the determining years, but such is not true of the adult. Habits going back many years, set ways and methods of living, make impossible anything but slow change. In fact, the quick revolutionary change of front is unnatural and also dangerous in most instances.

One of the most serious defects in our philosophy as to what is good technique in social case work centers about our failure to realize that the average man and the average woman are not capable of doing well all those things that enter into social case work in its highest form, and we are average people. We must, therefore, think out more protective and preventive processes, so that instead of talking about social case work for great masses of human beings we will emphasize the preventive elements in lives and communities so as to free more and more people from needing the services of these super-specialists.

I realize that in taking this point of view I run counter to the prevailing opinion of many whose work and lives I value most highly; but certainly, if the protection of children-separate from their own families-rests solely or largely upon the existence of social case work such as I have described, then I very freely say that I see no way whereby they can be protected. Consider the abilities, the intellectual and personal equipments, of those of us engaged in children's work. By what right do we claim a superiority in knowledge and power and understanding? Think of staff workers in institutions who get twenty-five, thirty, and forty dollars a month, and then consider the problems presented to them for solution in the lives of children day by day. If ability is required to do the thing described as social case work, where is the ability to be found, and how prevailing is it in children's work?

Think of our lack of experience and training in the care of children, of our assumption that there is not very much that is decisive in the fact of parenthood. Think of how we come and go, how short are our terms of service with most of our organizations, how most of us are in the thirty-year-old group telling the fifty-year-old group how to treat their children. Consider how frequently we need social case work ourselves, but won't take it when it is offered. How utterly impossible it is to do all the things the books stipulate because we are not interested, or our boards are not interested in a qualitative service, and this in spite of the fact that children must have a qualitative care. Just where do we go with our battered army and rain soaked powder? An army implies training. Where do we get our training? What kind of training is it? Are there fifty children's agencies in the whole country-fifty out of seven thousand-that give practical training in the art-yes and science of child care? Some say "Yes"; others "No." But the odds favor the latter. What do we offer to these workers in the way of study and research? Is a profession ground out or down in a treadmill of superficialities?

The public school is the finest agency yet devised for the development of high standards of civilization. It is being looked to for the development of character and for the development of efficiency. It is our duty to create in children a sense of duty, a love of beauty, the understanding of spiritual things, color, form, art, for these are the basis of true living. We have spent much precious time debating the worth of wholly transient work for children, failing so many times to get close to the real heart of the matter. I beg of you not to further delay in determining that these admitted values should be brought to children even if we have to wreck or dissolve a great mass of so-called child welfare or child caring equipment.

Dr. Marty, Inspector of Schools of Toronto, in an article on "Education and Citizenship," says: "One of the most hopeful signs of the New Era which we have entered is the quickened sense of public responsibility in the matter of education. The importance of education looms larger today in the mind of the general public than ever before. The world has had an object lesson on the mighty influence of education in shaping national life and ideals, or in other words, "in making for citizenship." It was the influence of the school and of the college with their doctrine of "Will to Power" which transformed the ideals of the German people in one generation, and we have good authority for believing that a thoroughly nationalized system of education has been utilized to shape the ideals of the people of Japan. The thinking public, pushing these facts to their logical conclusion, may well ask: "What may we not accomplish in the cause of good citizenship if education will concentrate on directing the minds of the youth of the nation toward the importance of spiritual values in life as against the material? If one generation of educational propaganda can result in complete national deterioration, what can it not accomplish if directed towards national uplift ?"

Accordingly our conception of the scope of education has been much enlarged within the last few years. Education is no longer confined to the acquisition of skill in the use of tools of education, nor to the acquisition of knowledge, or even of culture through acquaintance with the storehouses of the past. The problem of education is being recognized as the problem of citizenship in its fullest sense-citizenship in the community and in the nation. It must be clear that not upon the school alone falls the responsibility of shaping the citizenship of tomorrow. So great a task demands that the school should have the active co-operation of all the educational, moral, and religious forces in the community, whether these forces emanate from the social institutions of the home and the church or from the various organizations which form a part of our complex social system.

There is much difference of opinion as to how the school shall educate for the character which stands for a high type of citizenship. Some are of the opinion that the training should be incidental through the teaching of history and literature. Some think that the introduction of the Bible as a textbook would be the solution. It must not be forgotten that the Bible and catechism were taught in the schools of Germany with great assiduity, and yet the nation was not saved from materialism. Much, of course, depends upon the personality of the teacher; but the most spiritually endowed teacher cannot accomplish the desired result without the co-operation of the varied forces of the community. Here is one reason why the profession should welcome and utilize any organization that seeks to co-operate in the cause of education. There is another factor involved in citizenship which is practical rather than ideal. It is utilitarian and economic, for the first obligation of citizenship is self-support. The school should help the child to find himself in life. It should give the primary training that will form the best basis for his future specialization. Aside from the right of every child to all the education he is capable of receiving, it is well to remember that it is wisdom on our part to build up an intelligent, highly trained democracy.

For every child denied the right to grow
Beneath the flag shall be its secret foe.

Social work in the schools means the understanding of the personal problems of children caught at a time when they are easiest to understand and handle. Social case

work with children in the public schools presents few of the abnormalities and intrusions which hold true in the case of children removed from their own homes. Let private funds initiate and extend this service of social work in the public school. Ultimately the expense will be borne in large part by the public educational authorities. I will leave to others to indicate the difficulties of family work or prison case work. We emphasize the machine—the organization, forgetting that principles and ideas are what endure in institutions or organizations, and that many of the latter are built around that which cannot be called ideas.

The juvenile courts, the industrial schools, have great values in limited directions. Yet the juvenile court in only a few places has realized the thing which eighteen and twenty years ago was prophesied for it as a general development. The juvenile court too frequently doesn't operate at all, or, when it does, so constantly forgets that only through qualitative work can children be helped. The machine is geared to suck in en masse rather than to operate selectively for the children of a community.

The agencies to which the juvenile court refers certain of its special wards, particularly the industrial school, call for interpretation, criticism, and change. A review of industrial school work at strategic spots reveals unquestionably the fact that, due to a very general lack of social case work, these same schools yield infinitesimal results in proportion to their great cost and outlay. This is not said in criticism of all staffsdevoted and preciously unselfish workers serve here as in other fields—but they are facing colossal and insuperable difficulties in the problems presented to them. Children frequently arrive too late to be helped, and because of pressure, insufficient understanding, and overcrowding within the organizations, they pass through in a hurried fashion, in a vain attempt to have attached to them, as in passing, some slight new self-control or new experience which must be made to offset great and overpowering character twists or environmental maladjustments. Is this not a time to say that the industrial schools do not prevent delinquency, and that, moreover, the juvenile court, because of the imperfections which permeate it, does not pull as weighty an oar as we have been led to hope for.

We are superficial in our general attitude toward the extension of state services in the field of child welfare. In spite of the fact that much that is being done by the private agencies is poorly done, there persists the myth that where the state in its collective capacity operates, it does poor work. This is regardless of the fact that in many states, as Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Minnesota, and again the Federal Children's Bureau, produce outstanding examples of the highest type of work, but under public control. Private work does not afford in many, many instances, those protections to staff members which assist in building up a good personnel. There is no assurance of tenure, no assurance of protection in the years to come for the performance of faithful service at the present time. Moreover, there is a load of child caring work which involves great risks and few possibilities in return. The children who suffer from a long accumulation of mental, physical, and character ills are primarily the responsibility of the state. The private agencies should use their resources for the more hopeful, more promising, and more pioneering types of work. In many communities the existing private agencies do a lot of useless work, and their resources available for good work are utterly inadequate. We should be more courageous in working to a larger and larger assumption by the state of what is just as much its problem as is that of health and education.

The financial aspects of the problem deserve far more time than is available in this whole evening. We simply have not faced the total cost of child caring work, either in terms of a good job for an individual child, or good work for all children, and we hardly dare to face the cost of work poorly done. It costs from $600 to $1500 per year per child in the care of foster institutional agencies. These average costs at the highest point are greater than the total average income for the average American family. The responsibility for the expenditure of such sums of money on individual children is great. Comparatively few of those who receive children realize how great it is. The true realization of all that is involved in the foster care of children forces every thoughtful student to agree that there is something appalling in the fact that not enough money can be found to give even average care to all the children at present in care. And then there is the sham of our rivalry and competition.

Home finding work when well done, and that is the only way to do it,—is something different from the free for-all grabbing which characterizes so much that passes for home finding work. What is the best way to help children? To take one from a family and spend $800.00 a year on it, leaving a mother and four children behind, the latter struggling under a low standard of living, or to put into the family the amount which would otherwise have been spent in a foster home? You see the answer to this question, but great numbers of people can't even guess at it. The approach which we make in our appeals in our fiscal statements quite conceals these cost factors. We talk of placing and supervising a needy child in a foster home at a flat rate of $50 a head, and this type of dishonest statement cheapens in the minds of the general public what is essentially a costly and expensive service. We accumulate capital for future uncertainties when priceless opportunities wait helplessly at our doors because of lack of funds. If all the child welfare agencies in the country were efficiently managed, and doing all the most valuable things first, using all of their income, and generous portions of their capital, such a hole could be cut in the problem of juvenile dependency and neglect as to make the task for the next generation a very much simpler one. We lose our heads in contemplation of large scale organizations. Helping people is a retail job and the mammoth organization may not succeed so easily in working out the details of intimate personal service. Mere organization does not insure spiritual things.

We are extravagant, and therefore superficial, in the estimates we make of our own successes. The normal percentage of success in human attainments for the whole community is discouragingly low, yet great numbers of children's executives unblushingly claim percentages of 80, 90, and 95 per cent of successful work for the children in care. In view of the way we do our job, by what mysticism or chicanery is it made so successful? Helping children involves trained service. How much training do we get, and how do we get it? The almost general observation is that the entrance upon this amazingly difficult task of working with children is haphazard and a matter of chance. We fail to realize how interdependent we are; how, if our objects are to be achieved, we must work together. This interrelative co-operation attitude is not helped at the present time because of the particular and special ways in which we emphasize and exaggerate our religious and racial prejudices. It is not possible to have a community-wide, non-sectarian child caring organization in view of the trend of affairs throughout our religious and racial lives. Sectarian and denominational lines, for the present at least, are more sharply drawn, racial animosities are more

sharply drawn; therefore, if religion, pure and undefiled, is to seek out all the hidden places in our lives, it must be through things still more fundamental than those that engross most of us in children's work. What are these things? They are health and education. Through them every destructive element that exists in life today is subject to attack and control.

Education-the realization as to the superimportance of the public schools as child caring and child training organizations becomes more and more evident. There are undoubtedly difficulties in working out our educational program, but the future of this country rests upon a unified common school system-not parochial schoolsnot private schools, but public schools, and in view of what happens to children nowdue to the imperfections of our school system-there awaits a mighty opportunity in the field of truly preventive, truly creative social work in the public schools. Parents get their training from parents in childhood. There is no end to the evil of woe if we wait until their children become parents before we begin their training process. Social work in the public schools is the new El Dorado!

We must revamp our projects of care to the physically handicapped child, and to cease this institutionalizing of children who are normal mentally but whose bodies are imperfect physically. The more abnormal the body, the more normal must be the daily life. We need to take a sounder point of view as to the whole mental hygiene of children-not to say that every child must be "psyched"--but to take from the psychologists the essential things that they have to give us and to apply them in our daily work so that all of the children, all of the people whom we reach, may be better understood. It is wild for those in the mental hygiene field to say that every child must receive the individual personal service and analysis of the trained mental hygienist. There are not enough such in the world to do the job for even a tiny percentage of the children living today.

What I have said does not mean an immediate scrapping of work and interest for dependent, neglected, and delinquent children. The vast resources in the hands of these agencies need to be melted down and run into other molds. Our money will be made available for family preservation; we will board children with their own parents; we will give family relief out of our largess and with the family agencies standing by refuse to cast our eyes. We will have money to make possible health work for children to the extent that they won't need foster care.

Let us be willing to agree that there should be scales of values applied to the children's work of cities and states, and let us see which state can lead all the rest in the fundamental and embracive character of its newer kind of children's work. Let us criticize ourselves and see that through self-analysis there can come progress; that we are too little prone to think fundamentally, to seek for cause and effect, to admit mistakes, to admit fallibility. Let us be open-minded to the question as to whether the general improvement in community life in place after place in the country is not more than the product of better wages, of good schools, of health work, of recreational control, of mothers' assistance, of mental hygiene, than all the so-called child caring, and even the family caring, agencies. Let us look into the field of prevention, of science, to see how far birth control, family limitation, training for parenthood, can be made a general possession; to see if we can view its possibility, not as the essence of impurity, but rather the opposite, spelling healthy, normal, happy lives for children who are wanted.