Clara Barton
[Translation]
Paris, June 14, 1877
Miss Barton, and Honored Friend:
It is in French that I write to you, for you would laugh at my bad English. I am at present in Paris on a visit at my brother’s. I hear that Mr. Moynier has written to you on the same subject which will make the contents of this letter. I expect Mr. Moynier in Paris in a few days, which will give me the opportunity to talk the proposition over with him, which we both wish you to take an interest in.
Mr. Moynier has undoubtedly told you that our Committee has tried for these last ten years to give to an American Committee an active existence, but we failed. In the first years our communications were made through a Mr. Bowles, then residing at Paris, with whom we ceased to correspond, not seeing that we arrived to any certain result by this channel. Later we have been in direct communication with Dr. Henry W. Bellows, President of a phantom Committee in New York, from whom we seldom receive an answer. Having therefore no proof that that committee was active, we ceased to correspond, and we at last learned officially that that committee was officially and entirely dead. From that time, about a year since, we considered the Red Cross as not existing any more in America. I need not speak here of the disease which has caused that death. You are an American and you know better than we the temperament of your Nation. Our hope to entertain the life has been nourished in us by the reading of the admirable work which America had made for the care of the wounded during the Secession War. We spoke of it at length in the thick volume which Mr. Moynier and myself have published under the title, “The War and Charity,” and which obtained the integral prize of the central committee in Berlin. Mr. Moynier has told you, without doubt, how happy we should be to see a work come into life again in your rich and generous America, which had shone with such a bright luster at the epoch when it was stimulated by the mighty auxiliary of the patriotic motive. We know little what America has done for the victims of the Franco-German War, which you have seen and during which we have for some time worked together, and I am not surprised that many generous gifts have been lost for want of a good organization, and especially for want of being able to establish regular communications with the armies by the channel of an American auxiliary committee residing in Europe and which would offer all the security.
If you, my honored friend, could succeed in organizing something durable in America, in relation to the Oriental War which appears only in its beginning, you would have nobly crowned the work of devotedness to which you have consecrated your life. I do not know what means of execution Mr. Moynier proposed. I shall write again upon that subject, when I shall have seen him, so that we agree completely together in what we tell you. Permit me, however, now to communicate to you some ideas. You can without doubt become the soul of this revising work, but you cannot be its body. America is not so different from Europe that my experience cannot profit you for your country. Now, medicine teaches us that a soul without a body has no life at all, at least upon earth. Perhaps even it is better that a woman should be the soul; her moral influence, her earnest entreaties near the Governments and authorities are often better accepted and consequently more efficacious. I do not therefore see any inconvenience that you should be for America the head of the Order, the active working head,—why not? If you feel to have the brain power as much as I know you have the moral power, but then create immediately under that head a body, arms to write, to arrange methodically, to publish, to keep the correspondence, either alone or under your dictation, for copying, etc., after that, feet for running, to go, to come, to collect, to buy, to make multitudes of visits and receive visitors, as we were obliged to do in Geneva in 1870, where during two months my ten rooms were never empty all day long, each one containing a secretary, man or woman, to write and to receive a host of visits which would have killed a President, and of which hardly a quarter had really any other practical use than to enlighten the public and to keep up its zeal, not always rational.
Surround yourself at once with a little body of persons full of good-will and capacity, docile to your directions, either women or young men, especially doctors. Amongst the latter choose a secretary who must be entirely at your service and who probably ought to be paid.
1. The first work seems to me to be to awaken the attention, the sympathy, and the confidence of the public. Without the public, no money, and without money no material help. You know as well as myself the means to attain this end is publicity, the power of which is, I believe, greater in America than in any other country.
2. Complete study of the practical and sure means to carry an efficacious relief to the armies in the Orient. To that effect one needs to correspond very often with all the relief committees of Russia, of Rumania, of Serbia, of Montenegro, and even of Constantinople. It is necessary not to conceal to one’s self that these intercourses, easy enough on paper, are very difficult in reality, if one does not want the money or the relief to be lost to the profit of the war, rather than to the profit of the unhappy victims.