Clara Barton was normally responsive to praise and abnormally sensitive to criticism. In all the years of her public life she never recovered from that supersensitiveness which had characterized her childhood. Fulsome and excessive praise disgusted her, but she enjoyed discriminating appreciation. Straightforward opposition she could meet and bear, but she shrank from criticism at the hands of those who had been her friends, and such criticism hurt her far more than any one could imagine who beheld her self-possession and outward calm. She seemed to the world to take opposition somewhat lightly, but she bled within her armor from wounds which the world never suspected. She retired from the Red Cross broken-hearted. Her common sense ought to have saved her from nine tenths of the suffering which she endured in that unhappy experience. She felt that she had been denationalized, repudiated by her own country, expatriated. She thought for a time that she could not continue to live in the United States. She turned her eyes toward Mexico, and thought of going there partly to escape from the sorrows which confronted her, and which she painfully exaggerated, and partly with the thought that she might there establish something corresponding to the American Red Cross. She had a friend in California, Mr. Charles S. Young, who knew much about Mexico. On January 13, 1904, after the appointment of the congressional committee and before any of its hearings, she wrote the following letter which came as near to being hysterical as anything that Clara Barton ever wrote: You will never know how many times I have thought of you, in this last hard and dreadful year to me. I cannot tell you, I _must_ not, and yet I _must_. So much of the time, under all the persecution, it has seemed to me I _could not_ remain in _this_ country, and have sought the range of the world for some place among strangers, and out of the way of people and mails, and longed for some one to point out a quiet place in some other land; my thoughts have fled to you, who could, at least, tell me a road to take outside of America, and who would ask the authorities of Mexico if a woman who could not live in her own country might find a home or a resting-place in theirs. This will all sound very strange to you--you will wonder if I am “out of my mind.” Let me answer--no. And if you had only a glimpse of what is put upon me to endure, you would not wonder, and in the goodness of your heart would hold open the gate to show me a mile track to some little mountain nook, where I might escape and wait in peace. Don’t think this is _common_ talk with me. I have never said it to others; and yet I think they who know me best _mistrust_ that I cannot bear _everything_, and will try in some way to relieve myself.