The Anchor Grain Company
324-326 FLOUR EXCHANGE
Minneapolis, Minn.
Dear Jane Addams:
The above address is not due to any claim of unwarranted intimacy but there are some souls in the world that are bigger than any prefix or affix can make them. That is the way I feel about you after reading your last book "The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets". (Who would think of addressing Phillips Brooks with the prefix Reverend, Doctor or Bishop, he is so much greater than any of these.)
I have been greatly stirred by this last book of yours. It is so truly what I think myself but have not been able to express that I cannot help thanking you for it.
I trust that I have not simply had my emotions stirred and that is the end of it. Unless, however, I can do something I would better not have read it. I am trying to do a little something in my small way. I am sending the book to twenty different people of more or less influence in this city and other cities, asking them by word of mouth or pen to read it and act on it. I have given the book to our minister and to four other leading ministers and to two of our Educators in this city asking them to read it and do what they can to help conditions so that we may take hold of this "Spirit of Youth with whom all things are possible", and use it for its own righteous [development] and for civic righteousness. [page 2]
Mr. Freeman, the minister of St. Mark's Episcopal Church, of which I am a member is going to preach on it, use it at our mid-week meeting and use it next week in his talk at the Mayor's office on methods to be pursued in Minneapolis for the upbuilding of our city; particularly the question to be discussed is "Garden Cities." Four other ministers, and I think five, will preach on it. They are my friends that I have seen personally. I wish I might do more.
Thank you for writing it. Thank you also for the first chapter of the Autobiography in the April American with the fine wood-cut of yourself.
Very cordially yours,
Sarah Passmore [signed]
April 2nd, 1910.
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