Public sentiment in America is a strange and somewhat capricious thing. Clara Barton issued her little booklet in 1878 and it appeared to fall flat. The newspapers paid no attention to it; Congress treated it with complete indifference if not with hostility, and the President and his Cabinet ignored it. She reissued it in 1881 with added matter, and not less than three hundred newspapers and periodicals spoke kindly of it, many of them more than once, so that more than five hundred press clippings were collated as the result of that and Miss Barton’s little article written for the Associated Press. Congress, that had been partly hostile and where not hostile apathetic, became suddenly and unanimously interested. The Honorable William Windom, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, and afterward a member of President Garfield’s Cabinet, became a stanch friend, perhaps the first genuinely interested and largely influential friend of the movement. Senators Hoar and Wilson, of Massachusetts, and Hawley, of Connecticut, and Edmunds, of Vermont, lent to the movement intelligent and vigorous support. The Honorable Omar D. Conger, of Michigan, first in the House and afterward in the Senate, took an active part in promoting the cause. When the matter began to be discussed in Congress as the body which alone could declare war, and later came before the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate on the proposal to ratify the Geneva Treaty, there was not a dissenting voice in either house, nor was there in the press through the country, so far as is known, a single unfavorable comment. Clara Barton’s campaign of publicity had been a little handful of corn upon the top of the mountains and the fruit thereof shook like the Cedars of Lebanon. The whole Nation was suddenly converted to faith in the Red Cross. Foreign nations stood in amazement when they saw this change of sentiment. They were unable to account for it, nor could any one else explain it to them. After eighteen years of indifference and hostility America came over to the banner of the Red Cross with whole-hearted acceptance of its humane principles. But still the question was asked why America need concern herself with an organization for war, when she was never going to have another war. The answer to this question contained one of the distinctive principles of the American Red Cross as compared with the Red Cross in other countries. In Europe, the Red Cross was organized solely for relief in time of war. In America, it was organized to meet any great public need.