rural districts, and this in turn results in a more widespread knowledge of the agencies available for service and an increase in the number of calls for help. Another noticeable fact is the rapidity of movement of population between various parts of a county-from farm to village and city-and from the city to suburbs. This is a matter of common knowledge.

If, then, there are likely to be several county-wide and several local agencies working in each part of the county, how important is it for the exchange to be functioning, and why is it not more generally used? Consider this illustration, where three county-wide agencies dealt with an unmarried mother, Mary Doe: In July, 1924, a foster mother who had been boarding the youngest Doe child for nearly a year and a half at the rate of $8 a week, to be paid by the mother, complained to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that the mother was over $100 in arrears. Taking the unsupported word of this foster mother, the society filed a complaint in the court, which was withdrawn in a few days when the foster mother reported that the mother had made payments. A month later, however, the foster mother again reported to the society, stating that the arrears were mounting up. The S.P.C.C. wrote a letter to the mother, calling upon her to make payment by a certain date, and when this was not done, the case was taken into court and the child was found to be abandoned, committed to the county Child Welfare Department, and a warrant issued for the mother, who had not appeared in court.

This ends the S.P.C.C. contact. No field investigation of any kind was made, and the case was not registered in the Exchange. If registration had been made, the society and the court would have been informed of a long record on this family in the hands of the county child welfare department, which showed that the child in question was the youngest of four children, probably all illegitimate. Technically, the case was a success from the viewpoint of the S.P.C.C.; they obtained a conviction. Actually, they compelled the county to accept the care of this baby, which the mother had tried to give them some months earlier. Shall we register? Shall we cooperate? Consider these records taken from a children's institution which had its work studied in 1923. I quote from the report of the study:

A little girl, now seven, was admitted in November, 1918, upon the father's application. Registration made during the study in 1923 shows that the family was known to the Children's Aid Society in 1916. The girl's father was at that time, and had been for three years, living in adultery with the child's mother, together with two legitimate children of the mother. Disagreements between the man and woman, caused by non-support, led to his taking his child away from her in October, 1916. Two years later he placed the child in the institution, as above stated. The mother was unable to discover the baby's whereabouts. Later, the mother placed one of her other children in the same institution through the county office, and did not then learn, and in so far as we know, has never learned, that her other child was in the same home. Until the 1923 registration was made the Children's Aid Society did not learn what had become of the illegitimate child, and the institution knew nothing of the real circumstances leading up to either child's admission.

This is a fair picture of cooperation without registration:

In another case the probation office had been collecting $75 per month alimony and paying it to the mother, believing that she was making a home for the children. The fact that they had been in the institution almost a year and a half was revealed to the probation officer through the Exchange registration, made in 1923.

A similar instance showed that a family organization had been working actively for several years with a family where the mother had deceived the visitor into believing the child was at home, although she had sent her to the institution nine months previously and, moreover, had secured free care for her. This fact was brought out through the registration. Through use of the Exchange we also discovered brothers and sisters and other relatives who we did not know existed.

No case work agency can make pretense now at being cooperative and efficient if it refuses or neglects to use the Exchange. Such an agency either does not know what cooperation means, or it does not care, and a vigorous campaign for the systematic and intelligent use of the Exchange would go far to improve the quality of the service rendered.

It may be urged that having an Exchange located in one part of the county makes it too expensive to be used by other parts. At times registration may be made by mail, which is inexpensive; but even where telephone registration is made necessary by the urgency of the situation it can be clearly demonstrated that the cost of the telephone call is much less than the cost of inefficient and uncoordinated social case work. The wastage caused by "going it blind" would, I venture to say, amount to enough money to enable all registration to be made by personal messenger, on engraved cards, and leave a sufficient balance to found and support a home for inefficient, stupid, and negligent social workers; and I am convinced that our clients would prosper by a realization of both parts of that program.

So much for the use of the Exchange. The topic assigned refers to the Exchange as a tool. Like any other tool, it will not be worth the money invested unless it is used for the purpose for which it is intended. There are social workers who say: "Oh, yes, we use the Exchange, you will find their slips on all of our records." And so you will, but remarkable as it may seem, the information to be found on these slips has never been used. Therein lies a danger against which we all have to guard ourselves. In the rush of our busy lives we learn to go through certain motions, and may forget, or perhaps have never learned, the reason for those motions. Registration brings to our attention a statement of whether other agencies have knowledge of the family registered. It may bring us the names and addresses of various relatives, and a statement of previous addresses. It makes it possible for us to render a quicker, more intelligent, and a less obtrusive service to the family, and it enables us to plan our work in cooperation with the other agencies interested by advising us of their interest. I say it makes these things possible. In and of itself it accomplishes nothing, and unless we use the information so obtained we might just as well not have registered.

Two years ago I had an opportunity of making a study of 130 families that had presented difficult problems to a county-wide children's agency. In this county there is an Exchange. This society had registered all of the 130 families,

uns by thirty-five other agencies. tes and had been repeatedly regsstrations had been looked up. InNu stowed 183 agency contacts that is save a total of about six agency conoperation of about 33 per cent. (Cooperation between agencies working on the same The society had been unable successsamilies; had spent an average of nearly et had not taken the obvious steps of in the same families. How much more cea had the organizations coordinated their aced workers know that "united we stand, case work.

gister a case because they say they have not with the executives of three county-wide court, the superintendent of a child protective cer. They assured me they believed in the $ were too small, and they had no time to regisnor believe in the use of an Exchange. One ges as a time saver, and the busier the agency, Such people are like the wood chopper with a we couldn't take time to sharpen his axe.

change in terms of telephone service. When I ., New York, there were two telephone companies, is to do was to have both. Supposing there had e companies, each having certain subscribers nunicate. Imagine our home with twenty or ate of our nerves after living under these cone surprised if we damned all the telephone comse? I think the families who are the clients of change must feel that way about it. To have a 、g render service may be at times embarrassing; dination must be intolerable. We have no right

Age is no longer an experiment; it is not on trial. If cdig social work in a given territory there is every carca de coordinated through an Exchange. Those it either fail to understand the possibilities of it frankly that they do not care to cooperate.

THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL WORK IN NEW ORLEANS

Bradley Buell, Associate Director, Community Chest, New Orleans New Orleans is a city of paradoxes. It is on the east bank of the Mississippi River, and the river lies directly south of it. All of the uptown streets describe a huge semicircle. I reach my apartment in the eastern part of the city by traveling west. The city is below the level of the river, and all of its drainage has to be pumped up and out. Canal Street, which really was a canal, divides the modern business city from the old French quarter. In the older days no good citizen of French Town would think of crossing Canal Street; indeed, for that very reason the two biggest department stores in the city are on the French side of Canal Street. From this old quarter, now inhabited largely by Italians, Negroes, and artists, New Orleans derives much of the architectural and cosmopolitan flavor that makes it, as our Association of Commerce modestly declares, America's most interesting city.

Here is Jackson Square, so named in honor of General Jackson, who, with the assistance of Lafitte, the well-known pirate, defeated the British in the battle of New Orleans. Facing it is the famous St. Louis Cathedral, flanked on one side by the Cabildo, the seat of government in the Spanish and French days, from the balcony of which in 1803 was read the proclamation announcing the purchase of Louisiana by the United States, and on the other, by the old Caputian monastery. Here are famous old courtyards with quarters in their rear for the slaves-those slaves who hammered out the wrought iron gates and galleries that are part of the charm of French Town. Here is the famous Napoleon House, so called because if Napoleon had been rescued from St. Helena, and if he had come to New Orleans, and if he had found this house suited to his purposes, it would have been the house that Napoleon would have lived in.

But the French quarter does not house all of the picturesque paradoxes of New Orleans. Out Canal Street are the cemeteries where people are buried above ground. Here are the City Park and Audubon Park with their huge live oaks with the dusty gray Spanish moss hanging from their branches and giving them an ethereal and ghostlike appearance.

The social and civic history of New Orleans makes just as fascinating a story as its political history: the yellow fever epidemics and the fight for control of the yellow fever mosquito, the Bubonic Plague of only a dozen years ago, the gradual filling in of the old canals to make wide and spacious modern streets, and the substitution of a modern sewerage system for the old open sewers. Until 1909 each house had its own cistern, and these constituted the city's water supply.

The population of New Orleans was 387,000 at the time of the last census, and is estimated at 415,000 at the present time. Of these 100,000 were colored in 1920. The white population is thus more a native American population than is the case with our northern and eastern cities. On the other hand, the influence

of the old French stock is more marked than the census figures of the first and second generation would indicate. There are four times as many people whose parents were born in France as there are of the first-generation French stock, and the ratio would undoubtedly increase with the third and fourth generation. French family names are very common, while of course the French restaurants and cooking are among the things which have made New Orleans famous.

New Orleans is a commercial city. It is the second port in the United States (incidentally, it is 100 miles from the Gulf), and not only does very much of its historical past center around its dock and port facilities, but much of the hope of its future business development. As a railroad center its combined transportation industries account for something over 25,000 of the working population. Manufacturing is not a prominent feature, although across the river in Gretna and Algiers are strung a series of industrial and manufacturing plants. But its Cotton Exchange, its banking facilities, its selling and distributing organizations, mark it as a commercial center.

New Orleans is a Roman Catholic community, the proportion of the white population who are of that faith being variously estimated from 50 per cent to 85 per cent. The second largest religious group is the Episcopal Church.

In presenting in detail certain figures in regard to our social work I want to make it quite clear that they are not based on such a study as Mr. Clapp has been supervising throughout the country. We have, during this year, been concerned with two intensive studies of quite a different nature: of the methods and standards of work in our thirteen family welfare and about thirty-five children's agencies. The figures which I am presenting have been gathered hastily and for the sole purpose of giving Mr. Carstens something to go on in the detailed evaluation of our children's work. Some of the figures are frankly estimates— in only one or two cases have the expenditures in a given agency been segregated to the different fields of work-and, perhaps most important of all, it has been impossible to estimate the percentage of expenditure which should be credited to New Orleans as compared with that which goes to serve the surrounding territory.

New Orleans has altogether 126 social agencies, whose total expenditures are $5,171,825.00. This would make the total per capita expenditure $12.95, which would rank us very high in Mr. Clapp's list. Because, however, so much of this goes to serve not only the rest of Louisiana but also a good deal of Mississippi and Texas, I think this figure has no real significance. Of the 126 agencies, 80 are supported by the Community Chest, 29 others are supported by private subscriptions, and 17 are administered by the city or state. Further analysis shows that almost the entire public expenditure is in the health field. Charity Hospital, a state hospital with a budget of $760,000, is included in this, as are part of the state and all of the city Board of Health. The largest non-chest private expenditure is in this field also, and is accounted for by six hospitals, Catholic, Baptist, and Presbyterian, a Marine, and a Veterans' Bureau hospital, which are