Oct [29].
Dear Miss Addams
I am sending on to you for your consideration a letter from Dorothy Detzer. If you think the plan worth trying and are willing to go into it
Will you set the thing in motion by communicating with D. D.?
The matter presents itself to me something this way.
1) Why act in re Morocco and not in regard to the French war in Syria and the Bulgarian-Greek crisis?
Because,
the latter comes directly [within] the League covenant & the League is acting. [page 2]
Syria, France holds by a mandate under the League and it ↑is↓ peculiarly League business on that account though the League is inactive.
The [Rif] war has a different status. France has no League [illegible] is not in Morocco under a League mandate and would regard the war technically, I suppose, as a revolt. This makes any diplomatic action from the outside delicate, I suppose, and for us peculiarly so ↑in↓ view ↑of↓ the apparent resentful feeling in France toward the U.S. over the debt & for other reasons since the war. [page 3]
But there seems no one else to do it unless England could be induced to interest herself and I imagine that the present Government is not in this line of business in general, and that in particular it would fear to set a precedent of intervention in colonial unrest.
And this long-drawn out horror ought to be stopped, at least as much on France's own account as on that of the [Riffians], and perhaps most of all for Spain's.
I suppose any movement from the State Dept. ought to approach both Spain and France and consult England, don't you? [page 4]
I believe any more of this sort would be popular ↑in the U.S.↓ and yield political profit even if it did not succeed (& barring some obvious faux pas on our part). And if the U.S. authorities saw this so, the petition to them might not be so impractical.
I wish it might be tried out.
I hope to be seeing you in NY in a fortnight or less and am always yours E G B.
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