This is the principle upon which we have acted. The affording of relief to the victims of great disasters anywhere in the United States, is what the National Red Cross has proceeded to do, and it has confined itself strictly to its privileges, acting only in disasters so great as to be national. It never asks aid; never makes an appeal; it simply makes statements of the real condition of the sufferers, leaving the people free to exercise their own humanity through any medium they may prefer. In the thirteen years of relief work by the Red Cross in the United States, every dollar and every pound that has been received and distributed by it, has been the free-will offering of the people, given for humanity without solicitation, and dispensed without reward. It has received nothing from the government. No fund has been created for it. No contributions have been made except those to be distributed as relief at its fields. Its officers serve without pay. There is not, nor ever was, a salaried officer in it, and even its headquarters meets its own costs. Among the various appropriations made by Congress for relief of calamities in the past years, as in great river floods, not a dollar so appropriated has ever been applied through the Red Cross, although working on the same field. I name these facts, not by way of complaint, or even comment, but to correct popular errors of belief, which I know you would prefer to have corrected. True to its method, this is simply a statement of the real condition of things, and left to the choice of the people--the Red Cross itself is theirs, created for them, and it is peculiarly their privilege to deal with it as they will. The following list of calamities with the approximate value of material furnished, as well as money, will give you some appreciation of the services rendered in the cause of humanity by the American National Red Cross. Limit of time and space forbids even an attempt at description of its various fields. I can only name the most important, with estimated values distributed on each: