Rehabilitation and adjustment are far more delicate and responsible matters than mere relief or even “preventive treatment” and we find social workers warning each other that “life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations and that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole and that to treat a separate episode is almost sure to invite blundering.”[23] The excuse for quoting so obvious a statement is that former practice actually required it to be made. Philanthropy took little cognizance of its supposed beneficiaries’ “life and habits as a whole.” Such a feat of synthetic judgment cannot of course be more than roughly approximated. It has, however, proved possible to develop a technique of inquiry, analysis, interpretation and direct or indirect remedial action which is known as social case work and can be made the subject of systematic instruction in the schools for training social workers. And within the last six years has come Miss Richmond’s book with the suggestive title, “Social Diagnosis,” to give a description of simple charity availing itself of the means suggested by an age of scientific experiment and so justifying the expression, “scientific charity,” which, unexplained, sounds so incongruous. The method of social case work is sometimes claimed to be the essential and distinguishing feature of social work but if we study the classic expositions of case work we find that they are describing on their own showing a _method_[24] and a method which though applicable to many types of social work is not applicable to all and which is, moreover, by no means confined to social work. Case work, in any connection, is the systematic study of all considerable effects and causes in a particular situation and the development and application of special means to alter that situation in some preferred direction. Social case work is simply case work in the form it takes when applied in social work. There are some fully accepted forms of social work which have no occasion to use it. Important as it is we must recognize it as an expedient and not social work per se. THE INTEREST IN CAUSES An interest in the causes of disaster is responsible for the development of those forms of social work which do not retain the immediate serviceableness of charity proper. It has developed as part of the already described attempt to systematize philanthropic service and also on an independent line of its own. “In practically all departments of the work of prevention” write the Webbs, “in the campaign against degeneration and in favor of promotion of better breeding; in the campaign against the ruin of adolescence, the creation of unemployment and the demoralization of the unemployed--we are always being stopped by the need for further experience and additional research. We know enough now to know how extremely important it is to increase our knowledge.”[25]