send him back to her to talk things over. At the same time we tell her we feel that she can help him more than we can in the present difficulty. This minimizes the antagonism that is likely to be felt when the boy runs to the clinic as a court of appeal. The question of inferiority feelings and compensation mechanisms is all-important in the diagnosis and treatment of our group of problem boys. They have known frustration in their ego and libido strivings. Failure in school has forced some to excel in petty thievery with the gang or has produced inert discouragement in others. Unpopularity on the playground has led some to seek the substitute satisfactions of daydreams. A feeling of being unloved at home has impelled others to seek comfort in auto-erotic acts or to gain attention through enuresis. Treatment for these children must give them a feeling of security and a sense of adequacy and success in a legitimate field. Here we must move very carefully, lest in bolstering up the child's self-respect we hit the staff member's own feelings of inferiority. It is easy to arouse sympathy for the discouraged, dull, or sickly child, and he is generally assured of understanding and tolerance. It is the mentally superior boy who is likely to be a thorn in the worker's side. "David is unbearable," writes one housemother; "he continually asks me the meaning of words which he knows—just to embarrass me." An interested young teacher who had organized an algebra class for three or four of the brighter boys expressed her concern over several requests to join the class. She voiced the suspicion that one of the boys already in the group was starting a conspiracy to get his friends in, and must not, of course, be allowed to succeed in any such attempt. Luring other boys-even one's best friends-into an algebra class appears to be only mildly Machiavellian, but the point at issue was, "Should that boy be allowed to 'get away with it? Should he not be shown who is boss?" This determination to beat the child at his own game is a result of the adult's longing for power in the face of a sense of inadequacy. Conquering the child at the child's level furnishes a real satisfaction to the infantile components of the adult ego. When the boy opponent, with the odds of authority against him, wins even a minor contest through his intellectual superiority, the worker is likely to find it disconcerting. A housemother chides a sixteen-year-old boy for slumping over the table at meals. "You must learn 'pep,'" she says. She becomes intensely irritated when the boy remarks, with a grin, "You don't 'learn' pep, you ‘acquire' it." Another housemother mentions with naïve pride the acquaintanceship of a member of her family with a former governor of one of our states. “The one who was impeached?" asks a well-informed seventeen-year-old, with an air of innocence. It is significant that she punishes this mature youth by standing him in a corner. The results of competition with the child on his own level are bound to be unfavorable. If the boy is conquered by the sheer force of authority, the victory is an empty one. If he does occasionally win, he is all too likely to be publicly proclaimed "a master mind" and feel a challenge to live up to the title. It is to forestall this that our preliminary clinic reports on the superior boys often contain some such paragraph as the following: Louis should be given legitimate intellectual outlets in the way of special school work, outside reading, and a share in chapel programs, but should never be allowed to feel that he is unusually clever in wrongdoing. Rather, the childish and stupid side of any misbehavior should be stressed and he should be shown that he is acting unintelligently when he handicaps his own progress and loses sight of his real desire and goal to gain immediate trivial satisfactions. The mechanism of identification plays an important rôle in the treatment of our boys. The staff member who unconsciously identifies himself with the boy feels in the boy's difficulties the bitterness of his own failures. In the boy's overt misconduct he sees his own instinctive desires which he has repressed in himself as unbearable. A matron reports as follows on the pilfering of raisins from a boy's package by some of his young associates: "We have some horrible sneak thieves in the cottage. It makes me shudder." In the case of sex misconduct, we find a generally wholesome attitude among the workers. Occasionally one will betray some personal repressions, as a former nurse who thus characterized the auto-erotic acts of a child with a severe compulsion neurosis: "He is just as immoral as he can be. Why, he is ruining himself with this terrible habit. I can't bear to have anything to do with him. I hate anything like that and any boy who does it." So much for the obstacles presented by the adult personalities in the institution. In all fairness to them, we must present their own case. The limited institution budget necessitates low wages, long hours, and a small range for choice of workers. The isolation of the school, desirable in the case of the boys, diminishes recreational opportunities for the staff. We therefore accept the fact that we must carry out treatment through a group of adults for the most part untrained and sometimes with limited education. We must expect their own lack of satisfactory outlets to affect their attitudes toward the boys. A housemother who is on the job with little free time from 6 A.M. until 8 P.M. is entitled to a few feelings of irritation. Small wonder that she sometimes forgets the individual in her attempt to cope with the group. She must get her sense of success from the cleanliness of her cottage and the outward conformity of her boys. She has not time-perhaps fortunately-to gain libido satisfactions from individual attachments. The wonder is that with her handicaps she accomplishes so much. We do find, moreover, that the attitudes we lament so strongly often have surprisingly little effect on the children. When Mrs. B calls Freddy a "terrible little thief and liar" our psychiatric standards are outraged, but when Freddy runs up to her a few minutes later and she lays a kindly hand on his shoulder, praising him for some little accomplishment, we realize that it is her fundamental friendliness, and not her harsh characterization, that has value for Freddy. When a teacher with twenty-five obstreperous youngsters, most of whom have had black school records in the past, can arouse in them a lively interest in current events, nature study, and outside reading, we can forgive him a little "arrogance." It is all too easy for us to become impatient and irritated or to take the resigned stand that after all the staff member is pretty hopeless material with which to work. I wonder if it is not our own will to power that leads us to feel this way. The rehabilitation of the boy is our driving interest, and we find it hard to deal objectively with anything that frustrates our efforts. Perhaps, too, we get a sense of superiority through the assumption that the staff member is unable to grasp the subtleties of our technique, or we rationalize our disinclination to make an effort by diagnosing him as uneducable. The happy day may come when institutions can pay salaries that will attract highly trained workers to their general staff. And even then, of course, we shall still have the problem of personality relationships. Meanwhile we can turn aside, if it is turning aside, from our work with the boy to study the problems of his teacher and housemother. We can interfere as little as possible with the institution routine in our treatment processes-a very practical but important consideration. We may take the staff into our confidence to the limit of their understanding and establish a mutually friendly relationship that will insure cooperation when understanding is inadequate. We may suggest to the staff member definite contributions that he can make to our treatment program, and we may give him constructive suggestions to help him in his dealings with the boy. We may show appreciation of effort, and patience with blunders and opposition, bearing in mind that attitudes are changed by indirect suggestion far oftener than by arbitrary criticism. We may forestall jealousy by reinforcing the harmonious relationship between the boy and the worker. In other words, we must view our more intimate knowledge of the child, not as an achievement to flaunt in the face of the staff member, but as a channel through which the child may be led to a better adjustment to the group-at present the institution; eventually the community. VIII. ORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL FORCES TAX AND CONTRIBUTION SUPPORT OF SOCIAL WORK: Raymond F. Clapp, Associate Director, Welfare Federation of Cleveland There are four main sources of income for social agencies: contributions, endowment, taxes, and earnings. In size, earnings rank first; taxes, second; contributions, third; and endowment, fourth. Those of us who have been considering the amount raised by the community fund as the major factor in financing social welfare have much to learn from these figures. These four sources fall into two main divisions: earned income or self-support and unearned income or subsidy. Earnings provide 43 per cent, and unearned income, 57 per cent, of the total. Earned income includes such items as fees from patients of hospitals and nursing associations; board of inmates of orphanages and other institutions; club and class fees of character building agencies; dormitory and cafeteria earnings; and income from shops, wood yards, and other activities carried on as a part of the service of social agencies. Unearned income can be divided between tax support and voluntary support, including under voluntary support both contribution and endowment income. For today's discussion a few outstanding facts and comparisons are taken from the material collected in the study of volume and cost of social work which has been conducted during the past two years under the auspices of the American Association for Community Organization and the Welfare Federation of Cleveland. While called a study, this project is really an experiment in cooperative census taking. The time and effort available have been more than taxed by the collecting, tabulating, and checking of the data. The study of this material remains for the future. This census has covered those services in the fields of family welfare and relief, child care, hospitals and health promotion, recreation, and character building which are usually financed through community funds and welfare federations. The expense of parallel governmental services financed from tax funds is likewise being included. This information was secured in such a way that it is possible to compare not only the total expense of these services for various cities, but so that it is possible also to compare the cost of care of children in orphanages and in boarding homes; the cost of care of the sick in hospitals, in dispensaries, and by bedside nursing; the cost of character building through the settle |