My dear Miss Addams:
I have been attempting to plan a sort of Social Calendar for 1912, in order if possible to bring the public at large more nearly in touch with the modern trend of thought and progress along social lines. In so doing, I have found so many quotations in your "Twenty Years at Hull House" which seemed exactly to express the thought to be conveyed that I have felt that a smaller monthly calendar [page 2] made up of your quotations alone would be very much worthwhile. Are you willing that I should compile and publish such a calendar provided of course that I submit it to you for approval first and share with you whatever profits there may be to whatever extent you consider just? Would you also be willing that I should use some of these together with other shorter quotations in my larger Social Calendar and possibly in a calendar for workingmen?
I should very much appreciate your opinion in regard to the volume <of the> latter calendar, namely one [page 3] for workingmen, and the possible demand for it. It has seemed to me that if many of the ideals and aims of social workers were put simply and clearly to the intelligent workingman, he would rejoice and be encouraged to find that they were really one with his own, that he and they were in truth working for the same things. So many of them feel that they are working alone and do not yet realize that many of the cultured people, those born to greater advantages, are one with them in the forward struggle for better things.
I think that in all these calendars I would need to use general titles under which one or more quotations might come, as the Right of the [page 4] People to Civilization, Motherhood, the Settlement and the Community, the Brotherhood of Men. I am not certain if I should ask the permission of the publishers also to use the quotations. I trust that I am not taking too great a liberty in asking of you what I have. Your book "Twenty Years at Hull House" has meant much to me, for I have had to give up my own Settlement work to attend to home duties, and your experience has made me feel that the settlement workers are very close to one another and that a difference in cities and conditions is nothing to that universal nearness to the hearts of the people. Believe me
Sincerely yours,
Edith Waller.
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