It appears a pity that, being capable of maintaining her self-control till the end of the crisis, she could not still have maintained it when the need was over. But it was a part of her delicately strung organism to bear any manner of strain while the need lasted, and then to snap. The remarkable fact is, not that she ultimately gave way, but that she endured so long and so much.
Clara Barton was a woman to her finger-tips. Nothing that she saw or suffered ever coarsened her or made her oblivious to the finer things of life. Nothing that came of her association with men—and rough men at that—made her anything less than a woman and a lady. She was distinctly feminine. She had her own way of ignoring any incident occurring in her presence at which she might have been expected to be shocked, but of stickling at any trivial act which implied that she was indifferent to proprieties. Teamsters, with their wagons deep to the hubs in mud, might swear at their mules and she would never hear it; but at night by the camp-fire she could rebuke with a quiet and effective word or look the slightest approach to impropriety of word or deed. She was no prude when she had a duty to perform, and conventionalities meant little to her in the presence of human need. But on her return to home life, she was gentle, ladylike, and a stickler for proprieties.
She had no love for the mannish woman. She was much in the society of men. In many respects she preferred the society of men to that of women. She entered into their joys and experiences appreciatively. But in it all she was distinctly feminine. She was a woman always, a lady always. People who expected to meet in her a big, aggressive female, with a long stride and a heavy voice and a domineering attitude, were amazed. She was a little, undemonstrative gentlewoman of the old school.
One of Clara Barton’s most outstanding qualities was her almost complete disregard of precedent. The fact that a thing had always been done in a given way was evidence to her that it could be done again in that fashion, but was of almost no value to her as proving that that was the best way to do it. She always had faith in the possibility of something better. It irritated her to be told how things always had been done. She knew that a very large proportion of things that have been done since the creation have been blunderingly done, and she was always ready to listen to suggestions of better ways. Having once decided upon a course that defied the tyranny of precedent, she held true to her declaration of independence, and saw her experiment through.
In this she was not reckless or iconoclastic. She simply forbade herself the cheap luxury of a closed mind. If no better way presented itself, she was content with the old way of doing. But she was eager for any new thing that might improve upon the past. Hers was preëminently a forward-looking mind and a soul with face ever toward the sunrise.
CHAPTER XIX
CLARA BARTON’S LAST YEARS
Clara Barton lived for eight years after her retirement from the Red Cross. After her first disappointment and the giving-up of her dream of exile in Mexico, her heart turned to a form of work which already had been much upon her mind. In establishing the American Red Cross, she had determined from the outset that it should be of use in peace as well as in war. The conviction grew upon her that it should be broadened still further so that its activities should not be confined to periods of calamity, but that there should be established under its direction various forms of community service. Particularly did she desire that in every community there should be organizations for home nursing and first aid to the injured.
Before her retirement from the Red Cross, she had proposed to her associates the addition of a First Aid Department as a part of its activities. This did not seem to her board of control an advisable field for the Red Cross to enter at that time. After her resignation from the presidency of the American Red Cross, she organized the “National First Aid Association of America,” which was incorporated under the laws of the District of Columbia and had its general office in Boston. The plan included a large sustaining membership with a nominal fee of a dollar a year, and an active membership composed of those in every community who attended a course of lectures and passed a physical examination.
The plan of this new organization, as originally planned by her for the Red Cross, was fully set forth in a brief manuscript which she prepared:
During the entire period of the present differences among sections of the members of the American National Red Cross, I have never once felt that it was the desire of the American people that I should personally enter within the circle of disturbance, and I have consequently remained a silent and sorrowful spectator of a controversy that appeared to me to be leading where no true, loyal friend of the Red Cross would care to follow.