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Show THE RED CROSS CALLS AGAIN Once more the generous people of America are being called upon to make their annual commitments to the greatest charity of all. Beginning on Armistice Armis-tice Day and continuing to the end of the month, the Red Cross membership drive will be in full force. It will be a poor home indeed that does not display the window card of membershrip. This is the second call by the Red Cross this year. The first was for the special war relief re-lief emergency fund of $20,000,000, which was oversubscribed. But the work of the Red Cross goes on in peace as well as in war, and the work of the devoted women of the local chapters, in making garments, surgical dressings and other supplies for the relief of the suffering and the homeless is never-ending. In the year just past came the call for war relief, from England, France, Poland, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Holand, Spain and China. Through the foreign agents of the American Red Cross and the Red Cross societies of the war-torn nations, clothing, food, money and medical help has been given wherever wher-ever the needy victims could be reached. It is pleasing pleas-ing to note that there is no truth in reports that American Red Cross supplies had been confiscated i by the Germans, or otherwise diverted from those ! for whose relief they were intended. The first ship to get through the blockade I to a French port was the Red Cross "mercy ship," the McKeesport, with its million-dollar cargo, including in-cluding urgently needed medical supplies. In England, work is in progress on the Red Cross Harvard hospital, for the study and treatment of communicable diseases under wartime conditions. condi-tions. The Red Cross finances the building and Harvard University provides the medical staff. ! Shipments of blood given by thousands of Amer icans for use in transfusions where needed are going steadily forward. Wherever the arm of mercy can reach, help is being given to the vic- tims of the world's greatest tragedy. Nor does the work of the Red Cross begin and end with its war service. In the fiscal year lately ended there were 102 disasters of various kinds in the United States, calling for aid by the Red Cross to 102,000 of our own citizens. Aid and medical social service was given to thousands of men in the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard services, and their families. The safety campaign of the Red Cross, long established for rescue work wherever bathers take to the water, has been extended to the field of highway accidents, with nearly 2,000 Red Cross highway first aid stations and 3,000 mobile first aid units. To enumerate all of the activities for which your Red Cross dollars are spent would take pages. It is hardly necessary to recite them, so firmly established has the Red Cross become as the American philanthropy of the first importance. im-portance. Nor is it necessary to remind every reader that the time has come once more to give freely and joyously, each according to his means. |