These then are the essentials of charity “a free gift and a gift to need.” May we go on to inquire what additions or alterations have developed these into social work, or is social work a thing so far transmuted from charity that it no longer shows the very elements of its original? A reperusal of our digest of the charities directories shows the many forms of social work all of them still to include the qualities of charity. In the first place the services of social work are still a gift. Sometimes they are provided by the state in close association with the obligatory work of some routine state department, but in such cases the tasks of social workers will be found to differ from those of the other employees in the department in being not only highly extensible and almost infinitely variable but in some degree supererogatory--as in the case of the follow-up work of the workmen’s compensation office. In the second place the presence of a need, though less evident among the forms of social work than in the case of primitive charity, is always discernible. Social work often seems to aspire to knowledge rather than accomplishment, as when making investigations or surveys or when any form of ministration is accompanied by so much solicitation of information as to raise the question of which is product and which by-product. But its activities will always on inspection be found to claim connection with the discovery and removal of some form of human ill. Social work itself naturally points to immediate purposes, small definitive tasks like the formulation of a standard distribution of expenses in the budget of a family at subsistence level. To conclude that these are its ultimate objects would be as serious a mistake as to imagine that the medical profession would rest satisfied with a set of dependable prognoses. And these investigations do not exploit the fields of prosperity. They consistently maintain a preoccupation with untoward conditions and a sense of stewardship. Before all social work, as surely as before charity, a Samaritan purpose floats like a will-o-the-wisp, an inconstant and shifting but ever discernible guide, sometimes at several removes from the work in hand but always its ultimate sanction. Social work then, incorporates, while it modifies, charity, and we find ourselves ready to discuss the second part of our question--what is the nature of these modifications which have produced social work? FOOTNOTES: [6] New York Charities Directory, A Reference Book of Social Service, published by the Charity Organization Society of New York, 28th edition, 1919. [7] Social Service Directory of Philadelphia, 1919, corrected for 1920. Pub. by Municipal Court. [8] New Century Dictionary. [9] Webster’s New International. [10] New Century Dictionary.