“I hold,” said Dr. Southard to the 1919 conference, “whatever the ideal order, the practical order of work called social work begins with the eradication of evil. It may sound better to sow goodness or to transplant goodness, or even to graft goodness in the eager social world, and beautiful little gardens of Eden or smaller cases of goodness can be shown here and there to the social visitor--nevertheless, I hold, with the prejudice of a physician perhaps, the eradications of evil are more in the first order of our work than disseminations, transplantations, and grafts of goodness. At any rate, if there be anything at all in the millennial hopes and ingrained optimisms of Spencerian evolution, it is plain that by and large we are putting evil behind us and arriving at goodness by a clever technique of successful destruction.”[47] This “eradication of evil” may, as one side of the “technique” of evolution, operate in the terms of any developing organization; but in terms of eradication of evil, not in its own functioning or its subject, but in the conditions of its object it is not common outside of social work. It is not to be found in the business world where all purveyance shuns the applicant most in need of its wares and seeks the one best able to pay. It is not to be found in the law, which tries to hold the scales even to all comers. It is only slightly and intermittently in state-craft which while it is coming more and more to inhibit abuse of the helpless does still, from an age-old sense of security in the alliance with wealth and power, bend its constructive energies to encouragement of the prosperous. It is not even in education, which constantly tends to provide in each school grade teaching suitable for those who will have longest to study and is only importuned by demands from _outside_ to cater in the lower grades to those who must get in them all the education they are ever to have. Social work stands alone in its purely personal championship of the less secure in prosperity. It is in its enormous demands for them that it seems to have turned to purely constructive things. It is indeed possible that along the lines of prevention social work is developing a function which is positive in the same sense as hygiene is positive in the field of medicine and that social work will, to that extent, independently “plant good” as well as “eradicate evil.” But it is also possible, and in the light of past developments more probable, that any constructive phase of social work which proves permanent should come to be looked on as a routine purveyance and no longer considered social work. This we have already seen to have happened in the case of free education and many other things.