No words are adequate to describe the systematic, persistent
faithfulness of the women who organized and led the Branches of the
United States Sanitary Commission. Their volunteer labor had all the
regularity of paid service, and a heartiness and earnestness which no
paid services can ever have. Hundreds of women evinced talents there,
which, in other spheres and in the other sex, would have made them
merchant-princes, or great administrators of public affairs. Storms nor
heats could keep them from their posts, and they wore on their faces,
and finally evinced in their breaking constitutions, the marks of the
cruel strain put upon their minds and hearts. They engaged in a
correspondence of the most trying kind, requiring the utmost address to
meet the searching questions asked by intelligent jealousy, and to
answer the rigorous objections raised by impatience or ignorance in the
rural districts. They became instructors of whole townships in the
methods of government business, the constitution of the Commissary and
Quartermaster's Departments, and the forms of the Medical Bureau. They
had steadily to contend with the natural desire of the Aid Societies for
local independence, and to reconcile neighborhoods to the idea of being
merged and lost in large generalizations. They kept up the spirit of
the people distant from the war and the camps, by a steady fire of
letters full of touching incidents; and they were repaid not only by the
most generous returns of stores, but by letters from humble homes and
lonely hearts, so full of truth and tenderness, of wisdom and pity, of
self-sacrifice and patriotic consecration, that the most gifted and
educated women in America, many of them at the head of the Branches or
among their Directors, felt constantly reproved by the nobleness, the
sweetness, the depth of sentiment that welled from the hidden and
obscure springs in the hearts of farmers' wives and factory-girls.

Nor were the talents and the sacrifices of those at the larger Depots or
Centres, more worthy of notice than the skill and pains evinced in
arousing, maintaining and managing the zeal and work of county or town
societies. Indeed, sometimes larger works are more readily controlled
than smaller ones; and jealousies and individual caprices obstruct the
co-operation of villages more than of towns and cities.

In the ten thousand Soldiers' Aid Societies which at one time or another
probably existed in the country, there w