organization society and the visiting nurse association that the nurses will turn "family problems" over to the family agency, and that the family agency will turn over all "health matters" to the nursing agency. It is illogical to assume that there is any clear line of demarcation between these two things, but some such division may be a working necessity.

A truer co-operation will soon cut a gateway in the fence thus put up, however, and will be sure to find in addition a section of ground which must be occupied in common, if the best work is to be done. When this more highly developed stage in working together is reached, the understandings growing out of it will defy statement in a bald formula.1

Co-operation based on responsibility for the result of our social acts, co-operation advanced by sound and thorough professional training, fostered by good will, by social zeal, and by unhampered freedom of discovery, leads us away from "understandings" and into a daily deepening understanding. This latter is a matter of the spirit. Freedom to learn, to grow, and to serve is fostered by co-operation of the spirit. This is the fourth and highest period of social co-operation, for which the other periods are only preparatory.

I. TWO DISTINCT FUNCTIONS OF SOCIAL AGENCY TESTIMONY

Returning to the statistics of outside sources once more and for the last time, we find that, even when the medical, social, and school sources considered in other chapters are excluded from our total of social agencies, there remains a larger number of consultations with this latter group than with any other. Relatives (next in order of frequency) were consulted 1,187 times, whereas public and private 1 My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down."-Robert Frost in North of Boston. London, David Nutt, 1914.

social agencies-the deductions just named having been madewere consulted 2,243 times, or, if we include church sources, 2,748 times. If the plan of presentation adopted for outside sources had been followed strictly, social agencies would have been presented first of all. But, as sources, these agencies seem to belong upon another plane. In order to emphasize this difference, they have been reserved for separate treatment at this much later stage.

Somewhat different tests must be applied to the evidence given by social agencies to social agencies from those applied to the statements of any other outside sources: first, because the relation that these organizations have held to a client is in many respects similar to the relation now held by the inquirer; and second, because of the variety both of the tasks that social organizations perform and of the attitudes that they at present take toward the processes leading to diagnosis. The variety of their tasks is shown by Table 5, on the next page, and the nature of their relation to their clients brings us to the most important distinction to be made in evaluating social agency testimony.

This distinction is based upon the fact that social agencies can be called upon to fulfill two different functions as witnesses:

1. To Supply Data from Their Own Experience. They may have had a social experience of their own with a client, and we may need to know that experience. Even when the service undertaken for him was quite different from that which we ourselves are about to attempt, it may have fulfilled all the difficult conditions of an "investigation by experiment"; in that case, it may help us to know the client's reactions and may give us a key to certain of his personal characteristics. Social agencies are often at their very best as witnesses, when they are reporting, without bias, a first-hand experience of this kind—an experience acquired in the course of treatment. Of course, the better they understand their client's background, the more intelligent will be their interpretation of this experience.

Institutions for adults and for children frequently supply just this experience type of data. They have the advantage, when they are not too large, of being able to control the conditions under which their observations are made far better than these can be 1 See reference to this term on p. 86.

TABLE 5.-SOCIAL AGENCIES (EXCLUSIVE OF HEALTH AND SCHOOL AGENCIES) USED AS SOURCES BY 56 AGENCIES IN 2,800 CASES

To which, for the purposes of this study, may be added the following church sources:

controlled by the society or department engaged in field work only. They have the corresponding disadvantage, however, of a more rigid and artificial standard of measure. In the freer give and take of the field, an artificial standard is more easily corrected.

Plenty of evidence is at hand that, when case workers can see the asylum official who knows their client, they get valuable data as to the client's personal habits. The temporary homes utilized by children's agencies during a period of observation (investigation by experiment) are also useful aids in diagnosis.

Children's institutions that are excellent witnesses as to their own experiences with inmates may still have only the vaguest of extra-mural data about them. They may admit them, discharge them, send them home temporarily at vacation time, and place them permanently with relatives or with strangers on knowledge that would be regarded as inadequate by any humane person who was seeking a home for a stray cat or dog. It follows, of course, that institutions of the type that Miss Florence L. Lattimore describes in her study of Pittsburgh are not competent witnesses as to family conditions either past or present. Nor is their investigation of placing-out homes any better. In 1907, the date of Miss Lattimore's study, one of the largest homes in Pittsburgh allowed children to be taken out "by any woman of respectable appearance who applied at the institution, filled out a blank, and waited for the child to be dressed." 1

Even in our estimate of an institution's intra-mural testimony the point of view of the institution witness must be taken into account. In fact, the personal point of view must be probed for and allowed for everywhere. One amusing instance of this appears in a medical-social record:

A temporary home for working women was asked to report upon the conduct of a certain girl. The home replied that she was troublesome, unruly, and hard to control. When asked for detailed examples of her behavior, they wrote as follows: "We told Mary that she could not crochet in this house on Sunday. We had to speak a second time about this and send her to her room. Later, we found her disobeying upstairs. We do not allow gaiety of any sort in this house on Sunday, not even light music. You know we must keep up a certain standard."

A very different point of view-one that is also based largely on experience, but upon experience of a more flexible kind-is that supplied by the social settlement. The settlement thinks instinctively in terms of neighborhood reactions. This is a type of evidence so little known to numbers of case workers that they do not consciously seek it, as they should, or recognize its absence.2

A head worker in a settlement, who had formerly been for a year in a charity organization society, writes, in reply to a question about changes in her point of 1 "Pittsburgh as a Foster Mother," in the Pittsburgh District, Civic Frontage, p. 348.

* For a good illustration of the type of neighborhood evidence that a settlement worker of experience is able to give, see the descriptions of foreign neighborhoods in Boston in Robert A. Woods' Americans in Process. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1902.

view: "The settlement worker is continually gauging cause and effect in neighborhood reactions, and by continuous experimenting in lines of action tending toward a fuller citizenship comes to develop a sort of intuitive sense of the practicability of plans. Because of this on the part of the settlement worker and the training in analysis and deduction on the part of the charity organization society worker, the two should work together closely-far more closely than they do.

"From the settlement I have gained that subtle, interpretative method of dealing with facts which I believe can only come by steeping one's self in the standards, manners, and customs of races, and by entering into the community life of a neighborhood. By so doing one becomes sensitive to the varying tendencies of a district, and hence one comes to interpret the lives of individuals with all the gradations of shading which make fact true. Had I entered as fully into the lives of the working people when in charity organization work as I have the past two years, I know I could have done much better in my charity organization contacts."

To still another group of sources, to the churches, social case workers may turn for personal experience more freely than for objective data. The degree and variety of contact with parishioners are very diverse, however, in the different religious denominations and in the churches for different nationalities. A pastor or priest of the foreign community in an American city is often the one to whom members of the community most naturally turn for advice in temporal matters also for the interpreting of letters and for a variety of other services, each of which gives him added insight into the daily lives of his people. Parishes are sometimes so large and their clergy so overburdened that this ceases to be true, but in smaller communities it often holds true of both the foreign and the native American clergy.

In court work, both clergymen and settlement workers hesitate to give the testimony that they have to give, even when this would substantially aid in assuring a much desired result. The ground of their hesitation is the possibility of estrangement in future relations with the families involved. Social workers who are eager to bring about a certain beneficent result-the protection of children from neglect, the punishment of a deserter, etc.-must learn to respect this point of view, and to protect the parish and neighborhood representative from involvement, whenever this is possible.

Like the judge, the clergyman leans to a too great faith in conversion on the spot. In fact, the latter often takes a deliberately optimistic view which impairs his value as a witness in court and

out.