Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker

—What are we to do? We must wake up—

We are not awake. We are half asleep, dreaming over our plans, our worries, our visions. That is why we are preoccupied; looking over the head of the immediate fact, we miss the amazing beauty of face, word, and character tempered and enhanced by suffering.

Much as I hate the fault of never going beyond the fact that we see before us, I hate just as much the opposite error of not getting the full vision of the foreground. We ought always to be able to feel, at the end of any single home visit, that we have done something, accomplished something. Well: one of the things that we must make every effort to accomplish, and to feel ourselves a failure if we have not accomplished, is to find and to give pleasure, to enjoy ourselves, and if possible to give a little courage. The little embellishments of our work, the smile, the tone of voice, the jokes and courtesies of our fleeting contacts with individual patients, should be just as precious to us as any of our far-reaching plans and deep-plunging attempts to study into cases. How poignantly, how intensely Christ put this to us in saying that inasmuch as we did any good thing unto the least of his brethren we did it unto Him! I believe that He meant this not only of human beings, but of days, of moments. The least of these opportunities is infinitely precious and we are making a grievous mistake if we do not take it so.

I have known a few social assistants who make each little deed and each little moment a perfect work of art in itself. Art at its best this work is. It was my greatest single experience in 1917-18 to admire the French art for finding joy in little things, and of making beauty in little things. I asked recently a group of Americans what they had found the most admirable in their contact with the French people. Everybody present had had the experience of finding in his own hotel or pension, a femme de chambre or some other domestic who, though starting to work at five o'clock in the morning and working until late at night, nevertheless always kept joy or the appearance of joy in her work. On the first night that I was in Paris I went with a friend to dine at a restaurant very late. There was but one waitress, who had nearly finished serving an enormous number of people. She ought to have been near the end of her day's work, which our arrival prolonged still more. But I never can forget the welcoming look and tone with which she said to us, "Now I shall have the pleasure of serving you."

We need the artistic spirit, the spirit of beauty in social work. It is not opposed to, but surely very different from, the spirit of science which I have been emphasizing in the earlier chapters of this book. I must confess my impression that, on the whole, thus far, social work has been ugly. Social workers have not kept beauty and the sense of beauty in the foreground of their work. Beauty and joy always tend to drop out in social work, but this must not be. There is an old story of an inspired social assistant in Boston who had been working for a long time with a needy family who were at that time much discouraged. One day she had an idea: "What that woman needs is a blue dress. She is extraordinarily fond of that color. She has not had a new dress for a long time." And it was true. She was given a blue dress, and the history of that family afterwards began to show signs of the sort of change and upward constructive effort which had long been lacking. We cannot neglect that sort of thing, slight or sentimental though it may seem.

I remember another family in which flowers, and money spent on giving the children a chance to grow flowers, played a beneficent rôle; and still another discouraged family in which a canary bird seemed an essential element in the social work done.

There is something certainly very divine about the present moment. We shall never have it again. We are apt to think that next year we shall do something great. Then, we think, at last we shall gather up all the forces of our soul and do something worthy. But I do not believe we can tell ourselves too often in social work that now is the time, and that the opportunity of the present moment is priceless.

Hence, after trying to exemplify the backgrounds which we ought to seek out when a fellow being comes to us in trouble, I must now correct that overemphasis by paying homage to that state of mind which sees foregrounds. What we want is presence of mind—a very familiar and hackneyed phrase, but one which may grow precious to us after analysis. My complaint against the preoccupied, solemn look in the social worker's face is that the person's mind is not there with his fellow beings; it is aloof with his own troubles. He is not "in it," not all there on the spot. The necessity of joy in one's work, and the necessity of seeing the momentary and infinitely precious opportunities, come to the same thing. If you are "in it," you get your chance. To have sufficient presence of mind to seize one's chance is surely the crucial act in social work or anywhere else, for that chance does not recur.

But presence of mind connects itself with an interesting fact in our grammar about the present tense. The present tense, in contrast with past and future tenses, expresses presence of mind, attention to the wonder of the moment, the opportunity of the moment. But it also expresses a wholly different thing, namely, the eternal. Some languages have an eternal tense and use it about facts that are not present or past or future. We use the present tense for the eternal. Two and two make four. When? Well, not of course at ten minutes before twelve on the 11th of November, 1918, more than at any other time. We might just as well use the future tense. Two and two always will make four. But by a peculiar accident we have hitched on to one tense the whole body of eternal truth. Why did we hitch the eternal to the present rather than to the past or to the future? Because anything that we really grasp now, as truth or as joy or as beauty, anything that we really comprehend, can be eternally ours. In the physical sense it is so. The electric light that I am now looking at and which might be turned off at any moment, is eternal, for its vibrations are travelling off through space and always will be. The fact that those vibrations are going off through the ether is ever the same.

Any present fact, then, so far as we realize its truth or its wonder, is eternally ours. Hence presence of mind is the quality needed in social work to balance the scientific habit which looks for past and future, for what is not present. Investigation and history-taking must always be completed by appreciation, the other half of our mental life, which is acutely conscious of the present and therefore can be conscious of eternity.

I hope I have not put the contrast of science and art in social work so sharply that it seems as if one must take one extreme or the other. I do not feel any such contradiction. I believe that we can get courage for the long, discouraging search for causes out of the present joy which we find in speaking and listening to a person now. On the other hand, these momentary contacts are thin, capricious, and insufficient if we are not also planning some solid progress which will give us something to show for it at the end of a day or a year. One of the dreary things in human beings' work is that sometimes, after a month or a year, they cannot see that they have accomplished anything. It is all a mass of details. I remember a very marvellous social worker saying to me, "I do not want to die thinking that I have never done anything but case work." Case work seems to me as great a thing as any one can do. One might as well say, "I have never done anything but miracles." But I know what she meant. She meant that through case work she wanted to feel that there was a thread of continuity which ought to be science or character or friendship, a thread whereon something accumulates. We ought each year to be able to say and to write what we have learned, or given.

3. How to give in social treatment

Social treatment is giving and constructing. We want to give

and to help build the power to get more of each.

1. Pleasure. As we want to find pleasure in our work, we surely want to try, so far as our human capacities allow us, to give pleasure, to make people feel comfortable, to be always so polite to them and finally so fond of them, that they will enjoy the momentary contact no matter what it is about. As I look back over medical work of twenty-five years, I should say that in most of my cases I have failed from the medical point of view. Yet in a great many of those failures I can see some redeeming feature because of the friendships that the patient and I built while I was failing in my medical job.

Such a blending of success and failure is the rule, not the exception. We make elaborate social plans, but we know that many of them are going to fail. It is humanly impossible that they should not fail. But they will not be flat failures if along the way we have tried to treat people, not as they deserve, but a great deal better.[4]

But when we give pleasure we must try to provide that the stock shall go on. We want to try to build in and with the person some capacity to get that pleasure for himself after we have gone out of his life. This is just as true of course of Beauty which we surely want to try to bring into our patients' lives, and which is one of the things that redeems our failures on the other side of social work. Even people who are dying sometimes can get great enjoyment of beauty.

2. Money is, I suppose, on the whole, the thing we are asked for directly or indirectly most often in social work. If we are not doing direct medical work, if we are not giving a direct medical relief or trying to, we are more than likely to be asked for help in the way of money, clothes, food, or rent. Surely no one works long in social work who does not find the right place to give money. But I have to go back to the figure already used, the parallelism of money and morphine. A person comes to us with pain and begs for money or its equivalent—direct, immediate relief. What makes us hesitate in the one case is the same that makes us hesitate in the other. We may relieve, yes; but have we constructed? In the long run we must both construct and give, else our giving may be useless or harmful.

When can we give money without doing harm?

In a general way, when it is not going to lead to the repetition of the same demand. When are we perfectly sure that we may safely give morphine? In gall-stone colic. For it may be weeks, months, years, perhaps, before there will be another such attack of colic. We give morphine once only. The person gets over the attack, and does not want morphine again for months or years. But if the patient's pain is chronic or likely to recur soon and frequently, it is cruel to give morphine, because soon the patient will have all that pain again, and more—the pain which is produced by morphine after it has been taken a little while. We never can tell that the pain suffered is not wholly due to morphine. So the person's trouble after we have given money may be due to the money itself, ill used. We should be able to say, after a careful, though not care-worn study of the case, that we know the patient's pecuniary need is not going to recur, because we are not dealing with a chronic difficulty like extravagance or alcoholism, which will recur and cannot be checked by money.

3. On the whole, the safest form of giving that I know, that which is surest to perpetuate itself, to be planted like a seed and go on without our having to stand by it, is giving information—a cold-sounding thing, but sometimes very useful. One difference between the social worker and the person for whom she works ought to be that the social worker has had more education, more freedom, more friends, more opportunity to look around the world and see resources. Hence, when, for instance, she comes to find a job for a man, the social worker, because of the perfectly undeserved blessings that she happens to have, ought to be in a position to give information that is of value.

One of the most precious kinds of information is information how to secure more information. The difference between uneducated people and those whom we call educated, is not that the latter know very much, but that if they do not know something they know how to go to one who does. The uneducated person is helpless to improve his education. He does not know and cannot find out how to look up a subject.

I have distinguished information from education. Information as such never changes character in my opinion. This subject has been discussed in recent years in connection with what some call quite falsely sex hygiene. Information biological, pathological, physiological, talks about health and disease, never kept any man or woman straight morally. It never changes character. So our public school education sometimes represents only information, only the facts, not the meaning, the interpretation, the use of those facts. Hence the public school is justly open to the criticism brought upon it by those who say that it does a child no lasting good to know facts. It may make him clever and so able (like German science in war) to do more harm than if he knew less.

But when we give education—for example, hygienic or economic education—we give something else than information. Education is that which, by reason of practice, by doing something again and again, and doing it if possible in the presence of a good model (living or dead, book or person), changes our character and our habits, as the use of a muscle changes the muscle. A person learns to write. That is not merely information—he has learned to do something. Learning to swim is not information. We learn it by practice, by doing it, and by the imitation of good models. How does one learn to think? By doing the thing, and if there is any model in sight, by trying to imitate that model.

4. Education is what social workers try to give most often, most consciously, over the longest time, and sometimes with the greatest results. We try to give people hygienic education. We try to give, not merely hygienic information, but motives fit to bring about a change in habits, a wholly different thing, and one which may be of signal value. We try to teach self-control, the control of sleep, the control of emotion, the control of appetite. It is hard, but it can be done by prolonged effort, under such influences as give us courage to work at it. We try to give economic education, the power of foreseeing what is going to happen by reason of what has happened before. People are extraordinarily prone to forget things which they do not want to remember. We may help people by economic education, to economic foresight, to economic organization of their resources by practice, and by going over with them the cases of other people who have won out in similar difficulties.

5. Anybody who does much talking is asked a good many times, "Won't you please come round this evening and just give us a little inspiration?" There is no request that I look on more sadly, more wistfully, than I do on that. I know how little good such "inspiration" usually is because it can be given the same way as money or morphine can be given. Inspiration or courage means emotion of some kind. Nobody believes in emotion more than I do. I believe the greatest life is the life that feels the most, enjoys the most, suffers the most. But emotion is one of the most transient and unreliable of states. One may be in a most exalted and courageous state of mind at the end of a lecture, and a few hours later be as weak as an invalid, because, though courage has come, it is courage which does not provide for its reënforcement, for a new supply. We never give people help that has any permanence except when we give them reality. We try at first to help people in their woes through our own personalities. But we are not strong enough to keep anybody else afloat. We have to transmit something greater than ourselves, if possible to bring people in touch with a life-preserver that will be there after we are gone.

I suppose that when we can teach people to work and give them something they can practise all their lives and get joy out of, when we teach people to play, to deal rightly with their affections, and to worship, we have given realities permanently buoyant.

Our social history cards at the Red Cross Refugees' Dispensary in Paris had a great many blanks on them, which represented the blanks in our knowledge of the patients and the defects of our social work. We rarely entered deeply into our patients' lives in relation to their education, family life, recreation, religion. In our work at that Dispensary we dealt chiefly with medical facts and economic facts. To go thus far and no farther cannot satisfy many nor remake lives. That Dispensary was open but a few months and within that time, of course, nobody could expect us to enter into intimate relations with a human being's life. But if we were to work in any Dispensary for years and still not one of those cards had any note about the patient's education, recreation, family relationships, and religion, I should feel that we had failed. I should feel not only that we had done superficial work (that is often inevitable), but that we had done nothing but superficial work, which is not satisfactory.

It is because we want to give people the best, not that we have but that the world contains, that we should have spaces on our social history card for notes about those things which we believe are fundamental in our own lives and which we want therefore to see constructed or increased in somebody else.

Social treatment, then, is chiefly, the giving and building of health, pleasure, money, beauty, information, education, courage. It is not because we have such a tremendous stock of those goods to give away, but because we know that we must somehow help a person to self-help in those directions or else be superficial, that I have phrased social treatment in those terms.

4. Creative listening in social treatment

One of the simple and yet honestly useful things that we can do in social work is to give a man a hearing. Often he will solve his own problems with the aid of a little information from one whom he trusts and has talked things out with. But this implies unusual powers of listening on the social worker's part. It implies what Mr. R. H. Schauffler calls creative listening. Some of the most delightful friendships are those one makes through a magazine. In the "Atlantic Monthly" some years ago I saw an article on playing string quartets by a man whom I had never heard of, Mr. Robert H. Schauffler. Mr. Schauffler's writings, which I came to know through this article, contain many interesting points, but nothing so valuable to me as the essay on "The Creative Listener."[5] It was founded upon an autobiographical incident. As a musical amateur he used to attend orchestral concerts in what was then his home city, Chicago. He used to go with a certain group of friends, his brother and others, who liked to sit together because they found that in this way they enjoyed the music more. Ordinarily they were very regular in their attendance. But one evening for some reason they had to miss the concert, and then it came to their knowledge that the orchestra had felt their absence very much, and really could not play their best without them. This is true. There are people whose attention makes us play or speak or act better than we could otherwise. We have known it in friendship We all know that some people when we talk with them, make us feel as if we really were worth something, had some ideas. Others are destructive listeners who make us feel as if we had no ideas; our personality seems destroyed.

I think it is perfectly within the province of any of us to make himself more of a creative listener than he has been before. For creative listening is due in part to the intensity of our sympathy, the whole-heartedness with which for the time being we give ourselves to the person we are with.

Under favorable conditions the power of the creative listener to enlarge and to remake a personality is not capable of limit. The people whom I most often help are the people for whom I do nothing. They tell their tale, spread it all out before me; then they see the solution themselves. Just to state our difficulties clearly to another person who will listen not merely sympathetically but creatively, and with resistance as well as furtherance, is of value. With certain people we run against a stone wall every now and then, even though they are only listening silently. This is right and helpful. The right kind of listening is sympathetic when it ought to be and dissenting when it ought to be.

We help people out of trouble in other ways also; often by bringing new facts. A person tells us about his difficulties at work. He sees it perhaps more clearly after he has talked about it. But he may not know some facts that we know, and therefore we may be able to help in some ways that go beyond creative listening. But in the end a person has to make his own decision, to find his own solution; and in many cases he will find it without any more active or physical help than this.

5. The case-worker's pyramid in social treatment

It might well be objected by any thoughtful reader that if a person carried out the physical, economic, mental, moral, spiritual investigations that I have suggested in this book, he could take care of no more than one patient at a time, and would need years to finish up the tasks suggested by the history of that one person. That is an objection that certainly deserves an answer. I will begin my answer by a comparison with medical work. A trained physician is supposed to know something of all the organs in the body. Even a dentist or an oculist has had some training on all the bodily organs and not merely on the special ones he treats. Among the organs of the body, the medical profession is supposed to include the brain and all the functions of the brain. This implies that he is supposed to have at his finger-ends the ability to make an examination so complete that a whole day would be needed to finish it. Obviously if he attempted anything like that he would soon be overwhelmed. But on the other hand if he limits himself to the professional examination of a single organ, the one perhaps which the patient complains of, he does so at his peril. He is in danger of making a wholly wrong diagnosis. But that can be diminished only in proportion to his knowledge of all the other organs that he does not examine. A well-trained physician must and can safely do some superficial work. So a very well-trained social worker can and must do some superficial social work. In the practice of any doctor who counts up a month's patients we will say to one hundred, there will be about fifty that he has examined and treated very slightly. Then there may be twenty-five whom he knows a little more about, fifteen perhaps that he could give a full account of, and possibly ten whom he has had to study from all the points of view that his medical education has made possible for him. His professional life then is not wholly superficial yet does not attempt to deal exhaustively with every case.

As I see it, therefore, our work in the social or medical field ought to be something like a pyramid.

We should study and treat many cases superficially, a smaller number more intensively, and at the top of the pyramid which represents our case-work will come a few to which days or weeks of time are devoted. Such a distribution of time is not unsatisfactory or slipshod because not all the needs that come to our attention call for thorough study.

Such a pyramidal distribution of our energies is familiar and satisfactory in other fields of life, for instance in the field of friendship. Nobody wants only intimate personal relations. Everybody needs as a basis a host of acquaintances. Out of them all he makes a few friends whom he hopes to know as well as he can know any human being. Almost no one is satisfied to possess only acquaintances or only intimate friends. The properly balanced life has both.

Both among those for whom we attempt only slight study or slight service, and among those to whom we devote ourselves intensively, doctor and social assistant alike must count failures as well as successes. We do not try to balance failures and successes if we are wise. The Lord only knows which of our seeming failures are really successes and which of our successes are failures. Some of the people with whom we seem to have made total failures, a more complete knowledge might show to have been actually helped. All this we must face from the start. Then we shall not be disappointed because we have to touch a great many people superficially and to fail a great many times. That is all right so long as we are not always superficial and do not always fail.

Such a philosophy is my defence for so elaborate and extensive a scheme of social investigation and social treatment as I have tried to explain in this book. The experienced physician and the well-trained social assistant can judge with some accuracy which cases to select for thorough study and continued devotion. But such a judgment is impossible unless one keeps always ready in the background of one's mind the whole apparatus of social diagnosis and treatment as it might be applied in toto, if time and strength were unlimited.

CHAPTER IX THE MOTIVE OF SOCIAL WORK

What is the motive of social work? Why do we do it? Why is it worth while? What will keep it going?

To me it seems like a head of energy behind a faucet or behind a dam, a pressure that has to be explained; and as we use the word motive, we may well think of it in a literal sense as something that pushes, something that moves. Then what moves? Energy, which is the source of our work, is perhaps the most general term that there is in the world. Behind everything, we say, there is energy. Behind the activities of our physical bodies there is energy to an extent that those who have not studied medicine or other physical sciences do not always recall.

Eighty per cent of any human being's body is made up of water. Where did it come from? It came from what he has taken in in the form of drink. Where did that come from? From the earth and the streams. Where did they get it? From the clouds. Where did the clouds get it? From the seas. Where did the seas get it? From the interplanetary spaces and God knows where. Eighty per cent of our bodies, of our available energy, comes out of something as far off as that, out of sources that have ultimately as little to do with us as that.

The other twenty per cent, the solids of every organ in our body, the brain included, are alike widely distributed in source. We do not always stop to think how widely distributed are the foods out of which the body's solids are built. Grains, fruits, vegetables, meats, we get them out of every part of the globe. The minerals that are deposited in us as what we call bone, the lime and other salts, are something which a plant once sucked up out of the earth, or another animal took out of his food to pass on to us. The bones of a human being come out of the bones of the earth through his food, animal and vegetable. The breath of the trees, the oxygen which the trees give out every day and every night, we breathe in. They take up in turn the carbon that we give out, so that there is constantly an exchange between the animal and vegetable kingdom and ours. We are warmed by inheritance from thousands of years in the coal that plants have laid down their lives in layers and strata to form; we are warmed also by the constant literal burning up of food energy in ourselves. We are clothed with borrowings from sheep and cows and other animals; birds' feathers go to make our pillows, beds, and hats.

Sometimes I wonder whether we are worth all this destruction and all the other forms of destruction whose living incarnation we are. I described, in speaking of fatigue and rest, how our physical life is a constant process of burning up and breaking down tissue, hence of destruction. And of course the money and labor of our parents that kept us alive up to the time that we call ourselves self-supporting, represents other stores of energy passed on through various way-stations, by the same sort of borrowing, from every part of the universe.

All that death, that suffering, that destruction, are we worth all that? One certainly could see a tragic aspect to this question if one were so minded. Many philosophers have so seen it. But the answer depends, I think, on what we do with that energy. It may easily be wasted. It may just run through us, as much of our information runs through us, uncaught, unused, sacrificed for us, and nothing come of it. But it may be used right.

When we come to think of our mental energies, are we any less incurably borrowers, incurably indebted to the universe, incurably wasters except in so far as we make use of what we borrow? Anybody who has not studied how the child learns to talk, does not realize what a borrowing the simplest acts of language are, what imitators we are from the earliest moments of our lives. And if we try to think back to the pieces out of which we have been actually made, our intellectual, moral, spiritual life, we could take ourselves apart like a piece of machinery and say where each piece came from. If we look into the generation of our own minds I think we shall be overcome with wonder as I often have been, by the consideration of how little there is left that is us if we take out what has been given us. I can say from whom every idea I have had came, from whom I had it as a free gift. I believe the greatest of all our borrowings are from people we never saw, from books, from music, from art, from personalities to whom we feel inexpressibly near although we never saw them in the flesh.

Our spiritual borrowings are not only from sources such as I have mentioned, but from impersonal sources also, from beauty, from nature, that does not speak to us through any man. I have seen a hepatica on a rocky hillside under brown oak leaves, the sight of which made me conscious that I could never pay off my debts for life. I have heard a thrush singing in the early morning in wet dark woods, and known then and there that after the gift of that song I could never get even with the universe.

Most of us have had that sort of experience many times; it goes on and on piling up our debt. But our obligation grows and grows when we think of our country, of the traditions of our race, and of what has been given us by the church or university or family in which we have found ourselves without our doing anything about it. What should we be without those? What shred of personality would remain? I do not think the figure of the body, as I have tried to describe its borrowings, is any more striking than that of the mind, the spirit, and the inexhaustible debts that it has laid up.

All this energy poured into us from the material and from the spiritual universe around us accumulates in us. It accumulates bodily in vital force, zest, animal spirits, or "pep"; the desire to shout and sing or jump or slap somebody on the back. That is the vital side of our unexpended borrowings, the bodily expression of the fact that we have received more than we can easily take care of. But mental energy accumulates too; and the sense of its pressure is expressed in what seems to me the greatest word in our language—gratitude. Gratitude is "happiness doubled by wonder," happiness such as anybody may contain almost unconsciously or may let out of him, if he is thoughtful, in action sprung from conscious gratitude. Gratitude seems to me ultimately the motive of social work. We find in ourselves this painful head of energy—to me often painful. The sense of an animal caged, of a dog in leash, is the figure that most often comes to me as I am aware of what has been given to me and of how little I have paid it back. The extra flood of physical energy which any healthy human being or animal has, is paralleled in this tension of gratitude for all the gifts which we have not properly handed back, have not passed on, and never shall.

The attempt to pay out, to pass on, this energy naturally divides itself up according to the ways in which we have received it. We have received the physical bounty of life. We know how good it is to get water when we are thirsty and food when we are hungry, and along with the full-flavored awareness of this good we feel the pain of not being able to share it as swiftly as we would like to share it, as fully as we would like to share it, with people who have not got what we have. We call that pity, the sense of kind. I think of it as the sense of a common need. Other people are such as we. We are painfully aware of what has been given to us, and how much we and everybody else need it, and how little we deserve it. We are eager therefore to pass that on in any such form as it can be received. We are grateful for any good chance to pass it on. A homely but true image is that of the nursing mother. The baby needs milk and the mother needs to get rid of that milk. It is a painful pressure in her breast and a pressing need in her child. The two needs meet and satisfy each other.

We are just as eager, I think, to give back in kind all the different sorts of delight and of beauty for which we are grateful. But we have not well expressed this eagerness. I have dwelt already on the great lack of beauty and of art in social work, on its ugliness and drabness, and on the care-worn look in the social worker's face. But no one who is vividly conscious of the gifts of beauty which have come into his own life can continue to make his attempts at social work as unbeautiful as they have been hitherto.

If we have any sense of gratitude to the people that have cared for us, we want to pass on affection. We know the affection that was our physical creation in the beginning and our upbringing through childhood and youth, yet most of us have never tried through most of our lives to pay back these debts to our parents. Indeed we usually do not become aware of those debts until it is too late. To know that would bring us to almost insupportable remorse after our parents have left us, if we were not aware that we could pay over to somebody else the affection and care which they once lavished on us.

As we know that the physical energies of water and oxygen and carbon, of the food, the lime salts, and whatever else goes to make up our physical being, all come out of one source, so we are aware that all spiritual gifts come out of one and the same source. To be vividly aware of that, to stop and face the facts, to stop and take a view of where we are, tells us what next to do. It makes us eager to pay back some of that gratitude directly in prayer, and also indirectly through all the way stations by which this help has come to us. If you want to please a mother you do something for her children. A human being lives in his children, in the people or the undertakings that are his children literally or figuratively. If you love him, you feed his lambs. So we get the impulse to pass on the best fruits of life, first to the one source of all that makes us grateful, and then to the children of this central Energy, the different way stations from which it has come to us.

We eat our heads off like stabled horses with too much oats, if we do not get a chance to give away some of what has come to us. A man who tells funny stories is always grateful to the man who will listen to him. The same principle holds true all the way from story-telling to social work. It can be taken as humiliating, but properly viewed it is a sanifying and humbling fact.

I wrote a moment ago of the sense of what we owe to our parents, a debt that seems almost insupportable sometimes. It would be insupportable if we could not pay it on to somebody else. Were it not for this central fact our gratitude would be a curse not a blessing. But in fact those who gave to us, our parents and all the rest, are best pleased if we pay over their gifts to somebody else. That is how we can best repay them.

If this is a right conception of the source out of which comes the energy that has set us going and will keep us going, I think we can trace out a justification for the principles of social work which I have tried to present in this book and will now summarize:

1. We want to do social work because we have got something that we must share, something that is too hot to hold. There is a false emphasis, approaching sentimentality, in saying that our social work is done because of our love for the individual people to whom we give. We have a hope that some day we may know a few of these people well enough to say that we love them. But that is hope, not fact or present impulse. Hence it is not right (although it is not a fearful error) to say that we do social work for love of the particular individuals whom we try to help. We are looking for an opportunity and are grateful for the opportunity that social work gives us, to pass on the gifts which we are grateful for, not as has sometimes been said, to people whom we love but to every one who needs them.

That may seem a very slight difference of emphasis. I think it is a very important difference of emphasis. We are in a much more self-respecting position if we do not have to think of ourselves as having already conquered at the beginning that which we aspire to win in the end, a personal affection for all our patients. If we remember that our patients are (unconsciously) doing us a favor in allowing us to pass on something to them, and that although we may have found a genuine need, still we are grateful to them because they want what we have to give, then our work is humble and free from taint of Pharisaism.

2. The second principle is: give as one passing on that which is not our own. That is familiar enough in relation to money. Any one who has any money and any capacity for thoughtfulness, knows that his money is not his own. Whether it happens to be literally in trust or not, the only right he has is the right of rightly choosing what he will do with it. He holds it rightfully just so long as he needs to find the chance, the best opportunity for passing it on.

Such a sense of trusteeship we ought to feel about everything that we have and want to give: beauty, information, education, affection, and courage. One should give them (if he can!) not as one who has any special merits, not as one having property which is one's own, but as one who has received without any possible deserts an incredible wealth and would like above all things to share it because it is not his own.

3. We ought to give and build, because the effects of any giving that is not also building will not last. Our bodies and our souls are what they are because of what has been given and built into them by nature and by man. The same energy which burns in our bodies and knows in our consciousness should make us desire always to give and build by giving, because we have ourselves been built up of such gifts.

4. We ought to give and take. That is another aspect of giving as one who passes on. We can give only what we have taken. Hence if we allow our lives to get cooped up, narrow and stifled, so that we are not taking in steadily, or not getting fresh energy out of what we have already taken in during the years that are past, we soon have nothing to give. I have written of the ugliness and the depression that I have seen too much in social workers' lives. That is partly because they are often led into giving without providing for any adequate source of renewal. They are not taking in enough to have anything to give out. They give until they are drained dry, squeezed out.

5. We give not as people who find the world so pitiable, so miserable that we want to diminish its misery. We give as people who find the world so glorious, so overflowing, in what it has done for us, that we want to even up, to pay out. We want to share our enthusiasms. Pity led Schopenhauer to pessimism. He pitied the world so much that he thought everybody ought to get out of it by suicide. Pity therefore does not necessarily lead us to social work.

But if we admire anybody, that fact gives us a duty to get our admiration over to somebody, to share our enthusiasm. The whole of a Christian's duty might be phrased as the duty to share his sense of the beauty and the wonder that is in Jesus Christ. Almost the only act that we can be sure will be of use in the world is the act of sharing what enthusiasm we have.

6. But this cannot be done without some care to shape it, without some labor to put it in a form in which somebody else will understand this sense of our admiration or gratitude. Without form and study to give it form, our enthusiasm is mere noise and good spirits. As I have described the fund of energy which comes into us, is felt as gratitude and then pours out of us in social work, one may have wondered, where does man's individual will and choice come in? Where does he begin and these tumultuous energies stop? What is he?

He is that which focusses, that which forms, which makes comprehensible, which expresses the energies that have been given him as a free gift. And because miraculously he is made new—for everything that is new is a miracle—because miraculously he is different from every human being that ever was, so different from all others is the gift that he has to give. I think it is sometimes comforting to look at a finger-print. One gets doubtful whether there is any special reason that the individual called by one's name should persist on top of the earth. Then it is well to go back to simple, elemental facts like finger-prints, with the pretty nearly irresistible conclusion that the rest of our body and soul must be as unique as that, and so possesses something as original to contribute to the world. I have no doubt that there is waiting for each of us to-day a job much more individual than we have ever yet done.

Although, then, we can rightly give in social work merely as people who pass on to others in gratitude and wonder the energies which create our bodies and our souls, yet we can be perfectly sure that if we do what it is up to us to do, we shall in time be giving as people never gave before and never will again. We have missed rare chances in social work unless through presence of mind we find our chance to express differently from what we have ever heard it expressed before that which we feel pushing in us to get out.

7. Since it is our business to give as people who pass on, we want if we can to make it clear sooner or later to the people to whom we pass it on, that we know this. Then they will feel no shame in taking since they know that they do not take from us. There will be no sense that a higher being is distributing what a lower being has to take, if we make it clear that we are sharing that which it is uncomfortable not to share. We are sharing that which we share because in view of all the bounty which we have received, in view of the beauty which has struck us dumb, in view of the flood of affection that we never have answered, we know what to do next. We know that we are branches of a vine, and that the sap of that vine can flow out in us and through us to other tendrils.

THE END

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS

U. S. A