New York, Oct. 1. -- Not the daily horrors of Europe's war, nor its material [toll] in lives and goods, nor indeed any of the more apparent evils of modern warfare seems to stir the imagination of Miss Jane Addams so much as does the psychological and spiritual reaction of wholesale slaughter upon humanity.
Miss Addams spoke of these things for a few minutes yesterday just before she left for Chicago.
"All is out of joint, out of character," she remarked. "Human sensibilities were more acute when this war began than ever before. The comradeship, the friendliness between nations had been brought upon a basis of mutual understanding further than ever before. By mechanical means we had been brought closer together in communication and in sympathy.
"Either we ought not to have equipped ourselves with these fine sensibilities or we ought not to have to face the horrors now confronting us. It is a too terrible inconsistency against which we should protest."
It was the world's ever growing consciousness of a strong social obligation, carefully nurtured through years, and now being blighted by brutal influences, to which Miss Addams recurred in discussing the war's effect upon her work.
"All organized social welfare activities are put back for years," she said. "We have to work up public opinion anew.
"The various woman's movements are greatly crippled, but that is only a small part of the harm done.
"When a million men are suffering in trenches wet and cold and wounded, what are a few children suffering under hard conditions in the factories? Take old age pensions, upon which England, France and Germany have been working. With widows and fatherless children numbered by the thousands in each of those countries, what are a few old people more or less? It will be years before these things are taken up again. The whole social fabric is tortured and twisted.
"Infant mortality is one of the things which we are just beginning to deal with. We are trying to learn why such numbers of little children under two years of age die. In Germany the nation's statesmanship was challenged in the Reichstag because, out of approximately 2,000,000 children annually born in that country, some 500,000, or one-fourth, die.
"But what are half a million new born children in comparison with such a slaughter -- the hideous, wholesale slaughter of thousands of men a day?"
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