A certain letter by a Red Cross official, assuming to represent the Red Cross Society, was mailed from the Washington Red Cross headquarters to the members of the U. S. Senate and House of Representatives. Said letter was written to be used, and was used, as the basis of an argument against the record and fame of Clara Barton before the Library Committee of Congress. On the letter-head was the following: The American Red Cross Pointe-au-Pie Province of Quebec, Canada. July 29, 1916. The letter was signed ... (unofficially). From that long letter, certain to be in American annals of peculiar interest as an epistolary curio, are taken the following excerpts: “Her father died in 1862, leaving property valued at a little more than $1,000, of which she received a few hundred.” “I may say individually that previous to the war Miss Barton appears, according to her statement to have taught school at Bordentown, New Jersey, where a teacher’s salary was $300 per year. A little later the records show that she and some other woman occasionally did copying in the Interior Department.” “She obtained from Congress in 1866, $15,000 which she said she had expended of her own money in tracing the missing soldiers. It is difficult to understand where she obtained this money and also upon what her income depended in future years, as she stated she never received any salary or income from the Red Cross and yet she had no other remunerative occupation that we know of.” “In the 126 volumes of the War Department records of the Civil War no mention is made of Miss Barton’s name or services except in a single letter from her asking information as to prisoners at Annapolis.” “We have a printed diary of.... This diary was published in 1863. Though the names of a number of efficient women like Miss Dix and others connected with the Sanitary Commission are mentioned in a laudatory way, Miss Barton is never referred to.” “In many published accounts of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, Miss Barton is not mentioned, though hundreds of other devoted women are given.” “Just after the Civil War, several gentlemen who had been connected with the Sanitary Commission organized the first American Red Cross Society, but as the Senate had not at that time ratified the treaty of Geneva, this body could hold no official status and shortly went out of existence.” “In 1881 Miss Barton who, previously when visiting in Vienna, had learned of the treaty of Geneva and the Red Cross societies, with a number of others organized the American Red Cross.” “The International Committee of Geneva transmitted through her a letter to the President of the United States requesting the ratification of the Treaty.”