=What Shall Public and What Shall Private Social Service
Attempt?=--How far and by what ways shall the varied philanthropic and
educational activities which are named in mass "social work," and
which have been developed and are now so largely operated by private
and volunteer agencies and organizations, be made a part of the
official service of the father and the mother state? In this social
work, so far, the few have set a pattern of aid to individuals, which
public agencies have tended to take over without much serious study of
whether in any particular case the transfer was necessary or wise.
This change has often been made, also, without determining whether or
not further supervisory work by the private citizen was needed to keep
the social enterprise true to its original and tested principles of
action. The time has come when in all such changes from private and
volunteer work of a few to the demand for support and the dependence
upon guidance of the many, through public officials, we should have
some clear guiding principle. What that principle may be it is not the
purpose here to discuss, but the state that is now doing so much that
only families were formerly expected to do, and is attempting to do so
much that only trained and devoted service of experts chosen by
acknowledged leaders in social service has previously tried to
accomplish, must be tutored and must be supervised by a more
intelligent electorate if it is to do its more ambitious tasks well.
No private agency should allow its finest fruits of longest study and
effort to be absorbed by official provision and control, unless it can
gain assurance that those fruits will be secure in the transfer.
This all indicates that women voters who have, happily, no past
bondage to partisanship to overcome, who entered upon their political
power with no pledges to any one party to hamper their free action,
and who, being indebted to progressive party leaders in every one of
the political divisions, have friends in every one, may and should do
much to help progressive and independent men voters to solve the
deeper problems of our political situation with clarity of judgment
and true patriotic devotion.[21]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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