life, and any attempt to arrange for the life of another as a whole is profane. The clearest sighted come often enough into unlit passages of their own destiny where they must grope forward in bewilderment and a kind of awed respect for things which could go unsuspected and yet all along be “nearer to them than breathing, closer than hands and feet.” Who then shall interpret another? Yet life must be met with a certain hardihood. For the conspicuously defective we know that self direction is impossible, and for the intolerably troublesome we accept coercion, but in the case of the merely dependent there are delicate lines to be drawn. Social work knows perfectly well that it is possible to degenerate into “substituting one neurosis for another.” Hamlet, thrusting on the bewildered courtier the flute which that courtier could not play, spoke for many an inarticulate protestor, “Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ’sblood do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?”[67] Lincoln is credited with the observation that the Lord never made the man who was good enough to have power over another man and, by its option of giving or withholding benefits, social work undoubtedly holds its beneficiaries very much in its power, not to mention the cases in which it has actual guardianship, legal or otherwise. A German social worker accustomed to the strict German notions of regulation could yet say after a study of American social work, “an individual is never so absolutely at the mercy of an administration as when he is the beneficiary of a relief system.”[68] It is the social worker who is the champion of individual rights all down the line from insisting on discrimination among the men referred to en masse as “the criminal” to rescuing orphan children from the uniformity of plaid dresses all of a length. But who shall rescue the beneficiaries of social work?