But the greatest resentment is probably not caused by these lapses, which social workers themselves know better than outsiders. “Organized charity” did not, as it is so easy for those who know only the present to assume, originate suspicious scrutiny. Charity was “cautious” in the sense of the bitter couplet long before the present organized charity movement. The fierce old English poor law took no chances on “impostors”[71] and the dread of them by the private charities of the continent in the sixteenth century has already been referred to in these pages. It is, of course, easy to see the necessity for “investigation” when charity is on a large scale. But it is easier to resent for oneself, or one’s friends, the mortification of being suspect; and to many people “organized charity” has never meant anything more than an attempt to prevent overlapping and imposture. But in the scientific charity movement precaution soon sank into insignificance beside the more positive purpose of learning enough about a situation to tackle it intelligently. This is a trifle harder to understand and even easier to resent. When we want help we usually have a pretty definite notion of just what help we need, we are in a touchy mood to begin with, and unless we are very nice people indeed we resent any questioning of our preference. It is a matter of common knowledge that those who do not appreciate the difficulty of the doctor’s task and the time required for cures drift from one dispensary to another and try physician after physician in search of one who will treat their troubles as they think they should be treated and give them the relief for which suffering dares not cease to hope. What wonder if a yet greater dissatisfaction is felt with the deliberateness of the social worker. And if, as we have said in the definition, he is to proceed by “scientific” methods he must be as “cautious” and “statistical” as the doctor. But granting the need of caution in procedure it is shocking and repellant, on the face of it, that this organized charity should make the throbbing woes of a fellow creature the subject of dehumanized records. It is bad enough that people should be required to strip their predicament bare, exhibit all their helplessness and violate reticence to expound whatever can “throw light on the situation”--but why must it be recorded? But it is shocking enough to learn that someone we care for is known as a certain sort of case in a hospital and yet we have now so far appreciated medical exigencies as to accept it as a necessity. In other matters also we may come to realize that there is no impertinence in impersonal treatment for purposes of serviceable classification, and for all classification the prerequisite is records.