Tribute to Jane Addams, 1923

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THE Nobel Peace Prize for Jane Addams -- upon whom in all the world could it better be bestowed? Not that Miss Addams has taken the extreme [nonresistant] position but she has stuck to her own beliefs through thick and through thin, through good repute and ill. Foreign peace and domestic peace and human understanding of human ills to these her life has been dedicated. Never has she taken thought of herself. When it came, for instance, to the question whether she should go with Henry Ford upon his peace ship, it was asked whether she who had so much to lose if the enterprise were to become ridiculous should go along. Somebody, she thought, must go to do what was possible to make the expedition [practical] and useful -- had she any right to spare herself? So she went -- to share in the ill fate of the ship whose mission failed because of the mental limitations of its [character]. And later on Miss Addams found herself denounced, [abused], vilified, spied upon, published by two branches of her government as a dangerous [pro-German] pacifist merely because she nobly held in 1917 to views for which everyone admired and applauded her in [1915?]. We cannot think of any Nobel award that would be so fitting such a crowning of a faith kept, of a creed lived and verified. Nor could any act of the Nobel trustees reflect more glory upon them, not even the bestowal of their last award upon Fridtjof Nansen.

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