The work had grown so that it extended beyond the limits of the city of Fort Dodge. Calls came from the country round about. We were no longer a town organization, so we changed the name to the Webster County Welfare Association, and under that name and under the guidance of our social welfare worker we have been carrying on the work for nine years. Since making it a county-wide organization, the township trustees, who, under the laws of Iowa, are the overseers of the poor in the rural communities, have made it a point to have frequent conferences with the secretary and to depend upon her for advice and assistance.

Because of the records that were kept and the information that they contained the judges in our courts began to call on the secretary for evidence, especially in juvenile cases and in mothers' pensions. The judges asked the secretary to make investigations of applications for mothers' pensions, and reported to the supervisors that the assistance rendered was of great value, saving the time of the court and reducing its expenses. At the request of the supervisors the secretary was made juvenile probation officer, which practically amounts to being a deputy sheriff. Then the school officials of Fort Dodge appointed one of our workers truant officer.

We have now four workers in our office in the courthouse at Fort Dodgethe secretary of the Webster County Welfare Association, the overseer of the poor, and juvenile probation officer, and the truant officer. We have the full cooperation of the Farm Bureau, the Chamber of Commerce, the home demonstration agent, the county health nurse, the doctors, the lawyers, the schools, the court, and the supervisors, and we cooperate with other institutions such as the churches, lodges, and clubs.

Now, something as to the results we get. From a supervisor's standpoint I am interested in the cost, in the reduction of expense. The first year we had a trained worker as overseer of the poor we spent $1,500 less out of the poor fund than we did the year before she came. The second year we saved over $2,000 more than we did the first year, and we were giving better service to the worthy poor. All this was at a time when the cost of living was advancing steadily. Coal had gone from $3.50 a ton to $8.00; flour, from $1.75 to $3.50; and other items in the same proportion. In 1924 we paid out $1,800 less than in 1923. We have come to the place where we are looking about to see where we can give more and better service, and then at the end of the year look up the records to see how much we have reduced the tax burden.

Three years ago I checked over the records of at least twenty people that had been taken off the county poor list. Here is a little sum in mental arithmetic. In Iowa the poor are allowed $2.00 per week per person for groceries. Medical aid, rent, and fuel are extras. The grocery allowance for twenty persons amounts to a saving of $2,080 a year.

There is another side to this. To me the greatest and most important thing is not the saving so many dollars and cents, but that through this service we

are able to help dependent persons to become independent, making them over into useful citizens, converting them from a liability to an asset. This is worth more to us and to future generations than can be estimated.

Public relief, as it is disbursed by the average county official, becomes the prey of unscrupulous persons, and not the aid to the needy that it is intended to be. It is not uncommon to find it used as a political plum by peanut politicians and for entirely selfish purposes by cheap officeholders. It is time that this misappropriation of public funds was stopped and that public aid be put on its proper footing and be properly handled..

Some people question the feasibility of combining private relief with public aid. We have been doing it for nine years in Webster County. We find that instead of lessening the high standard and respect accorded private relief, we have raised public relief to a higher plane and given it the dignity that it is entitled to. With us it is no longer considered a disgrace to receive aid from the public funds provided by the people for that purpose, and no stigma attaches to the aid we give.

We have been able to change public opinion regarding relief of the poor, the needy, and the afflicted by eliminating the grafters, the undeserving, and the lazy shiftless. We have raised public relief to a more approved status by having it properly administered by a person with judgment and training, who can distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy. To make a county as a unit successful in welfare work the public aid must be made subject to the administration of organized private relief under the direction and care of a trained worker. Public officials should never be permitted to direct or superintend the distribution of private relief in their official capacity.

Let me impress this on your minds, that you can never, in any way, make this consolidation a success unless the distribution of funds is left entirely in the hands of the trained worker. In our county the supervisors do not pretend to give any aid without first consulting the trained worker, and as a rule we turn the entire matter over to her. All we ask is for regular reports of the conditions that she finds. We are always ready to listen to her suggestions and to advise her as best we can, but the responsibility is hers, the work is all done under her direction, and when she takes action in a case there is no use of trying to go over her head to the board of supervisors; that has been tried, but we have refused to meddle with her work.

If I am able to interest you people in making the administration of public aid the servant of the private relief organizations; if I can in some way get you to see the necessity of making it an object of private relief organizations to get hold of the public relief funds and to handle them so that they will not be undoing the important work that you are doing; if we can establish cooperation between public and private relief in the full sense of the word, I shall feel that my trip to Denver has not been in vain.

PSYCHIATRY AND THE OFFENDER IN THE
COMMUNITY

THE JUVENILE OFFENDER

Ethel Goldsmith, Psychologist, Juvenile Court of Hamilton
County, Cincinnati

What do you think of mental examinations anyhow? If I could get your answers to that question it would help me construct the work of the court clinic for the next ten years. As practical probation officers working in the field, do you, in your innermost, secret soul, look upon psychology as a diversion for highbrow professors who live miles away from a real courtroom and have never seen the hang-out of little Johnny Jones? And do you think of mental tests as a conglomeration of silly school questions that don't at all tell what a boy can really do, and that the mental age we get from a test is pretty apt to call a boy feebleminded when he isn't? Are you one of the people who, if I produced a test and asked you to take it, would say: "You'd never get me to be tested. I'd rate just about six years." Or is psychology a real honest-to-goodness help to you in your practical probation work?

If you have happened on an examiner who thinks he knows it all after seeing the child in the laboratory, I don't blame you if you have your private reservations about the expert. Human beings are infinitely complex, and we can't get to know all about our little Johnnies in the artificial atmosphere of the office.

In an afternoon's examination, the definitely feebleminded, the definitely epileptic, or the definitely insane can be diagnosed and labeled "For Permanent Segregation"; here, of course, the examination is of the most immediate use. But most of the children who pass through our juvenile courts cannot be pigeonholed in these well-defined groups.

It is for this reason that the examiner's diagnosis is only a part of the picture. When a child is non-social there must be adequate reasons, but these reasons need not be mental, and an examiner's diagnosis should never be regarded as a substitute for social investigation or social treatment. If there is any one thing that psychology does teach us it is that there is no one cause for delinquency and no patent medicine cure. Feeblemindedness isn't the whole cause. Abnormality is not the whole cause. Environment is not the whole cause. If you have five thousand different children, you probably will have at least two thousand different causes for the delinquency. Abnormal psychology is only an effort to be of service to the probation officer in getting at these causes, a common-sense way of finding out why Mary was promiscuous and of discovering why Johnny ran away from home.

Systems of education that have not yet seen the importance of differentiating between the bright, the dull, and the feebleminded are the direct cause of truancy and other types of misbehavior. And even in enlightened school

systems, individual teachers who are old-fashioned and who feel that the same mental pabulum suits all children are manufacturing problems for the court examiner and the court probation officer to untangle. These teachers are helping keep us in our positions-but we don't thank them. Many inferiors can get along happily if no outrageous demands are made of their stunted brains. Simple directions, one demand at a time, immediate rewards for good behavior, and constant drill until one habit is formed must be the probation diet for the little Johnnies and Marys with mental ages of ten or eleven. This, plus the provision of suitable environment-because the inferior can't shape himself to fit conditions; conditions must be shaped so that they fit him. Neither parents, nor teacher, nor probation officer will get very far in an attempt to teach abstract morals to little Johnny with a mental age of ten.

Knowing whether Johnny is inferior, then, is a necessity. The examiner, of course, has special machinery for picking out the inferiors. It is rather complicated machinery and the handling of it needs a carefully trained person, but there is a list of common-sense questions of general information, memory, and judgment, issued by the Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research, that I think you will find of use if you have to be your own psychologist. You can get the list of questions by writing Dr. Emerick. The answers will give you a hint of whether Johnny is stranded in this sphere or whether he knows something about his surroundings. Some of the inferior look so bright, and some of them cover their. stupidity with loquacity in such an uncanny way, that it is wise to have something like this on hand to make a hole in their defense.

I find that having the children answer these questions at the time I take the preliminary history helps in adapting the interview to little Johnny's mental stature so that I'm sure he knows what I'm talking about. The stupid children are not the only ones who go through our mill. The court is the city slop-can and the bright as well as the dull are thrown on our dump heap, either because parents or teachers have made a sad mess of their job, or because the child's own temperament has forced him into behavior not approved of by his neighbors.

Many average or superior children are utterly unable to get along. When the examiners find that Johnny is not dull or feebleminded they look around to see if there is anything else wrong, and sometimes they find that while Johnny is not subnormal or below the normal, the thing that makes him bad is that he is queer or abnormal. His emotions and his will make-up may be so peculiar that he is regarded as queer, or even as insane. One child may be average in both respects. Another child may rate average on intelligence-that is, he may be as bright as the ordinary child-but in personality he may not rate average. He may be either too emotional or too indifferent; he may be weak-willed or he may be stubborn; he may be too suspicious or too impulsive, and so on. There are a thousand different personality difficulties that may cause his misconduct.

Fortunately, courts all over the country find that in the juvenile division

they handle very few of the definitely psychotic or insane. But slighter degrees of abnormality often cause misconduct. If we are too emotional, or nervous, or jealous, if we are too agressive, or easily discouraged, if we are oversensitive or feel inferior and are afraid to face life, we may not fit in with our neighbors in this cut-and-dried civilization, where everyone has to be built on the same pattern; and our temperament under fortunate circumstances may make artists of us, or, under less fortunate circumstances, may make us wards of the court. The idea of abnormality is so fascinating that it is apt to be exaggerated. We are apt to lean toward the thought that if Johnny keeps on being bad, he is simply too queer to get along in the community. "He is a psychopath," we will say, "of course we can't do anything with him." This is a dangerous statement, because the idea of abnormality, like the idea of feeblemindedness, has a tendency to be exaggerated as the cause-all of misconduct. The concept of abnormality as a cause of crime is an enormous contribution if we make use of it conservatively.

Some of the delinquents are bad simply because they have inherited abnormalities. They are really psychopathic; but others merely appear to be psychopathic or queer because something in their environment has made them restless or unhappy or bad. So now we have no faith in our label until we have thoroughly investigated the child's development and background to see if something in his surroundings made him queer. Not "what he is," but "why is he" is the fruitful question for the probation officer to ask.

None of us is superior in all respects. We are either less beautiful, or less intelligent, or less talented in some way than the others of our particular group. We may be bow-legged, or be slow in understanding things, or be poor talkers. The best and most normal reaction to our own inferiorities is to admit the defects and correct them as far as possible. Children do not understand this, and it is up to the examiner and the probation officer to make them see the point.

Probation officers can act as their own psychologists and can do an enormous amount of good by keeping their eyes open for children who are inferior or who feel inferior. They can clear up misconduct by helping the child to acknowledge the inferiority, instead of compensating for it by being bad.

A good probation officer appraises a child physically as soon as she enters the room. She takes in any obvious defects, and the child's pitiful ways of trying to hide them. She'll notice the child with a goiter who has her neck covered with beads, or the child with queer teeth who tries not to open her mouth when she laughs, and, if she interviews her tactfully, she can frequently find out the less, obvious causes that make Mary feel she doesn't belong. In discovering these things the probation officer is being her own psychologist. An expert, to my mind, is not a person of a certain caste who devotes his life to collecting a certain kind of material. He is a person with a scientific point of view, and the probation officer who looks for causes instead of punishing or preaching avoids placing himself in the position of teacher or policeman or of sentimentalist, and