honor, in his social existence, to be secure in his belief and opinion, his spiritual existence, to be secure in his domestic relations, in his expanded individual existence and to be secure in his substance, his economic existence.”[31] It will be noted that, in the attempt to define these individual interests even a superlatively able lawyer could come no nearer to legal precision than to say “for example.” The concept is one which social work itself continues to alter, fill out and expand with every breath it draws and is not the less significant because it is elusive. As social work becomes more systematic with an almost technical practice, more dissociated from the specific act of relief and more widely and variously allied with the practices of other callings this personal, this “social” interest, becomes increasingly important as one of its distinguishing features. We may recapitulate the effects of the extension of a charitable interest into new fields. The charitable interest working along scientific lines has produced what we know as social work and social work continues to manifest that interest as its characteristic feature in all the widely scattered fields to which human needs have called it. It is, first, everywhere engaged in the gratuitous extension of benefits. That is to say, it performs services which, while they may be officially sanctioned, are discretionary and adjustable, and are not considered established rights in any but the most broadly construed humanitarian sense. Secondly, it is concerned with negative conditions; not the successes but the failures interest it, not the promising people but the difficult people, not the leaders but the under-dogs. And thirdly, as social work begins to operate in close association with many other services, we see, what was always implicit in charity but now first stands out in sharp relief, a prime interest in the personal needs of individual beneficiaries. This puts social work in a new relation to public affairs for it not only stands by to gather up the human wreckage of bad management but it brings to formalized administration a constant and well-posted challenge to meet individual requirements. THE PROPOSED DEFINITION Diversity in social work may today be more conspicuous than likeness but under the diversity essential likeness can still be traced. Despite all appearances to the contrary it has its own department of human affairs and its universal common interest inherited from charity and to this department of human affairs, to the service of this interest, it brings a method adopted from science.