From this distance it is possible to view the whole situation in perspective. The present author has no hesitation in saying that the time had come for Clara Barton to retire from the active work of the administration of the American Red Cross. The organization had grown well beyond the ability of any one person to manage it in the way that Clara Barton had managed it so successfully in its earlier years. On her return either from Cuba or St. Petersburg, she ought to have retired, accepting the honorary presidency, and giving over the control and active management to younger people. The author has witnessed in not a few instances the pathetic struggle which goes on in the minds of elderly people on their prospective retirement from positions which have outgrown them. It is a situation nothing less than tragic. A person long identified with an organization comes easily to believe, either that he cannot get on without it, or that it cannot get on without him. Clara Barton had come to believe the latter concerning the American Red Cross. She was mistaken. There comes a time in the life of almost any organization when, if it is to prosper and enlarge, it must accept new leadership and adapt itself to changed conditions. A woman as sensible as Clara Barton was in most things should have realized this situation and not have permitted herself to be heart-broken by a change as necessary for her as it was for the Red Cross. Nor is it necessary at this time to refer to the fact that the change might perhaps have been brought about in a kindlier spirit and with less of distress to a noble woman. If there was any lack of consideration for her, it will do no good now to remember it, nor to ascribe unworthy motives to any who had a share in it. One thing, however, ought to be said concerning this tragic experience. If Clara Barton did not bear this sorrow like a philosopher, she bore it like a Christian. The author has searched her diaries and most intimate papers of this period without finding in any of them any spirit of personal resentment or desire for revenge. She felt that she had been deeply wronged, but she felt it not so much as a wrong done to her as an injury to the cause she loved. Her constant question was not, What will become of me? but, What will become of the Red Cross? Her books had been kept honestly and she knew it; but she also knew that, when money came to her on the field, she had been accustomed to spend it for the necessities of life for those she had come to help, and that not all of it had passed through the hands of the treasurer. She knew that no committee of Congress could find any of this money in her possession, but she also knew that her system of book-keeping had not been established with a view to a possibility of that kind of an audit. How would it affect the Red Cross if any scandal arose out of her unbusinesslike book-keeping?