastrous consequences, I at once commenced the system of work-giving, in which occupation you have found me, and concerning which you have done me the honor to ask some opinions and recommendations.