Feb. 6, 1927.
My very dear Jane Addams,
When I saw you at the club last Friday I realized that I had not done the thing I have had in mind ever since that huge dinner at the furniture mart, that is to tell you how much I personally appreciated all the splendid things you have done in the past nearly forty years.
Of course they haven't seemed splendid to you in the doing. You have just gone on meeting one problem or opportunity at a time as they appeared, some of them interesting and stimulating, some of them very hard, but the sum total of the result has [page 2] been a great contribution to better human living. The world is certainly far better for your having lived in it, and nothing much more satisfying than that can be said.
I have always felt a very special interest in Hull House because in a way I was in at the beginning. How little any of us anticipated, when you and Ellen Starr used to come out to Rockford to tell Sarah Anderson about your plans, that in less than half a century the whole region about the House would be so transformed, your effort would have lifted the whole social thinking of a great [page 3] city and you would have become one of the world leaders for human betterment! But that is the way that the steady, true following of a right and noble ideal does work out in this world. That is the way God built the world.
And so I say -- God bless you and give you great satisfaction in what has been done and continue to give you the strength to meet misunderstanding and selfish opposition.
Yours with love and appreciation,
Martha H. MacLeish.
Don't trouble to answer this. I can imagine how many such notes you are getting.
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