Whose fault is that? Let any one who blames it on social work turn to the reports of the national conference. Let him turn to the “Survey.” He will find no lack of interest in prevention. The fact is that social work is paid for by voluntary subscriptions, philanthropic foundations, and state appropriations. So far all these sources of support, the potential representatives of the people in the legislature no less than wealthy donors, are more accessible to an appeal for relief of existing misery than to an appeal for the prevention of possible catastrophes. This ties the hands of social work even in the simple matters in which it might alone do more “preventive work.” But social work cannot alone, in any but a secondary sense, prevent the situations it is called upon to relieve. It works prevention as hard as it can and puts it up to the community in plain terms, but the situations which, at our present stage of progress, largely occupy its services could only be prevented by a living wage and regular employment, work that would not poison or exhaust the worker, sanitary and decent housing, clean milk, and so on through the list of those simple requisites of a civilized life which are now inaccessible to a large part of our population. Social work cannot give employers the will or the ability to pay a living wage; it cannot provide the masses with decent housing and unadulterated food nor, all at once, with a corresponding standard and habit of living. And if it should stop all it is doing now, in order to devote itself to prevention, neglected children would grow up unhealthy and vicious, the feeble-minded would multiply and every calamity of today become a fruitful source of multiplied disaster tomorrow. One might as well ask that all physicians cease treating from day to day the many diseases that afflict us, the better to devote themselves to a wholesale campaign of prevention. The social work of our definition has its own specific work to do from day to day. It must, like medicine, care for the handicapped in each generation and prevent the spread of contagion while it uses the margin of its energies for prevention and progress. Social work _as we have described it_, is not synonymous with social reform. It has no more responsibility for reform on “general principles” than has any other profession or calling. That it should ever be thought to have is a tribute to its thoroughness and convincing proof of its devotion to prevention.