basic principle to be kept in mind in dealing with child life and its development. We have learned that we cannot pursue a policy which casts aside the mental defective, because he cannot keep pace with the normal child and that we have a duty to perform to the immigrant, whom we admit within our borders. In other words, we have extended our program so that the protection of human lives and human rights is given a very prominent position upon it. We have recognized our responsibility to the weak, to the helpless and to the unfortunate and have declared that the community owes them a duty of help and assistance.

Great progress has been made in this direction in the past few years, but there are still vast possibilities for improvement. The social worker is largely responsible for the present advance. We must look to him and to her also for our future development.

I believe this convention will be extremely helpful to the whole country, and especially to our community in which it is convening. I welcome you all to our city and assure you that we will listen with attention to your deliberations, advice, and suggestions.

Rev. William H. P. Faunce, D.D., President, Brown University, Providence

Brown University welcomes this large and varied assembly to its historic campus. Hospitality means not only the opening of houses and hotels and halls, but the opening of minds. It means not only the "glad hand" and the spoken greeting, but it means the interchange of ideas and facts and principles; and in that sense Rhode Island has always been famous for its hospitality. When Massachusetts, in the old days long since forgotten, welcomed only those who thought as she thought and lived as she lived, Rhode Island opened its doors to "Turks and infidels." (There is no implication whatever intended in regard to the faiths represented here tonight.) The Quakers played a large part in the founding of this community, and they were tolerant and openminded. The mild Quaker virtues are emblazoned on the street corners. I live on "Hope" Street, on one side of this campus is "Benefit" Street and on another "Benevolent." Other streets are named "Peace," "Prudence," "Faith," and "Friendship." The Quakers were thrifty as well as pious, and so down by the river we have "Pound," "Shilling," and "Pence," and even "Doubloon" Street which may be a relic of the old East India trade.

Years ago Irving Richman, a young student from Iowa, went to Oxford to study modern history, and came under the influence of James Bryce. Mr. Bryce said to him, "If you want to write history, go to Rhode Island, for there you will find the most interesting corner of the American Republic," and the result was The Making and Meaning of Rhode Island. Nowhere has the golden age of Newport been pictured more nobly than in its pages. In that golden age of our sister city-not the gilded age, which came later there were four hundred ships sailing annually to all the ports of Europe and Asia, bringing back with them not only goods, but conceptions of life. So when the French soldiers came to Newport during the Revolutionary War, they said the society there reminded them of Paris, because of its brilliancy and because of its artistic and literary traditions.

And from these historic halls have emerged lives of leadership in other fields. From those windows in University Hall once looked out Adoniram Judson, the first American missionary. Here John Hay wrote those ballads which first made him

famous. From that window yonder looked out the young face of Charles E. Hughes, who little dreamed in those days of the leadership that was then before him. On this platform only a few months ago Marshall Foch stood and spoke to our students a message which they will never forget. Two years ago there stood in this place Cardinal Mercier, bringing a message of humanity and sympathy and tolerance and hope from his stricken people to America. You are treading on historic ground, and making it more historic by your coming. The university is glad to have you tread these "green and winding ways," to walk under the shadow of these elms, and share our hospitality for a few days, that you and we may work more closely together in the future for the making of a fairer and finer and more enduring America.

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS-CHANGING FUNDAMENTALS

OF SOCIAL WORK

Robert W. Kelso, Secretary, Council of Social Agencies, Boston

If a ship, blown from her course, should chance by Easter Island, her lookout might see upon the skyline of a deserted shore an assemblage of huge idols. They have come to us from prehistoric times. They are the spirits of the departed, bound in stone. They sit, each in his great stone chair, his back to the sea, gazing at the cloudrack, forgetful of the seasons, careless of mankind, enduring through the ages of time.

They embody an idea. It is the idea of immortality.

The rain courses upon their furrowed cheeks, and the salt spray drives about their massive ears; the sun parches the lentils that struggle for a footing in the hollows of their shoulders, but they remain-mute-eternal as the rock.

They embody an idea at the bottom of man's notion of the nature of things. They personify a fundamental.

The basic truths of human existence do not change. Our conception of them, as we come to understand with clearer mind, is always changing. Thus it is that we may speak of changing fundamentals in that process of analyzing human relations which we call social work.

But contrast with a fundamental, if you will, that which is merely our conception of it. For decades science has told us that this whole universe is in a state of decline like a giant clock wound up in the beginning to run down with the passing of time. How otherwise to explain the cooling of the earth and the burning of the sun. It is an assumption that has become basic in our thought. But now comes radium and radio activity, throwing off energy which comes apparently from nowhere-transmutation of matter hitherto impossible. How can we explain it except we assume that the life of the universe is a life of cycles, that the earth was incandescent once and likely will be again. Thus is our old concept overturned and a new hypothesis enthroned.

We see the fundamentals of our existence with the imperfect eye of inexperience and ignorance; wherefore the methods of our search into the eternal truth of things are always changing. As we see for the moment with clearer vision down that vista of science, or peer with rare opportunity over this wall of prejudice, we gain newer and ever new glimpses of those ultimate truths which we seek. The truths themselves change not; our conception of them is always changing.

And there is one further distinction which we must draw. There are some fundamentals, even in method, which remain constant. In the midst of changing technique

and improving ways of doing things the axiom is fixed that sound social judgment rests upon plain, sober, common sense, and by common sense I mean that robust element which underlay Cromwell; which supported Washington; which was the mighty strength of Lincoln; which in this present hour marks the difference between the statecraft of our Mr. Hughes, looking upward to the intelligence of a thinking people and the demagoguery of Lenine, which scorns intelligence and shouts to the emotions of the ill-balanced in all corners of the earth.

Common sense is the strength of effective social service. It is a constant.

As we look out over the plain of human society, we observe what we call a social complex. It is the sum total of joys, of sorrows; of comedy, of tragedy; of wealth and of poverty; of genius and mediocrity; of loyalty to friend and country; of hatred and contempt for law and the rights of others: re-actions all of them from the circumstance that we live together. These are the physical symptoms of our social complex.

It is easy to observe that whatever disturbs profoundly the condition under which man lives upon the earth will have its marked reflection in this complex. The progress of invention and discovery, revealing new channels for the changing of human activity, alter the social complex. We are one human race in the Middle Ages, with primitive language, with no art of printing, with no industrial machinery, with no surgery and little medicine. We are another human race today, with our bewildering advance toward the elimination of space and time and the uncovering of those boundless forces of nature which are made to labor in our behalf.

Our complex changes, and with it change our social reactions. Wherefore it is that the basic processes in social work must change also.

Bear with me if you will through a short analysis of some of these changes. Within a few decades there has been a revolution in the physical condition under which the people of this nation live. Less than a century ago we were a frontier people, engaged largely in agriculture. Today we are building cities, constructing single industries so large that cities must perforce spring up in a day about them to house their workers. The seat of power has forsaken the furrow: and the springs of our daily life, our leadership in business, in law, in medicine, in letters, in all thought and action, emanate from the city. Our new contacts are more intimate and more dynamic. The delightful freedom of God's sunshine has given way to man-made shadows in dull brick alleys; and our little ones must pass through the valley of that shadow.

Parallel with this change in physical environment has come a development-the greatest of the last half century—in American thinking. I may define it in general terms as the realization of ourselves as a society or community. In frontier days we were a populace made up of individuals each supreme in himself, yielding to government that grudging spark of sovereignty required to make us a nation. Government was a necessary evil: it should encroach as little as possible. The law existed to enforce those obligations only which we of our own free will have assumed. Without consent we owed no man a groat. It was an attitude which one great thinker has styled "the Puritanism of the common law."

But now that Puritan individualism is passing, a revolution has come about. Dimly we have been groping for a truer basis in our philosophy of conduct. Necessity has been the mother of our invention, and the invention is this: That we have made social relationship the basis of our law, and social necessity the driving force in its develop

ment.

Aforetime we gave effect to the individual will. One might exact his pound of flesh if there be but the contract. Today we strive for the greatest benefit to the greatest number, at the least sacrifice to person and property.

It is the most far-reaching change in American history. For social work it is the basic fact.

In those other Puritanical days a bit of alms sufficed to assuage distress. As for the individual, he had called his misery about his head. If a fool, let him suffer for being a fool. Where tragedy interposed, it was the device of an all-wise God.

Today, when social relations are the groundwork of justice, and social necessity the driving force in the growth of our law, there has arisen the need of an analyst of our social contacts, a professional student of human relations; a statesman to shape our social thinking. So enters the trained social worker. We, and the world with us, have passed from an age of charity to an epoch of constructive social service: charitable in a truer sense, organic; reaching out toward justice.

Note then, if you will, the effect of this fundamental change upon a few of the major phases of social service.

Family relief. The historical root stalk of social work is the relief of the poor. It may be said of any people that the state of their civilization can be gauged by the way they care for their poor. It is a problem of the ages. It deals with that vast accumulation of human wreckage which lies strewn along the march of progress like a morain. Its picturesque character, the wandering mendicant, has tramped the highways of mankind since the dawn of history-for your beggar is not a thistle blown by the vagrant breezes of the last autumn, or of the last decade, or of the last century. In all times and among all peoples he is that same dramatic figure, persisting through all change. He is the hero of the biblical parable; the subplot of Shakespeare; the curse of empires; springing out like fungus upon the surface of decay.

To this day the professional beggar plies his trade upon our city streets, and thrives. The plodder in honest toil cannot hope to earn as much. Your citizen stumbles upon him at the edge of the curb. He sees and is filled with compassion. With pity he pays, and with pride he justifies the payment. And through this bit of heartfelt sympathy he does that which man has done since there were beggars and streets and chill days, and will continue to do so long as pity rises in the human heart.

In earlier days the relief of the poor meant the giving of alms. The gift was bound up in religious rite; and the good of the giver's soul was the primary aim. Then came the day when the recipients of alms and doles were divided into groups: the sick by themselves; the aged and the infirm together; and the able-bodied dependents given a work test.

This was the beginning of reason in poor relief. Since that day we have advanced far, yet there are institutions-no farther away than the great father of waters-where the lame, the halt, the blind, the insane, and unoffending childhood mingle with the vicious with hardly a pretense at restraint.

In the early days of this colony great emphasis was laid upon the maintenance of the family. It took expression in legal directions to the householder. He must keep his children occupied-he must eschew idleness and forbid those in his charge to run a vicious course. If he fell sick or through like misfortune came to want, it was not unusual to build him a house if need be, taking a mortgage in favor of the government. The towns of New England often owned milch-cows which they placed successively

with poor families, thus insuring a fresh milk supply with little wear and tear on the machinery.

But in later days of heavy economic stress, it became harder to keep families together, and institutional care came into extensive use, especially for children.

Today we look back to the family as the starting-point in poor relief and count our truest fundamental the working out of the personality of the individual, developing his latent power as homebuilder and citizen. Thus we began by relieving distress. Now we strive to remove the causes which lead to distress. Food and shelter have given place in importance to personal service, though it is common still to enter the office of a relief agency and stand abashed before a stern old monolith whose business is the mechanical termination of the poor. This sybil is becoming extinct. The carefully trained case worker with a heart and an imagination is taking her place. The dispenser of doles is departing, and in his stead is arising the skilled social worker-the citizen of vision who can glimpse the finished statue in the granite block; who can see the summer blossoms in the snow.

Child care. For decades we have told each other that men are born free and equal. The truest phase of that political assertion for social workers is that every child has a right to a fighting chance. Wherefore, in his days of helplessness he may command the service of the community to start him in the way of developing into effective citizenship. If he is found in an ash barrel and no man claims him, the community is his foster parent and will bring him up to self-support and competency. If he is illegitimate, the public will see that his rights are preserved and will guard him through infancy. If he be mentally dull the state will protect him and will look after him to see that he be not a menace to society. If, suffering from none of these tragic handicaps, he has parents who neglect him, and he becomes delinquent, the public again will step in for his protection rather than his punishment.

This is the modern practice. It was not always so. Though the process of indenture, which was essentially the placing of children in free homes, was practiced in New England from the first days of the settlement, the treatment of children down to a very recent day was harsh. If the little fellow committed a crime he was sent to prison. Jesse Pomeroy, guilty of murder, went to Charlestown at the age of fourteen, there to be kept in solitary confinement for the rest of his natural life. That was before most of us in this assembly were born. Yet he is still serving his time. Like a relic of ancient days and outgrown legal systems he now walks his few paces in the prison yard; and all about him are the evidences of an enlightened probation law, a fair system of parole, a method of treating juvenile delinquents which aims to develop character and start the springs of citizenship. The first forty years of his time he spent in complete solitary. His is a living death. The little fellows who came after him bask in a sunshine the rays of which have never touched his pallid cheek. He was a great problem. but no greater perhaps than Judge Cabot of the juvenile court at Boston may have to deal with once, or perhaps twice, in a morning.

From a rigid system of accountability of the citizen and a crust for misery, we have come to methods of personal service aimed at helping others to help themselves.

Health. The effect of our new philosophy of conduct upon problems of the public health is marked. Within your memory and mine a man's physical condition was his own personal business. Barring the quarantine of a few of the most dreaded diseases, the individual might take his malady where he pleased, might carry a loathsome disease