Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/51

 32 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS Perhaps there could be found no better expression of the attitude of Chicago toward Miss Addams than the banquet held at the Hotel La Salle the latter part of February, 1913, just before her departure for a four months ^ vacation trip to Egypt and Italy. Twelve hundred guests met at the call of the Progressive Club of Chicago. From varied walks of life came expressions of esteem. Bainbridge Colby, of New York, but expressed what all felt as he summed up the career of this woman whom Graham Taylor in an editorial in the Chicago Daily News csIIb ** Chicago's foremost citizen'*: deed ! Refusing to lull her conscience by a dreamer's scheme, unbeguiled by paper reforms, she set out early in life — and I use her words — ^to make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society and to add the social function to democracy.' Proceeding upon the sober theory that the dependence of classes upon each other is re- ciprocal, she determined to deal directly with the simplest hu- man wants. the assertion that the year just closed is the richest and most fruitful of her life thus far. This year she has sown broad- cast the seeds of ripened purpose, of experience and deep re- flection. She has scattered wide the accumulations of the past. To a waiting and famished people, who hungered and thirsted after righteousness, she has thrown the rich spoils of her life. ' ' And then to the tune of **My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" twelve hundred voices sang: Jane Addams sails over the sea, We 're glad she 's to have a vacation. But bring back Jane Addams to me. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome,
 * What an extraordinary mission of life is hers,*' he said,
 * * and how wondrously her life has preached the sermon of the
 * Abounding in achievement as her life has been, I venture
 * Jane Addams sails over the ocean,
 * * We '11 lend her to Greece and to Egypt,