A little girl with curvature of the spine, whose mother had died when she was a baby, she abjectly admired her father, a man of consequence in frontier Illinois, a friend of Lincoln and a member of the state legislature, who had a floor mill and a lumber mill on his place. Whenever there were strangers at Sunday school, she would try to walk out with her uncle so that her father should not be disgraced by people's knowing that such a fine man had a daughter with a crooked spine.

When he took her one day to a mill which was surrounded by horrid little houses and explained to her, in answer to her questions, that the reason people lived in such houses was that they couldn't afford anything better, she told her father that, when she grew up, she should herself continue to live in a big house but it should stand among the houses of poor people.

In 1915 Jane Addams was already renowned for the establishment of Hull-House, the Chicago settlement that decided her reputation as one of the Progressive Era's most effective reformers and social thinkers. Born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois, Addams was greatly influenced by her father, who stood out in the community as a great supporter of Abraham. Lincoln and an opponent of slavery and was a God-fearing man who, his daughter claimed, favored Quakerism although regularly attending services in both Methodist and Presbyterian churches. Addams, therefore, was reared in a religious home that valued humanitarianism. As a girl, she expressed sympathy for former slaves and other impoverished people in the community. As many other children whose parents opposed slavery but supported the Civil War, Addams grew up aware of the dilemma between fighting a just war and maintaining moral witness against all violence. These values made her a perfect candidate for a lifetime of work around social justice issues. Her upbringing held her in good stead throughout her public school years, college-level education at the Rockford Female Seminary, and a period of searching for the kind of work she could do to serve both herself and humanity.

After visiting Toynbee Hall, a settlement house that had opened in London's East End in 1884, Jane Addams felt she had found her path. A year after the visit, in February 1889, she and her friend Ellen Gates Starr rented the semi-abandoned mansion of Charles J. Hull, once a country home but now situated in the slums of Chicago. There they created Hull-House as a settlement that would serve a predominantly immigrant community. Within four years of its inception the settlement boasted an array of dubs and functions as well as a day nursery, gymnasium, dispensary, playground, and cooperative boardinghouse known as the Jane Club. Lobbying and public campaigns launched by such Hull-House residents as Florence Kelley and Alice Hamilton resulted in an array of legislation, including passage of the first factory inspection act in Illinois in 1893, establishment of the state's first juvenile court in 1899, and investigations into city sanitary and health conditions.

While Hull-House made Addams a household name, it also resulted in her election in 1909 as the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Correction (later known as the National Conference of Social Work), her being the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University (1910), and her being called upon to second Theodore Roosevelt's nomination to run for president in 1912 on the Progressive Party ticket. From 1911 through 1914 she also served as first vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1913 she attended the convention of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Budapest, where she met many women she would see again at The Hague congress.

Three factors thus led to Addams's sensitivity to peace: first, youthful exposure to her father's ideals of social and racial justice and tile fact that he passed along a humanitarian, strongly Christian identity; second, work with the poor and immigrant community at Hull-House, which taught her about commonalities among people and the importance of ethnicity to identity; and, third, work in the woman suffrage campaign, which awakened her to the specific injustices that women the world over experienced in personal, political, and economic arenas. Her ever-growing political clout and international reputation as an effective, respected organizer added to her attraction when other activist women were considering who should lead the new peace movement.

Addams's first foray into the world of peace was her membership in the Anti-Imperialist League, founded to protest the Spanish-American War of 1898 that resulted in an extended war in which the United States colonized the Philippines. She particularly deplored the racist and imperialistic language of the war, which referred to the "browning" of the U.S. Population should numbers of Filipinos enter the country and by referring to "taming" and "civilizing" the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba (which became a protectorate of the United States) expressed U.S. ideals of white Christian Superiority. By 1902 she began to formalize her ideas in print with Democracy and Social Ethics. In this work, Addams made clear her belief that various ethnic groups could learn to live and work together and in the process develop a collective social morality that would eventually lead to Cross-Cultural understanding, tolerance, and the use of what now would be called conflict resolution or negotiation and mediation. As the democratic nature of living together became more embedded in local communities it would set the model for future national and international communities based on cooperation rather than conflict.

In my long advocacy of peace I had consistently used one line of appeal; contending that peace is no longer an abstract dogma; that a dynamic peace is found in that new internationalism promoted by the men of all nations who are determined upon the abolition of degrading poverty, disease and ignorance, with their resulting inefficiency and tragedy. I believed that peace was not merely an absence of war, but the nurture of human life, and that in time this nurture would do away with war as a natural process

I told him of the opportunity for work on the drainage canal and intimated that if any employment were obtainable, he ought to exhaust that possibility before asking for help. The man replied that he had always worked indoors and that he could not endure outside work in winter. He did not come again for relief, but worked for two days digging on the canal, where he contracted pneumonia and died a week later. I have never lost trace of the two little children he left behind him, although I cannot see them without a bitter consciousness that it was at their expense I learned that life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man's difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is almost sure to invite blundering.

I knew Jane Addams and have never forgotten her piece of advice to me: "If you want to be surrounded by second-rate ability, you will dominate your settlement. If you want the best ability, you must allow great liberty of action among your residents." Jane Addams's name today is among the most famous in the world. But perhaps few people realize the incalculable good she has done in helping others to enlarge and glorify their own work. Many people can build their fortune by using others. Few can encourage ability without dominating it.

Jane Addams is a woman of indomitable energy and persistence, of enthusiasm and adaptability; intellectually she is strong and possesses a keen sense of a humour. She is a slender, delicate, pink-cheeked woman with a face as fine as a cameo and a manner unassuming and attractive.

To those who say that most of these hideous and terrorizing acts have been committed in the name of chivalry, in order to make the lives and honor of women safe, perhaps it is women themselves who can best reply that bloodshed and arson and ungoverned anger have never yet controlled lust. On the contrary, that lust has always been the handmaid of these, and is prone to be found where they exist; that the suppression of the bestial cannot be accomplished by the counter exhibition of the brutal only. Perhaps it is woman who can best testify that the honor of women is only secure in those nations and those localities where law and order prevail; that the sight of human blood and the burning of human flesh has historically been the signal for lust; that an attempt to allay and control it by scenes such as those is as ignorant as it is futile and childish.

Miss Addams shines, so respectful of everyone's views, so eager to understand and sympathize, so patient of anarchy and even ego, yet always there, strong, wise and in the lead. No 'managing', no keeping dark and bringing things subtly to pass, just a radiating wisdom and power of judgement.

Let us put ourselves in the position of the striking men who have fallen upon workmen who have taken their places. The strikers have for years belonged to an organization devoted to securing better wages and a higher standard of living, not only for themselves, but for all men in their trade. They honestly believe, whether they are right or wrong, that their position is exactly the same which a nation, in time of war, takes towards a traitor who has deserted his country's camp for the enemy. We regard the treatment accorded to the deserter with much less horror than the same treatment when it is accorded to the 'scab', largely because in one instance we are citizens are participants, and in the other we allow ourselves to stand aside.

Women who live in the country sweep their own dooryards and may either feed the refuse of the table to a flock of chickens or allow it innocently to decay in the open air and sunshine. In a crowded city quarter, however, if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed a tenement house may see her children sicken and die of diseases from which she alone is powerless to shield them, although her tenderness and devotion are unbounded. In short, if women would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying quite outside of her immediate household. The individual conscience and devotion are no longer effective. The statement is sometimes made that the franchise for women would be valuable only so far as the educated women exercised it. This statement totally disregards the fact those those matters in which women's judgement is most needed are far too primitive and basic to be largely influenced by what we call education.

The first thing which was striking is this, that the same causes and reasons for the war were heard everywhere. Each warring nation solemnly assured you it is fighting under the impulse of self-defense.

Another thing which we found very striking was that in practically all of the foreign offices the men said that a nation at war cannot make negotiations and that a nation at war cannot even express willingness to receive negotiations, for if it does either, the enemy will at once construe it as a symptom of weakness.

Generally speaking, we heard everywhere that this war was an old man's war; that the young men who were dying, the young men who were doing the fighting, were not the men who wanted the war, and were not the men who believed in the war; that someone in church and state, somewhere in the high places of society, the elderly people, the middle-aged people, had established themselves and had convinced themselves that this was a righteous war, that this war must be fought out, and the young men must do the fighting.

In this war the French or English soldier who had been killed in a bayonet charge gave his life to protect his home and country. For his supreme exit he had prepared himself by months of discipline. Through the winter in the trenches he had endured shells, disease, snow and ice. For months he had been separated from his wife, children, friends - all those he most loved. When the order to charge came it was for them he gave his life, that against those who destroyed Belgium they might preserve their home, might live to enjoy peace.

Miss Addams denies him the credit of his sacrifice. She strips him of honor and courage. She tells his children, "Your father did not die for France, or for England, or for you; he died because he was drunk."

In my opinion, since the war began, no statement has been so unworthy or so untrue and ridiculous. The contempt it shows for the memory of the dead is appalling; the crudity and ignorance it displays are inconceivable.

The time was when Miss Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago held a warm place in the hearts of the American people but she is vast losing the esteem, with her earlier efforts seem to merit. Her dabbling in politics, her suffrage activity and her ill-advised methods of working for peace have very materially lowered her in the esteem of hundreds of former admirers.

In the true sense of the word, she (Jane Addams) is apparently without education. She knows no more of the discipline and methods of modern warfare than she does of its meaning. If the woman conceded by her sisters to be the ablest of her sex, is so readily duped, so little informed, men wonder what degree of intelligence is to be secured by adding the female vote to the electorate.

This world crisis should be utilized for the creation of an international government to secure without war, those high ends which they now gallantly seek to obtain upon the battlefield. With such a creed can the pacifists of today be accused of selfishness when they urge upon the United States no isolation, not indifference to moral issues and to the fate of liberty and democracy, but a strenuous endeavor to lead all nations of the earth into an organized international life worthy of civilized men.

For three of four years past Jane Addams has gone to bizarre extremes in her advocacy of weird measures and her championship of impossible people, apparently capitalizing a reputation honestly won in a worthy work, to keep herself constantly in the headlines. She has sacrificed fame for notoriety and a place in the public heart for a place in the spotlight.

It will not be for her chairmanship of the Woman's Pace Party and its earnest but mistaken activities that Jane Addams will reign in the hearts of men. And now she is seeing clearly again, and her service is with the country, with the administration, with the Allies, wholehearted and whole-souled."

Hundreds of poor laboring men and women are being thrown into jails and police stations because of their political beliefs. In fact, an attempt is being made to deport an entire political party.

These men and women, who in some respects are more American in ideals than the agents of the government who are tracking them down, are thrust into cells so crowded they cannot lie down.

And what is it these radicals seek? It is the right of free speech and free thought; nothing more than is guaranteed to them under the Constitution of the United States, but repudiated because of the war.

It is a dangerous situation we face at the present time, with the rule of the few overcoming the voice of the many. It is doubly dangerous because we are trying to suppress something upon which our very country was founded - liberty.

The cure for the spirit of unrest in this country is conciliation and education - not hysteria. Free speech is the greatest safety valve of our United States. Let us give these people a chance to explain their beliefs and desires. Let us end this suppression and spirit of intolerance which is making of America another autocracy.

It is of the utmost significance that practically all the radicalism started among women in the United States centers about Hull House, Chicago, and the Children's Bureau at Washington, with a dynasty of Hull House graduates in charge of it since its creation.

It has been shown that both the legislative program and the economic program - "social-welfare" legislation and "bread and peace" propaganda for internationalism of the food, farms, and raw materials of the world for their chief expression in persons, organizations, and bureaus connected with Hull House.

And Hull House has been able to cover its tracks quite effectively under the nationally advertised reputation of Miss Jane Addams as a social worker - who has often been painted by magazine and newspaper writers as a sort of modern Saint of the Slums - that both she and Hull House can campaign for the most radical movements, with hardly a breath of public suspicion.

Miss Jane Addams went to Passavant Hospital on the 18th May. The operation was performed on her that day but it was found that she had an incurable disease. On the 20th she sank into unconsciousness, and she died very quietly on the evening of the 21st.

May 22nd and 23rd Miss Addams lay in state in Bowen Hall at Hull House. She looked very lovely and very natural, and during the twenty-four hours she was there thousands of people passed through the Hall. The Hull House Women's Club formed a guard of honor and stood on either side of the hall, while the older boys and girls in the Clubs with white ribbons tied around their arms acted as ushers and everything was conducted in a most orderly way.

She lay in a casket with a loose light blue robe around her, her hair pushed back from her forehead as she always wore it. On either side of the casket were bright colored tulips, so that it looked as though she was resting on a bed of flowers. The hall was opened at five o'clock in the morning, and working men on their way to their jobs came in with lunch boxes in their hands, many of them kneeling on a little stool in front of the casket and saying a prayer.

The morning of the funeral - and it was a beautiful day - she was taken from Bowen Hall and placed upon the terrace in Hull House Court. This Court is surrounded by the various Hull House buildings. The funeral was at 2.30 in the afternoon. As early as ten o'clock in the morning the Court Yard was crowded with people, one or two thousand standing there all day in order to be present at the services.

When the funeral began, the music for which was furnished by the Hull House Music School, every window in the Court was filled with people, there were flowers in every window and wreaths hanging below the windows, while the terrace was banked with lilacs and apple blossoms with bright colored tulips around the edges. It was a most touching and democratic gathering. Strong men and women with children in their arms all stood weeping for the friend they had lost.