Helena Lucy Maria Swanwick to Jane Addams, April 22, 1923

22-IV-1923

Dear Miss Addams

I was very glad to get your letter & I wish I could be with you on your travels.

I don't expect the Nobel Prize to fall to anyone like you; but it was worth while trying. I thank you for the [check] for 10 dollars but it won't be cashed. The books were sent when application was made & so that's past history.

I'm glad to be able to tell you that I have persuaded Kathleen Courtney to be Chairman of the British Section. I just had to get loose from perpetual [organization]. I hope you won't think me a quitter. But seven years of organizing an office & drafting documents & correspondence & cadging for money have tired my spirit & I was beginning to approach every call with a mental "Oh dear"! That's no good at all. One must take a change when one's so stale as that. I think it quite possible that she may get others to work more, a useful function which I perform very ill.

The newspapers are all saying that the Ruhr situation is working up to an imminent change. I hear that French business men are getting restive. One would welcome almost any change -- slow strangulation & intense growing bitterness [page2] are such dreadful things.

I see [today] that Pres. Harding has very emphatically reiterated America's intention to keep out of the League of Nations. I am [afraid?] this is a sort of counterblast to Lord Robert Cecil who seems to have found Borah equally intractable. I have always been urging that we ought to give the League a really fair chance & work hard for its enlargement & amendment, but of course this can't go on [forever] & unless the settlement with Germany includes her admission to the League on a real equality, I expect it will really mean the end of the League as a peace maker. I suppose it may survive usefully as an organizer of beneficent activities.