NEW YORK, April 23, 1910.
My dear Miss [Addams]: --
I have been reading your autobiography in The American Magazine. I have been very very much interested in it. I want to return a little of the interest if possible to its author and venture to think that possibly you may be interested in my book on The Thirteenth Century which I am sending you with this. It is a favorite thesis of mine that men do not develop, but that in each generation they accomplish the good that is in them as well as will ever be done if they only have high ideals and firmness of purpose. Even in science I am not so sure that we are making the advances that we think we are. We are developing inventions which is quite another thing. The only problem that the nineteenth century of which we used to be so proud really solved was that of transportation. Transportation of the human voice, human thought, the human body. But that academic question is neither here nor there.
I am sending you the book then in the hope that it may give you in return a pleasant hour or two. Mr. Riis read some of it at the Neighborhood House in New York last Fall and one of the women of the century St. Elizabeth of Hungary is surely of interest.
With all good wishes then I am,
Yours very sincerely,
Jas J Walsh [signed]
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