unrewarded and uncared for by a great government in whose service she has given the best of her life and her all. And who
shall say she is not the greatest woman of the Nineteenth century? Is there another with such a record of noble achievements
for humanity? No other woman has appeared, bearing the banner of the Red Cross, and personally ministering to the suffering
on the field of disaster, though many calamities have occurred since Clara Barton was driven from the work to which she was divinely called.
MRS. MARY ASHTON RICE LIVERMORE.
Mrs. Livermore was born in Boston, Massachusetts, December 19, 1821. Her father, Timothy Rice of Northfield, Massachusetts, who was of Welsh descent, served in the United States Navy during the War of 1812-1815. Her mother, Zebiah Vose Glover Ashton, was the daughter of Captain Nathaniel Ashton, of London, England. Mrs. Livermore was placed in the public schools of Boston at an early age and was graduated at fourteen, receiving one of the six medals distributed for good scholarship. There were then no high, normal, or Latin schools for girls, and their admission to colleges was not even suggested. She was sent to the Female Seminary in Washington, D. C, where she completed the four-years' course in two, and was then elected a member of the faculty as teacher of Latin and French. While teaching she continued her studies in Latin and Greek, resigning her position at the close of the second year to take charge of a family school on a plantation of southern Virginia, where she remained nearly three years. As there were between three or four hundred slaves on the estate Mrs. Livermore was brought face to face with the institution of slavery and witnessed deeds of barbarism as tragic as any described in Uncle Tom's Cabin. She returned to the North a radical abolitionist and henceforth entered the lists against slavery and every form of oppression. In 1857 the Livermores removed to Chicago, Illinois, where Mr. Livermore became proprietor and editor of a weekly religious paper, the organ of the Universalist denomination in the Northwest, and Mrs. Livermore became his assistant editor. At the first nomination of Abraham Lincoln for the presidency in the Chicago Wigwam in i860, she was the only woman reporter assigned a place among the hundred or more men reporters.
Out of the chaos of benevolent efforts evolved by the opening of the Civil War in 1861, the United States Sanitary Commission was born. Mrs. Livermore with her friend, Mrs. Jane C. Hoge, was identified with relief work for the soldiers from the beginning. She resigned all positions save that on her husband's paper, secured a governess for her children and subordinated all demands upon her time to those of the commission. She organized soldiers' aid societies;
