Social work is a group of callings representing a certain function of civilized society whatever form that society may take. Its nearest analogy is educational work. Whatever form society may assume education seems likely to retain the functions of rendering available the experience and conclusions of the past and developing the capacities of each generation as it comes on. Similarly we can ascribe to social work, under whatever system of society it may be conducted, the functions of completing inadequacy, extending benefits and rescuing the individual from the category. In a community where no one was poor or out of work, where abundance of pure food and decent housing were available for all, where wholesome recreation was attainable and attractive, and physical and mental hygiene as much a matter of course as school attendance, the tasks of the social worker would not be what they are now; they would be changed beyond our imagining. But they might still be present. In some distant sunny noonday of a healthy happy world it may even be possible that the supernormal will need rescue from victimizing by the mass. Even today social work is concerned for the superior child handicapped by a public school routine that forces him to keep step with the average and the dull. What is overlooked by those who fail to see this permanency in social work is that it has a day’s work of its own. Since its object is personal service, it tends to focus in the present and since that personal service is primarily the relief of need, it is relative to the standard of the times. “Radicalism is not an absolute but a relative school of thought. It stands for the things that the government is not ready to do. Hence it is that no government is really radical.”[77] Social work is radical in the sense that it proffers services that have not yet become duties. It is by the same token that it is also relative and will, despite changes in social organization, continue to relieve new needs, to extend new benefits and to rescue individuals from newly-felt forms of regimentation.