My dear Stanley
Your letter came when I was "Hooverizing" in Denver, I then waited to talk to Weber about it so that I have had to delay until today before replying.
In the first place I can quite understand your feeling of restlessness in regard to the war and not being part of its activities -- we all feel it of course and I suppose that is why I am speaking for the Food Administration. But there is no doubt that there are all sorts of things that are equally important with being connected directly with the camps whether as a soldier or in Y.M.C.A. work or Red Cross [etc.] [page 2] I should think that you were doing the best thing possible in raising food -- [illegible] is as important as any other [illegible] of food -- and that as the government itself had decided that agriculturalists were to be exempted ↑in many cases↓ even if they were of draft age, that your conscience could be quite clear. It seems to me that with a new ranch and a family, that unless the emergency were much greater than it is now, that you ought not to go into camp work.
I have been trying to get places for several people and various difficulties are always encountered. [page 3] Married people are never sent abroad together and only once in a while are both allowed to go even separately. Most of the [semi]-military activities are placed under military regulation so far as [traveling] and locations are concerned. It would be considered [unheard] of, to try to take a child.
Your last letter written at night, made me feel again, what I have several times suspected from your letters that so hot a summer coming after your typhoid fever had been a bad time for such hard work as you have been doing, adding evening & morning work to a full days hard effort. I wanted to [page 4] talk to you about it when we came out in Feby or March to see if we couldn't perhaps make a better arrangement for next year, but all that is too complicated to write about.
I hope very much that you won't enlist. If you have quite up your mind that you want the regular camp service both Weber and I will see what we can do for Y.M.C.A. work, but I should rather you would postpone any such decision until after I see you which will probably be in Feb'y or March.
I am going to Washington next week & will keep my eyes open here and there for any such openings for either Myra or [page 5] yourself, with both or perhaps one at least in this country -- but my advice is against it for both of you unless the demand is much greater. So many American women have volunteered for canteen service and for Red Cross work in France that according to some accounts there are already too many there. I have been trying for some time to get a girl into canteen work who is a domestic science teacher with all sorts of training for it, but I ↑have not yet↓ been successful.
I will write you again after I come back from Washington but in the meantime and always I think that you ought to remember that the great business of the world just now is to [page 6] raise food and to put more land under cultivation -- that people in Europe are actually starving and that it is not impossible that the U.S.A. will become more and more involved in serious food difficulties.
Please tell Myra that I was very grateful for her letter, and that while I am sympathetic with what you both have in mind, I don't believe that the time has yet come. I am always your dear Aunt Jane Addams
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