public welfare department in 1914, which includes among its functions the administration of outdoor relief on a scientific basis, administration of the almshouse, a children's home, special and general hospitals and other public health work, and supervision of private charities. They have put their work on an efficient professional basis. Good, popular educational work has been carried on throughout the various towns of the county. January 1, 1918, Fresno county, California, established a comprehensive county board of public welfare.

North Carolina, in January, 1917, adopted the first comprehensive law providing for a State Board of Public Welfare and authorizing county boards of public welfare in every county of the state. The work of organizing the department and applying the law is only in its infancy but it presents the first opportunity to apply this plan to rural counties, where I believe it is most needed and where the benefits of consolidation would be the greatest.

In Pennsylvania, New York, Minnesota and California, county boards, for the care of children or with other limited duties, exist, but in scope they do not fully exemplify the board of public welfare idea.

In Illinois, July 1, 1917, a law establishing a great state department of public welfare, which had been adopted earlier in the year, went into effect.

National Department of Public Welfare

The board of public welfare idea is not yet ten years old, yet, as this review shows, it has applied to town and city, county and state governments in widely scattered parts of the United States and Canada. It is equally adaptable to our national government. Inded, there are already assembled in the Department of the Interior many of the functions that would tend to justify calling it a National Public Welfare Department. It deals with Indian affairs, with national parks and forest reserves, with soldiers' pensions, with the great reclamation service and with education.

In my judgment, it would be best to segregate the social work or the national government in this department by giving to it the Children's Bureau, the bureaus of Immigration, Public Health and the Census; and as the social work of the national government develops, I think it should be the policy of social workers to try to put it in the Department of the Interior and make this the National Department of Public Welfare in fact, if not in name.

All the social welfare work done by towns, cities and counties, or even by private agencies in any given state, should be at least loosely correlated, and co-operation and exchange of service and information should be brought about by the state government through its public welfare department; and the work of states should in like manner be correlated and co-operation and exchange of information should be provided under the leadership of a national department. This would truly constitute a system of government social work.

Board of Public Welfare Ideals

The board of public welfare movement has behind it the dynamic of a great ideal which in a measure explains its history. The movement proclaims a practical Utopia to be realized by doing scientific social work on a large scale. This program is based on the idea that social science and social invention can revolutionize society. It accepts no misery as inevitable and no wrong as irremediable. It aims at a new social order.

Since 1900, there has been a greater development along these lines than existed in the previous one hundred years. Miss Eva M. Marquis, superintendent of the research bureau of the Kansas City board, made a study of all the national organizations devoted to social betterment propaganda and social reform which she could find. She listed ninety, in all, and found that three-fourths of them had been organized since 1900. It is probably no exaggeration to say that the proportion of governmental activities for social welfare that have originated since 1900 would be almost the same.

First, what has been accomplished in the way of preventing sickness and prolonging life? The average length of life in civilized countries is from 40 to 50 years. In the United States it is about 45, in Sweden it has reached a maximum of 56, while in India and even in Japan, it has only recently been as low as 20 or 25 years; and this difference is due to better measures for the promotion of the health of the people. Or, if you wish to, you can compare the average length of life in modern European countries fifty years ago with what it is today and you will find that it has increased from about 30 to 45. And, if you want a still more recent example, you can compare modern cities and find that they vary in the death-rate for infants under one year of age from 135 to 250 per 1,000; and you will find that where infant welfare stations and careful instructions have been introduced, the death-rate for infants has been cut in two within a year's time. This record of achievement in the prevention of sickness and death ought to convince anybody that the measures are practical and the program is not merely a dream.

Let us see how we have progressed in the matter of the prevention of vice and crime. It is interesting to read from the Anti-Saloon League Year Book that in the states where prohibition has prevailed for ten years or more, there are only 84.4 prisoners in state prisons per 100,000 population, and in so-called near-prohibition states, where over 50 per cent of the people live in dry territory, there are 115.8 prisoners per 100,000 population; and in partially licensed states, where only 25 per cent to 50 per cent of the people are in dry territory, the number of prisoners per 100,000 population is 118; and in license states, there are 130.3 prisoners per 100,000 people. The publication of the report of the Chicago Vice Commission in 1911 marked an epoch in the handling of the social evil by cities. If time permitted, I could show that great progress had been made in the reduction of this evil. Prof. E. A. Ross, of Wisconsin University has said the Chief of Police of Cleveland told him that he had been able to reduce the number of prostitutes by about 90 per cent by taking away from them music, lights and liquor. A committee on crime, of the Chicago common council, headed by Prof. Charles E. Merriam, showed that the business of thievery was organized and exploited by dealers in stolen goods and gave data which would justify the conclusion, that if these exploiters were suppressed, thievery would be reduced to a minimum.

These few brief hints tend to justify the conclusion that it is an entirely practical program to stop the exploitation of vice and crime and to practically wipe it out so far as normal people are concerned. When we supply complete custodial care of the defective classes, as we will in the future and as we are now doing increasingly, the problem of the elimination of crime will be practically solved. It is entirely practical to achieve a sort of society where arrests for crime will be very exceptional and where many units of government will not have any arrests within a year; in fact, there are many such towns and counties in Kansas and other states already.

Our progress in attacking the problem of poverty has been somewhat less marked, perhaps, than the progress we have made in attacking sickness and crime. Poverty may be said to arise from three causes,— misfortune, inefficiency and exploitation. There is no form of misfortune but what can be covered by social insurance. Inefficiency is being met by vocational education and guidance and by scientific management, in so far as details are concerned; and by conservation work, agricultural bureaus and business consolidation in a wholesale way. Exploitation is being curbed and offset by the Interstate Commerce Commission, Industrial Trade Commission, the National Reserve Bank Commission, the Income Tax, the Inheritance Tax and other forms of government regulation.

Whenever we can secure even moderately intelligent people to manage industry for the direct purpose of providing for the comforts and luxuries of the people, abolishing poverty presents no insuperable obstacles. It is not unreasonable to hope that the nation, whose mechanical inventors have given us the steam engine, the gasoline engine, the electric light, the telephone and the aeroplane, will have social inventors equal in skill, and many of the dreams of the centuries may be realized in this generation.

Government Efficiency in Social Work

The achievements which I have just been describing have been largely dependent for their execution upon the government as an agency. We are moving in the direction of government ownership of social work. Many of the new social welfare activities of the various government units have been established only after a thorough study has been made by a commission appointed for the purpose and after a survey of the facts and conditions has been made by trained social investigators.

What is the meaning of this, except that there is an attempt to establish social action on a scientific basis? But this vast extension of research work is not the only evidence that the government is trying to establish these activities on a scientific basis. The municipal research bureaus, established and paid for by the municipalities, and the commissions on economy and efficiency, which have been established in various places throughout the nation, show the same tendency to put not only the social work but all the work of the government on a scientific basis. The civil service merit system has been extended by leaps and bounds. Classes and schools for training the employees already in government service have been established in many city departments and the work of training people for the government service has been taken up by the municipal universities of Cincinnati, Akron and other places; and it will not be ten years before training courses for public service will be thoroughly established in our system of public education, and entrance into the public service will be increasingly made through that avenue. There are thus many evidences that the society of tomorrow is to be scientifically organized.

Apropos of this statement, I would like to comment on the general reputation for inefficiency and graft which the government has as an agency for doing things. There are two different agencies that promote this slander with great vigor. One is the partisan political organization which belittles the achievements of its opponents in order to have its own representatives elected; the other is the great array of public utilities, such as street car systems, water works, electric light companies, railroads, etc., which are trying to stem the rising tide of public ownership. They have a motive in representing that the government's work is inefficient and inferior to their own. While the government has plenty of faults and deficiencies, I would be perfectly willing to place it side by side with the general run of private enterprises, and challenge anybody to show that there was either more graft or more inefficiency in the government than there was in the private enterprise. Mr. F. C. Croxton, formerly connected with the national Department of Labor, has told me that various clerks connected with his department gave several weeks of their time to the government for nothing as a mere matter of patriotism in order to get out a certain government report when the appropriation for that purpose was about exhausted. The employees of the Board of Public Welfare of Kansas City voluntarily proposed and accepted a cut of 25 per cent in their salaries for three months near the end of the fiscal year in 1913 in order to prevent the crippling of its activities.

Democratization of Social Work

While it may be true that the government needs some infusion of unselfishness and scientific precision from social work, it is not unlikely that some gains may be made by bringing the democracy of the government into some of the realms of social work that have been exclusive in management and limited in scope and condescending in spirit. It is quite likely that, in some directions, it would result in a regulation and standardization of social work that would improve it. What would it mean to thoroughly democratize social work? Abraham Lincoln's formula for political democracy was "government of the people, by the people and for the people."

"Of the people" implies that the government is inclusive and universal in its scope. This phrase has to do with the extent of the authority of the government. If we should apply this to our field, it would mean that social work would keep within its purview the whole population. Our objective must be the welfare of the people, not merely of selected cases that come to our attention. The democratization of social work means the enormous extension of social work.

The second phrase of Lincoln's formula is "by the people." This has to do with defining where the authority to control and administer the government is to be lodged. What does it mean to have social work administered "by the people?" In the first place, it means that it is henceforth to be supported by taxes, and that everybody must contribute to build up a fund against the day of misfortune; it means that each man has a right to the benefits of it when misfortune overtakes him. It means that what was charity has practically been transformed into social justice. It means that many little ill-advised and conflicting societies will be wiped out and the duties of others will be assumed by the government, and the cost of a good deal of administrative machinery and much of the expense of money raising will be saved. It means that there are sufficient available funds so that relief can be adequate when it is necessary. Social work by the people means social work by the government, the only agency in which all the pople have an opportunity for equal representation.

The third phrase of Lincoln's formula is "for the people" and this is used to define the object and central purpose of the government. It is to be for the benefit of the people. Social work has always exemplified this principle of democracy in a high degree. It should be the ambition of social workers to place the imprint of this standard upon government and industry and every human institution. For, why is the obligation to serve any more binding on one than on another?

Let us undertake to apply Lincoln's formula of democracy to the field of social work by establishing such a system of government social work as I have outlined here.