The tide had turned, though she seemed hardly aware of the fact. One evidence of it was that rival societies, to her excessive irritation, were springing into being. She felt that powerful influences were opposing her, and, true to her kinsman-biographer's definition of her as "normally responsive to praise and abnormally sensitive to criticism," wrote in her diary one day: "All the society people of the city and country seem to be arrayed in arms against me, with only my single hand, sore heart, and silent tongue to make my way against misrepresentation, malice, and selfish ambition." In reality her tongue was no more silent than her pen, which she took in hand, less than a month before her fight was won, to write to Frances Willard, in terms concretely foreshadowing the later struggle over the League of Nations:

It is hard and heavy and bitter; the shots of malice and detraction fall thick, but I must stand at the helm and steer my ship safely into port. The Treaty of Geneva must first be secured. I have but one passage to take it through and that is lined thick on every side with guns manned by the society ladies of the Capitol of the Nation. The Red Cross, a little stranger craft from foreign lands, bearing only the banner of peace and love, and her messages of world-wide mercy begging shelter and acceptance in our capacious harbour, has chosen me for her pilot to bring her in. Besides these guns that open upon her from all sides she runs against the chains which have so

long held her out fancied Government defenses of "Nonintervention," "Self-isolation," beware of "Entangling alliances," "Washington's Farewell Address," "Monroe Doctrine," apathy, inertia, general ignorance, national conceit, national distrust, a desire to retain the old-time barbarous privileges of privateering and piracy which we have hugged as a precious boon against every humane treaty since we began. . . . Never a messenger of mercy met a more inhospitable welcome, but the poor battered pilot has faith in the craft, and faith in God, and at no distant day, in spite of all, we shall throw out a sturdy old iron anchor to grapple with the reefs of the coast, and run up a little pennant beside the cross, "Treaty Ratified."

"The poor battered pilot" had not long to wait. The very intensity of her feeling had doubtless produced its effect, for on March 16, 1882, the Senate, with a complete and astounding unanimity, ratified and removed the injunction of secrecy from the accession of the United States to the Convention of Geneva, signed by President Arthur on March 1. A woman's single-handed fight on behalf of a great cause had ended in an amazing victory.

V

Clara Barton was now sixty-one years old, with thirty years of vigorous life still ahead of her. If she had done nothing more, her work on the battlefields of America and Europe and her initial achievement on behalf of the Red Cross would have entitled

her to a high place among American women. But she did much more, chiefly to the enlargement, partly to the diminution, of her final fame.

For its conspicuous enlargement, there was her presidency and direction of the American Red Cross for twenty-two years, from 1882 to 1904. This involved her arduous personal participation in many enterprises of active relief on fields of suffering. Dramatic and romantic incidents appear at every turn of the story, completely American in its idiom. Where but on a tributary of Mark Twain's own river could she have found a steamer with such a name as the Josh V. Throop to serve as the first American relief boat to fly the Red Cross flag? On the Ohio and Mississippi, in the river floods of 1884, she used this and another boat as floating depots of Red Cross aid. In the Texas famine of the next year she established an effective plan of self-help for the sufferers. To the summons of the Florida yellow-fever epidemic of 1888 and of the Johnstown flood of 1889 she responded with small bands of devoted helpers and large resources of supplies entrusted to her especially at Johnstown for distribution. After the Sea Islands hurricane of August 1893, she passed more than six months on the islands with which she had become acquainted during the siege of Charleston, directing a work of

mercy among the stricken Negroes which caused them to christen their male babies "Red Cross" and the girls "Clara Barton." From Washington she had directed an expedition for the relief of the Russian famine of 1891-92. In 1895 she went herself to Constantinople in charge of succor to the survivors from an Armenian massacre, and performed a task of diplomatic delicacy with high success. In 1898 came our Spanish War, before the outbreak of which Clara Barton, at the age of seventy-seven, was in charge of a Red Cross ship at Havana, administering relief to reconcentrados. After war was declared, a second vessel in her charge joined Admiral Sampson's fleet off Santiago. There and in its neighborhood she supervised sanitary and hospital care of American and Cuban combatants, and was accorded the honor of sailing with her supplies into Santiago, after its surrender, in advance of the United States vessels of war. If she and her helpers joined in singing the Doxology and "America" as the State of Texas neared its dock, they need not be scorned as sentimentalists. The efficiency with which they proceeded to dispense relief to the people of Santiago marked them as eminently practical.

With all these good works, officially and universally recognized, to her credit at home, with a reputation abroad which caused the Czar of Russia in