So far I have spoken of the housing question mostly from the standpoint of health or cheapness, but, as I have already suggested, the moral aspects of the problem are still more important. It is difficult, for many impossible, to preserve personal decency and to keep family morality at a proper level, when adults and grown-up children are forced to sleep in the same room. Lifelong injuries to body and soul may be forced upon innocent children in this way. Nothing can be more important than this. We must remember, however, that custom and previous habits play a vast part here. One race or one set of people may have so adjusted themselves as to preserve decency under conditions impossible for another. We cannot generalize. We must know the particular people with whom we are dealing, and we must know their previous habits and standards in case they have shifted their lodging or increased the number of persons in a room within a short time, as is so frequently the case. _Working conditions_ Work and the conditions of work are among the most important and the most difficult of the economic problems in which a social assistant may find herself inevitably involved. These concern the patient's trade, the physical and moral conditions under which he practises it, his fitness or unfitness for it, the wages he receives, the future possibilities of advancement in pay and type of work which it offers. In all of these problems the social worker can sometimes help a little because of her greater freedom of mobility, mental and physical. She is not tied to her task as blindingly, as deafeningly, as the manual worker is. She may know more or be able to find out more as to labor markets, as to other, possibly better, positions, shops, employers. She may be able to see, better than the worker himself, his fitness or unfitness for the work he is doing. She may be able to realize better than he that his trade presents an _impasse_, has in it no possibilities of development, personal or financial. She may realize better than he the bad effects of his work upon health or morality. In all these respects she may be able to give the safest, and in some ways the most satisfactory, of all help,--namely information. I do not underestimate the difficulties of such help. It is not easy to know more about a man's business than he does. Yet if the social worker's education, her health, her circle of acquaintances, is greater than that of the wage-worker, she may really be of some assistance to him even in the field that is more specially his own and that she can understand but superficially. It is for this reason among others that the social worker cannot be too broadly educated, too fresh physically, too vigorous in her powers of thought and observation, too widely acquainted in her community. Among the problems growing out of the basal economic needs of which I have just spoken, are others with which I cannot here deal adequately. Such are: