our vice-president,
Mr. A. S. Solomons. This left a sum of two hundred dollars and some
cents in the treasury with which to commence another field.

This was the commencement of 1883. In May, at the solicitation of
General Butler, then Governor of Massachusetts, I took the
superintendence of the Massachusetts Woman's State Prison at Sherborn,
at the customary salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. To this duty
the Legislature added, after my arrival, those of secretary and
treasurer, without increase of salary, discharging the former incumbent,
a man, at three thousand dollars a year. I accepted the new duties,
became my own bondsman for ten thousand dollars, by transfer of that
amount of bonds from my bankers, Brown Brothers, New York, to the
Massachusetts State Treasury at Boston--remaining in charge of the
prison until the close of the year, and the retirement of General Butler
as Governor.

In the short and interrupted existence of our association--scarce two
years--our few official advisers had formed some general regulations,
relating to our course of procedure. Realizing that to be of any real
service as a body of relief for sudden disasters, we must not only be
independent of the slow, ordinary methods of soliciting relief, but in
its means of application as well, it was decided:

_First._ To never solicit relief or ask for contributions.

_Second._ Not to pay salaries to officers--paying out money only to
those whom we must employ for manual labor--and as our officers served
without compensation they should not be taxed for dues.

_Third._ To keep ourselves always in possession of a stated sum of money
to commence a field of disaster--this sum to be independent even of the
closed doors of a bank which might prevent leaving for a field on a
Sunday or holiday.

_Fourth._ To take this sum of our own, going directly to a field with
such help as needed, giving no notice until there, overlooking the
field, and learning the extent of the trouble and conditions of the
people, making immediate and reliable report to the country through the
Associated Press, some of whose officers were our own Red Cross officers
as well. These reports would be truthful, unexaggerated, and
non-sensational statements that could be relied upon.

_Fifth._ That if, under these conditions, the people chose to make use
of us as distributers of the relief which they desired to contribute to
the sufferers, we would do our best to serve