Such glaring cases of unfitness are however not typical of the sort with which social work most often deals. More typical is such mild cherishing of unfitness as the securing of eye-glasses for a nearsighted child. Would it do any good to leave him without glasses, unable to see the blackboard at school, considered a blockhead, unhappy and defiant and growing up at odds with the world? He would be no whit less likely to have a family of shortsighted children. Since the relative security of civilized life allows the unfit, left to their own devices, to live long enough to demoralize their community and perpetuate their strain, a humane guardianship supplied by social work, with an eye to prevention and all the possibilities of the social situation, is simply the safeguarding of a group in which spontaneous elimination has ceased to be sufficiently expeditious for the public safety. The last of those who would say “hands off” believe that the needs to which social work at present ministers are chargeable to a few major abuses in our economic system which could and would be removed by swift revolutionary measures were it not for false hopes of gradual reform--hopes which social work helps to keep alive. They think that if the distress caused by “the present system” were left unrelieved people would be shocked into summary abolition of the system. The chances of concerted action on any such program are so infinitesimal that it is difficult to regard such a proposal as anything but a mere “talking point” of propaganda. The abuses of the “present system” are too hideously great for us to risk any momentary discontinuance of their relief without a very certain guarantee of the desired results. And when it comes to that we can but remember that the blackest nights of human oppression have not led to the brightest mornings of human brotherhood, though there has been many a fine gesture of uprising. What Mr. Wells remarks in his “Outline of History” apropos of the results of the French Revolution seems to be true of any attempt to emancipate life at a blow. “When these things of the ancient regime had vanished, it seemed as if they had never mattered. * * * the immense promise and air of a new world with which the Revolution had come remained unfulfilled.