Can you wonder that I ask a bridle track? And that some other country might look inviting to me?
Mr. Young, this unhappy letter is a poor return to make for your friendly courtesy, but so long my dark thoughts have turned to you that I cannot find myself with the privilege of communicating with you, without expressing them. I cannot think where I have found the courage to do it, but I have.
I know how unwise a thing it seems, but if the pressure is too great the bands may break; that may be my case, and fearing that my better judgment might bid me put these sheets in the fire—I send them without once glancing over. You need not forget, but kindly remember, rather, that they are the wail of an aching heart and that is all. Nature has provided a sure and final rest for all the heartaches that mortals are called to endure.
If you are in the East again, and I am here, I pray you to come to me.
Receive again my thanks and permit me to remain,
Your friend
Clara Barton
In conversation she said: “The Government which I thought I loved, and loyally tried to serve, has shut every door in my face and stared at me insultingly through its windows. What wonder I want to leave?”
In another conversation, referring to the abandonment of her dream of going to Mexico, she said: “There were but two countries where the Red Cross did not exist, China and Mexico. I did not want to go to China, but did want to go to Mexico, and fully intended to go. My friends finally dissuaded me and perhaps it was for the best, for if I had gone I probably would not have been alive now.”
From this distance it is possible to view the whole situation in perspective. The present author has no hesitation in saying that the time had come for Clara Barton to retire from the active work of the administration of the American Red Cross. The organization had grown well beyond the ability of any one person to manage it in the way that Clara Barton had managed it so successfully in its earlier years. On her return either from Cuba or St. Petersburg, she ought to have retired, accepting the honorary presidency, and giving over the control and active management to younger people. The author has witnessed in not a few instances the pathetic struggle which goes on in the minds of elderly people on their prospective retirement from positions which have outgrown them. It is a situation nothing less than tragic. A person long identified with an organization comes easily to believe, either that he cannot get on without it, or that it cannot get on without him. Clara Barton had come to believe the latter concerning the American Red Cross. She was mistaken.
There comes a time in the life of almost any organization when, if it is to prosper and enlarge, it must accept new leadership and adapt itself to changed conditions. A woman as sensible as Clara Barton was in most things should have realized this situation and not have permitted herself to be heart-broken by a change as necessary for her as it was for the Red Cross.