My Dear Miss Addams:
For several weeks past the notice of your forthcoming book in various periodicals have caused us to watch eagerly for its appearance, and yesterday's mail brought the author's copy you so kindly had sent to me by your publisher.
It has pleased me and touched me very much to have our friendship of so many years confirmed and registered in the dedication of your book to me.
I send you my grateful appreciation of that honor, and of the volume, which I shall cherish.
Mrs. Thomas and I dipped into it as soon as it was out of its wrappings, and are now more than half way through it.
In presenting the cause with so much simplicity and straightforwardness I think you have rendered a most valuable service to the processes of [page 2] liberal thinking that are beginning to reassert themselves, now that the long hold of war psychology is being relaxed.
I think I like as much as anything you have ever written chapters four and five of "Peace and Bread in Time of War"; -- it is reassuring to have some one point out to us that "the quality of mercy" was as valid in primitive life as the fighting impulse, and that feeding the helpless antedated war in the scale of human impulses.
If people could get rid of nationalistic prejudices and prepossessions, perhaps once again "primitive human compassion" might make a folkway between man and man.
I hope for their sakes that you can speak through this book to the audience you were not able to reach during the war.
I thank you, again, for associating me with this piece of work, so similar in its aim and feeling [page 3] to the work in which we have been so happily united throughout the years at Hull House.
I have ordered a half dozen copies of "Peace and Bread", which I want to distribute among my friends here on the Key, and shall have others sent out by the Macmillan Company to friends in other places.
I am looking forward to seeing you at Rookwoods when I get back in May.
With my love,
Helen Culver
(by H. P. T.)
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