Whether real or imaginary, the heroes of Homer and Virgil are worth more to the literature of that ancient period than all the physical wealth of Greece and Rome. What legacy to a nation could be greater than to have inherited the name and influence of a Homer, a Socrates, a Michael Angelo, a Queen Victoria, a Washington, a Franklin, a Lincoln, a Florence Nightingale, a Clara Barton? In the long centuries ago, of fame it was decreed: “Fame (’tis all the dead can have) shall live.” Through the centuries, Church and State have fought for their respective heroes and heroines not unlike Peter the Hermit and his followers, in the cause of Him on whom depended their future happiness. Now, as in all the past, the chiefest of a nation’s enduring wealth are the immortal names that were not born to die. [Illustration: ABRAHAM LINCOLN (Picture taken in June, 1860) The President, March 4, 1861–April 15, 1865 Miss Barton, I will help you. A. LINCOLN (in 1865). President Lincoln was good and kind to me in whatever I tried to do for the soldiers. CLARA BARTON. ] As an inspiration to the millions yet to be, the name of America’s Angel of Mercy will live—live heroic in the deathless songs of peace and of war. There is Second Bull Run, and Chantilly, and Antietam, and Fredericksburg, and Petersburg, and Strasburg, and Sedan, and Paris, and Johnstown, and Santiago, and Galveston,—there on tablets of memory her heroism is inscribed, there to remain forever. Neither will the millions forget, nor cease to cherish, The American Red Cross and The American Amendment and The National First Aid,—forever theirs and their children’s, through the constructive genius of the American philanthropist. If “gratitude is the fairest of flowers that springs from the soul,” perennial must spring millions of fairest flowers over her whose services to the millions are unending, and world-wide. At Glen Echo on the Potomac when the world-humanist received her final orders, sustained by an unfaltering trust, she exclaimed: “Let me go, let me go!” Thence, as if by imperial summons called, the spirit of Clara Barton arose triumphant and on Easter Morn winged its flight to that undiscovered bourne amid the Islands of the Blest. In yonder Silent City, Pointing heavenward, Stands a granite shaft; Above that shaft of gray, The granite Cross of Red, and there a shrine for the human race till the end of time. [Sidenote: CLARA BARTON] _Clara Barton_ Born at Oxford, Massachusetts Christmas Day, 1821 Died at Glen Echo, Maryland Easter Morn, 1912 President of the American Red Cross Society from 1881 to 1904