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ern statistical methods that will bring us a necessary and helpful check, with a wholesome perspective of the needs and the available opportunities and the effectiveness of our efforts.

Hand in hand with improved organization of work and workers will have to go the development of a sane public opinion. Today the public is sadly overfed by propaganda and also by the specially fashionable present-day antipropaganda of sneering, always suspecting wholesale attacks upon the rights of the individuals, and raising the defense against so-called "uplift."

We no doubt have an exceedingly difficult task before us to live down the opprobrium of "uplift" and of "jobholder." It has become a very popular slogan used mercilessly by the press to gain popularity with the large numbers. There will always be far more potential victims of "uplift" than uplifters, and more subscribers to the newspapers to be gained by catering to the large numbers through flattering their supposed independence from playing on the rights of the individual, up to the playing on states' rights. It is easy to speak of religious and political freedom, but fatal to help sinister forces use the strongest weapons in mass psychology, the spreading of vague fears and suspicions, against all those who have the courage of convictions and cannot remain everlastingly passive. The only dependable remedy on our part is a clear and intelligible demonstration of what we do and aim at.

It is always a good rule for missionaries to make sure that they succeed first at home, and certainly we social workers have to furnish a specially good accounting for what we stand for. It is especially and preeminently important that we should be able to prove ourselves well-balanced and especially thoughtful also in the great task of dealing with the accumulated wisdom with respect to habits of life and habits of thought and habits of feeling, aesthetic, moral, and religious; capable, when called upon, of a helpful vision of spirituality and morality and conscience.

We all have or surely most of us have almost instinct-like thought and feeling tendencies which represent the very soul of human nature, and which we want to learn to understand in each other and share with each other-if possible without dogma and without insistence on specific revelations, because others may have grown up to live by other "revelations" than those of our own personal leaning.

The social worker and mental hygiene worker has to meet and coordinate very heterogeneous elements. To do so he has to have an unusually wellbalanced philosophy.

The problem of how to blend allegiances to group convictions and to the great ideal of political and religious freedom for which our Constitution stands is no doubt the most difficult problem to rise to. Yet I include it in the program of mental hygiene of community, town, state, and nation.

Present-day individualism unfortunately has a tendency to maximalistic extremes. In its Russian debauch it has landed in one of the most high-handed

forms of minority rule, akin to the "head-on" or "head-off" rule of the French Revolution. It becomes a more or less benevolent group despotism. In the Fascisti methods in Italy and in the Klan methods of this country, individualism loses itself in a more or less strongly organized and more or less well-intentioned, but after all very dangerous, usurpation of government by groups, and with principles not accountable to the whole. Sometimes it is Bryanesque selfsufficiency falling back upon sectarian assertions of revelations of the past. Sometimes it is the futuristic gospel of elimination of all "repression," and the idolatry of the instinct, where we might well develop more faith in the irrepressibility of real genius, remembering that real genius is not lawlessness, but shows in the natural and spontaneous espousal of what comes nearest to reality.

Here again I feel that our mental hygiene philosophy is ready to meet individualism without antagonism. We admit that groups have a right to enter upon agreements as to what they would like to take for granted with those who claim to "belong." But groups have to remember that they are groups among groups, and that conditions of belonging should be open.

It is not wise to talk too glibly of one-hundred-percentism. Nobody can know just what that is or should be. What we want is wholeheartedness and fairness and a willingness to learn to understand and know one's neighbor. But it is also our duty to try to make ourselves understood. This, I feel, we can do without the big stick of authority, and without enforced dogma, either political or religious.

One of the biggest conflicts today is that between two types of fundamentalists-those who seek their foundations and facts in revealed tradition and those who, with just as much respect for God and God's creation and true religion, seek the foundations and facts in the ever progressive revelations of objective experience. Even revelation has its growth from primitive to more mature forms. A sense of intuition and revelation will always be an essential experience of human nature. There have been inspirations at all times. Unfortunately, too many think of inspiration and revelation only where some mysterious influences claim to be at work, and they do not sense adequately the still greater happiness over every step that will lead us closer to observation and to the utilization of generally observable fact in constructive work.

I recently had my attention drawn to a dictum of Commodore Maury, one of our great government scientists: "When, after much toil," he says, "I have discovered a law of God's nature, I feel that I have thought one of God's thoughts, and I tremble." One might well tremble at such an exalted conception of science calling it thinking God's thoughts. One might tremble at the thought that some one might want to see more in the thought than in the fact, and turn it into a dogma. Dogma is a law of agreement and acceptance of authority and discipleship, but it does not, or should not, take the place of our reverence for fact. It should fade when it ceases to point to clear and obvious fact.

To claim anything as revelation is a responsibility before which, to use Maury's phrase, it is becoming in man "to tremble." With all respect for intuition and revelation and the flights of aspiration, the social worker wants to keep, wherever possible, to what speaks in terms of facts that bring themselves to unrelenting scrutiny and test.

The alternative slogans of the day are Devolution, Revolution, or Evolution. Devolution is the assumption of original perfection and a struggle against a supposedly imposed wickedness of nature. Revolution is the costly application of a peremptory, impulsive policy of "head on, if with me" or "head off and decapitation, if not with me," repeating the terribly costly methods of world improvement of France in the eighteenth and Russia in the present century. Evolution is the faith in growth and development-neither optimism nor pessimism, but meliorism, an ever growing betterment. We have good reasons to mistrust any agency that wants to work largely with force and fear. We may well choose; and let us hope that we choose well in turning to the faith in that type of evolution which is the philosophy and gospel of growth.

If then I may sum up my discussion, it is that, in the organization of neuropsychiatric work in a community, the present-day rise of individualism urges us in a number of valuable directions. It keeps before us a philosophy of evolution and growth, an ever closer appreciation of the importance of the concrete components of real life; it cultivates a respect for individual differences and a desire to understand and use individual qualities. It encourages teaching by doing, and confidence in the worker, encouragement and fostering of the local efforts, training of teachers by the study of old, seasoned, and new experience and, if I may give a new meaning to a misused word, a cultivation of a truly fundamental and creative and progressive new fundamentalism, as I said, with faith in that type of evolution which is the philosophy and gospel of growth.

ENVIRONMENTAL HANDICAPS OF FOUR HUNDRED
HABIT CLINIC CHILDREN

Bertha C. Reynolds, Director, Habit Clinics, Massachusetts Division
of Mental Hygiene, Boston

The select children who formed "the four hundred" were chosen quite democratically from the first 492 applications to the habit clinics of the Massachusetts Division of Mental Hygiene in the first eighteen months of their operation. Every record was taken except 92, which were slight service cases lacking a social history. A distribution by age showed that 67.5 per cent were under six years, 84 per cent were under eight years, and all but 2.5 per cent were under twelve years of age. The children were referred to the clinic by visiting nurses or social workers, or, in a few cases, by their parents.

The home backgrounds of the children studied may be roughly indicated by the fact that 66 per cent came from homes where foreign customs were predominant, and from neighborhoods made up largely of people of their own nationality or race. In 43 per cent of the whole number this was Italian; in 23 per cent, Jewish. About 25 per cent of the children were from American-born parents. In spite of the fact that the first four clinics were started in so-called poor neighborhoods of Boston, only one in ten of the whole number of children was found to be suffering for lack of the physical necessities of life.

A meager environment, however, did handicap to some extent 322 out of the 400 children. Suppose that we assume that a normal home should give to a child not only food and shelter and cleanly care, but some home training in conduct; some idea of the orderly control which we expect government to exercise toward its citizens, and which a young child must get through parental discipline; some of the culture of the group to which he belongs; some religious training; an opportunity to express himself in play or in simple duties; affection from his own circle, and some chance to mingle with other children of his own age. In this expectation 80.5 per cent of the 400 children failed to get what a home should give. The remaining 19.5 per cent were considered to have homes adequate for their needs, and were habit clinic cases for other reasons, physical or mental defect or disease or some lack of understanding by their parents being the most prominent. In other words, not quite 20 per cent were problems for the psychiatrist uncomplicated by serious defects in home life.

Only 13 per cent of the children whose homes failed them suffered from poverty. In 280 cases, or 87 per cent, the failures were in some wise spiritual rather than material. Eighty-three per cent of these got from their parents no teaching that the historian could discover of what right and wrong behavior means. Seventy-eight per cent received no effective control in the home. Nearly half, 47.8 per cent, lived in homes that, outwardly at least, showed no cultural interests; 41 per cent lacked opportunity for normal play; 23.6 per cent were cut off from the social give-and-take of their fellows, and 10 per cent were children unloved in the place they called home. What do these figures mean, interpreted in the light of day-by-day experience in case work?

In the first place, lack of training and discipline must be understood in its racial setting. The first two clinics were started in Italian neighborhoods, where the belief prevails that children under school age are "too little" to discipline, and where there is sometimes even a superstitious fear that a little child will die after punishment, leaving his parents to lifelong regret. The clinics have had to face the question of whether this attitude, combined with the Latin temperament, may be able to justify itself against a more rigorous northern system. Conceivably, delay in training while the habit-forming years slip by may be more easily made up for in an Italian village, with early responsibility for still younger children, close contact with unyielding natural forces, and comparatively stable organization of family life and customs, than in the welter of readjust

ment of an immigrant home in a city tenement. As far as we can judge, the parents whom we meet are themselves handicapped in their parenthood by their lack of self-control, which may or may not be due to lack of early discipline. Some who have thought about the subject want better training for their children, but find it hard to achieve against the public opinion of their group. The particular barrier to discipline in a Jewish community, the next most largely represented foreign group, will come out in the study of oversolicitude in parents.

The figures for lack of educational advantages in the home, though the product of careful consideration in each case, mean little in themselves. They signify absence of reading in the home, other than a foreign or American daily newspaper. They may conceal much folklore and common-sense philosophy which the children may glean from the conversation of their elders, much fine appreciation of music and art, and, in Jewish families especially, an urge to know which sends the children of barren homes eagerly to the opportunities of the school. Practically, the fact that 38.5 per cent of the 400 children studied lacked educational opportunities in the home, or that 225, or more than half, had parents whose handicap of ignorance was a serious one, means simply that these children will bring to their school opportunities either a culturally barren soil or one already preempted with a culture other than the one they there meet, and we must at best expect some difficulties as these children have to make school adjustments.

There are no figures on which to base conclusions as to the religious training received by these children. In view of the fact that, as a state department, we were approaching parents, many of them foreign born, with a form of service which they were hardly prepared to understand at first, it was thought wise to make the approach as far as possible a medical one, and to avoid detailed inquiry in any field where prejudice or suspicion might be aroused. From the large number of homes where training in conduct was distinctly lacking, and from impressions gained in visiting the families, it seems fair to assume that the children studied were meeting very little vital religious influence in their homes.

The problem of play is even more serious than that of discipline. One-third of all the children studied lacked normal opportunities for play. In every case, a congested city neighborhood was at the bottom of the difficulty. Let him who despairs of the value of safety campaigns try urging mothers to let their little children out to play even in the comparative safety of a block play yard. Children are kept prisoners in homes and on doorsteps till the desire for active play is gone out of them, or they get old enough to defy their distracted jailer. Parents have seen children picked up bleeding from the path of a truck, and they fear. They have not seen the connection between playless childhood and warped, inefficient adult years. Some mothers mention fear of moral corruption of their children. Some, in keeping their children in, provide toys, and the child gets on with home play, suffering only a cramping of physical activity. In a quarter of the cases, however, a poverty that gave no stimulus to the play spirit,