My dear Miss Addams: --
Nearly fifteen years ago, in my work as vicar of the Pro-Cathedral, on the Lower East Side of New York, I became intensely interested in protecting the young people of the tenements from the lure of the vicious elements in the district immediately adjoining us. With Dr. Felix Adler I helped start the Committee for the Advancement of Public Morality, and was its active worker until it was my privilege at a representative meeting held under the auspices of the Chamber of Commerce, to propose the Committee of Fifteen, of which I became a member, but soon resigned in order that the masses might be represented by one of their own labor leaders. To this committee I turned over volumes of reports, letters, and all sorts of evidence concerning the fearful problem, and after that continued my unabated interest, unofficially.
Pardon my mentioning this personal history. I do it that you may appreciate the better my thankfulness to God that you have been raised up to bring this matter to the whole country's attention. From all reports, you have done it in so beautiful a spirit and with such force as to revive my hope that it may yet be taken up by the ministers, teachers and physicians, especially, and so brought home to every parent and to the generation just starting in its teens. For all you have done and are doing in this and other important departments of life, many of your [fellow] citizens, even if they have not the [page 2] courage to write and tell you, are most grateful.
Though my problem in this sparsely settled country, where I have been for four years, is in some respects the opposite of what it was in the congested district of our metropolis, yet my ambition to bring about Church unity, especially in these little towns, provides me with an object demanding the very best that is in me.
With every good wish for your work,
Faithfully yours,
Robert L Paddock [signed]
Bishop of Eastern Oregon.
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