My dear Miss Addams:
Upon receiving the "Democracy & Social Ethics" which you so kindly had sent to me I read it with the greatest interest finishing it the second day. I sat down at once to [illegible] ↑express↓ my gratitude to you for my copy - & my deeper thankfulness that you had written & published it. Then, as you requested, I tried to tell you what I thought of its doctrines–and [Page 2] immediately my troubles began. It is one thing to devour with keen appetite & quite another to "inwardly digest". The more I have thought over the subjects discussed in it the less competent I think myself to express an opinion upon them. But I can say emphatically that the book seems to me illuminating in a rare degree. Your experience of the conditions about you has been so wide & so intimate, your study of them has been so sympathetic & [Page 3] so judicial & your analysis so keen, that I find your conclusions exceedingly instructive. They correct many of my preconceived opinions. I sympathize heartily with your [arrangement] of ↑prevailing↓ Educational Methods in their bearing upon industrial life.
I wish you might have felt impelled to add a chapter upon "Democracy & The Christian Church". If I were to put an interrogation points anywhere it would be after on some [Page 4] pages in the chapter on "Household Adjustment", and perhaps on some dealing with corrupt aldermen. You are not after all accepting "Johnny Powers's turkeys"? The schoolmaster in [illegible] also deserves quotation marks for "pull" on page 231. It was a very great pleasure to see & hear you again in New York. We leave this lovely place on Wednesday next and shall be at the Buckingham (in New York), for [Page 5] about three weeks, before going to our Summer home in Annisquam (Mass). We hope that an out-of-door life there is going to qualify us again for our part of the work & play of life. Mrs. Bradley sends her cordial regards and with mine.
Hot Springs, Va.
April 27, 1902.
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