Among the poor, with whom we deal part of the time in social work--though I insist that social work is concerned with the rich as well--we have to face _economic fears_. In America and England economic fears are a very real evil--fears of the work-house, fears of coming to be dependent, of having no place of their own, are what poor people often dread. Again, the clue for our usefulness is to find out what people do not tell us of these economic fears, and then to see if we can make them groundless. In a certain number of people (I do not feel competent to say how large a portion), life is rendered miserable by _the fear of being found out_. I happened, as I have already said, to get driven some years ago into a position where I thought it best to swear off medical lying. One of the surprising parts of this experience was the sense of relief which I felt when I knew that there was no longer anything in my medical work that I was afraid of having any one find out. It was in benevolent, unselfish medical lies that I had been dealing, according to the ordinary practice of the medical profession. But as soon as I decided that I could abandon these and need no longer fear that any patient might find out what was being done to him, I had the sense of a weight taken off my shoulders. _Forgetfulness_ There is a very eloquent passage in one of Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet's books[2] about social work, in which she describes the psychology of the poorer classes among whom she worked in London, and dwells especially on their characteristic forgetfulness. They cannot learn because they cannot remember. They cannot learn how to avoid mistakes in future because they cannot remember past mistakes. One well-known difference between a feeble-minded person and a person competent to manage the affairs of life, is that the former forgets so extraordinarily, and therefore cannot build up through remembrance of his past how to steer better through the future. Of course we all of us have this disease in varying degrees. We all forget, in the moral field as well as the physical, things that we ought to remember. There are things that we ought to forget. After we have started to jump a fence, we must not remember the possibility of our failing. The time to remember that is before we have begun to jump. Moreover, there is no particular benefit in remembering our own past mistakes if they are such that we cannot do anything about them, morally or any other way.