Oct. 29th 1923.
My dear Miss Addams,
Your kind letter made me very glad. What a great luck that after all you have gone through in Japan you at least have left that pretty country before the earthquake. I hope that our good friends in Tokyo and Yokohama have been saved. I wrote to Miss Kubushiro and hope to get good news from her.
You know certainly from Miss Marshall all about our meeting in Dresden and our visit to the German Government and the effort of Gertrud Baer and Mdme Jouve to see Poincaré.
After I returned from Germany I felt ill and this time it was an ulceration of the stomach. I am better now but as a result of it I got it left a narrowing of the pylorus (that is the issue to the stomach to the duodenum) and I shall now have to live on a diet of all kind of purée or to undergo an operation. As I will be [page 2] 70 years old this winter I prefer to live on a very limited menu of food than to be operated in the last period of my life.
I shall now use the winter-months to finish my [memoirs] so that they are ready before I die. There is here an English professor, who has lived in Holland for several years, he is translating it into English, so that the English copy will be ready at the same time as the Dutch.
Do you know that Mrs. Ramondt and her husband have divorced? She is now living with her daughter. Only from a financial point of view it is to regret.
We (the Dutch pacifists) are just now in great excitement. Our Government -- a very conservative one -- had brought in a bill for a new navy-law, so that in 12 years time a whole new fleet with dreadnoughts, undersea-boats etc. etc. should be built. Our people, as a whole, is very anti-militaristic and was very upset against the law. Everywhere meetings against the plan of the Cabinet of Ministers. Large petitions were sent to the M.P.'s to vote against the Bill with the result that yesterday the Bill [page 3] was voted down and the whole Cabinet resigned. We hope that now Holland soon will have only an army -- and navy-police, just enough to show foreign countries which want to violate our neutrality where the borders of our country begin, just as we have done since 1914.
I was very sorry that the editor of the Woman Citizen has shortened the article I have sent to that magazine, without saying that it had only printed a part of it. It was sent already in the beginning of August and printed in the Numb. of October 6th.(*) Perhaps you do not read it.
I hope very sincerely that your old [strength] and [energy] has come back and that you will be able to [fulfill] your noble work in life again with in the same way as before.
With many kind greetings
Lovingly yours
Aletta H. Jacobs.
(*) It was an article to give the arguments why U.S.A. ought to join the League of Nations.
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