The conference has thus confirmed and filled out the elementary features of social work which it inherits from charity, voluntary benefaction and response to need. What does it have to say of the qualifying features that have transformed charity into social work--the emergence of the individual as the only and sufficient nexus for its services and the adoption of scientific guidance? The first of these has already been touched on in relation to the first section. Throughout the second the discussion all bears on the prevention of delinquency or the care of delinquents. There is not much discussion of pure justice, the burden of the argument is all that we should “approach every individual prisoner with conscientious determination to give him the best service of which we are capable, realizing that his future is largely in our hands.”[48] A public defender is asked for “in order that every person accused, no matter how poor, may have a full and fair trial.”[49] And for sentenced prisoners social work asks something more than mere detention, “we used to look upon them, in the stage of repression, en masse. * * * Instead of committing a man to a particular institution he is now committed to the custody of a board of control * * * to be examined * * * to determine just where he will fit into school or industry. The man will be assigned by his board, to the particular prison to which he is best suited for mental and physical treatment.”[50] “If a child who is mentally sound comes into court with a mind bent on the commission of some offence he should be sent to a special school having for its purpose the education of such children. Let the great departments of psychology and sociology of our colleges and universities devise a course of instruction and education that will reclaim a juvenile delinquent who is mentally and physically sound”[51] and “we should extend the methods developed in the Children’s Courts to apply to all ages, wiping out our arbitrary age line by improving the treatment of the older groups.”[52] It is in this section that there appears at its plainest the paradox that the questions purely dependent on what we call personality are questions of social relationship and all genuinely social questions are questions of personal life. A public policy is justified in terms of personal benefit but interest is claimed for personal difficulties on the ground that they illuminate public issues.