“I can teach English, French, drawing and painting.... I am a rapid writer or copyist, and have the reputation of being a very good accountant ... and if, in your travels through the South, you see an opening for me, tell me.” As the pioneer woman in Government service Clara Barton was the object of commiseration. And only because she was a woman, she suffered through jeers and hoots and cat-calls, and tobacco smoke in her face, and slanderous whisperings in the hallways and boisterous talks about “crinoline”—all sorts of offensiveness, on the part of Government employees. Clara Barton in the public school, in the patent office, in the Civil War, in the Franco-Prussian War, in the Cuban War, in national disasters, in the presidency of the Red Cross, now filled by the President of the United States, is a series of object lessons of the greatest significance in the progress of womankind in the public service. Clara Barton the _intruder_ among men in the patent office in 1855, and Jeannette Rankin, the _honorable_ among men in Congress in 1918, are the exponents respectively of two conditions of American sentiment as to the public function of women in the United States. Possibly because of her sad experience as a woman in the public service, she became one of those who, with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other suffragettes, blazed the way to equal rights for women—equal rights now approved by the President, the United States Congress and the American people. At a meeting of the American Suffrage Association held in Washington, D. C., in language most caustic and argumentative, in part in a public address Clara Barton said: A woman shan’t say there shall be no war—and she shan’t take any part in it when there is one; and because she doesn’t take part in the war, she must not vote; and because she can’t vote she has no voice in her Government. And because she has no voice in her Government she is not a citizen; and because she isn’t a citizen she has no rights, and because she has no rights she must submit to wrong; and because she submits to wrong she isn’t anybody. Becoming optimistic, she said, the number of thoughtful and right minded men who will approve equal suffrage are much smaller than we think and, when equal suffrage[5] is an accomplished fact, all will wonder as I have done, what the objection ever was. Footnote 5: The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution proclaimed August 26, 1920. XII Clara Barton’s simple life was long, and so full of stirring incidents that all the books will not record the whole of it. Worcester (Mass.) _Telegram_. Be not like dumb-driven cattle. LONGFELLOW—_The Psalm of Life_. The Ox has therefore stretched his yoke in vain. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.