These are no simple tasks when the family is English speaking, native born, and when no particular difficulties arise from difference in language and in general domestic and social habits. With the non-English-speaking family, the agency is faced with difficulties at each of these points. There is first the problem of getting at the facts as to the nature and extent of the distress and the occasion of the family breakdown. In addition to the foreign-born families who actually need material assistance there are many who, because they are laying aside part of their income either to meet past debts or future needs, are living below the standard prevailing in their community. This family needs to be urged to spend more rather than to save. Unless the agency coming in contact with it digs below the apparent poverty and finds the real income, it will be tempted to give pecuniary aid rather than the personal service the family is in need of. Its service must not result in increased dependency. Special care in applying this principle of all good case work needs to be exercised in the case of the foreign-born family. Moving from one continent to another, with almost every element in the situation changed, makes the adjustment of the family to normal and healthy standards a delicate and important one. We have been told, for example, by thoughtful members of the Italian group, that in their judgment their fellow-countrymen are often led, through unwise alms-giving, not only to pretend to be poorer than they are, but to live in conditions of squalor detrimental to their well-being. In fact, in order to understand that normal state from which the family departs when its members become applicants for aid from a case-work agency, the representatives of the agency must have at command facts with reference to the standards and practices prevailing in the particular community from which the family under consideration comes. Only then can the need of the family be estimated with any degree of exactness. When the facts are learned and the nature and extent of the need are understood, there is the question of resources available for treatment and the question of methods to be used in building and maintaining the family life and in fostering the process of adjustment between its life and that of the community as a whole. To be able fully to utilize resources, to forecast the effect of certain kinds of care, it is surely desirable for the agency to know the life of the national group into which the family has come, the resources to which the family itself has access, and the ways in which others of the group expect care to be given. THE LANGUAGE DIFFICULTY