That out-patient clinics should fill an important place in the new nation-wide campaign for mental hygiene, there can be no doubt in the mind of any one who has given attention to the matter. That organized social service is not only a desirable accompaniment of such clinics, but an essential condition of their efficiency, is a demonstrable and measurable fact. CIVIL WAR IN THE WEST VIRGINIA COAL MINES HAROLD E. WEST [_The Survey has not had staff or means to send a special representative to the West Virginia coal fields to make an intensive investigation of the conditions in the strike area. That is the sort of social interpretation we shall hope to perform with the growth of the slender resources of the Survey Associates. We have done the next best thing--viz., turned to the most promising newspaper source._ _It has been current gossip among journalists that the press of West Virginia could not be relied upon to tell the truth about the situation in the Kanawha Valley. Of the metropolitan newspapers which up to March had had staff representatives in the field, the accounts of the Baltimore Sun stood out. They did not mince matters in telling of the brutal murder by the strikers of the mine guard Stringer; nor did they hedge in publishing what was done by the Cabin Creek and Paint Creek Colliery Companies. Mr. West was the representative the Sun had sent into the field, and from him The Survey requested an article, only stipulating that it be fair to both sides and tell not only the events of the strike but the conditions back of them._ _"The article may seem unduly to favor the miners," wrote the Baltimore Sun man in sending it in. "I went to West Virginia absolutely unprejudiced, with the idea of telling the truth about the situation. I found conditions I did not believe could exist in America, and I am no novice in the newspaper game, having seen some pretty raw things in my time. I told the truth about them, and am afraid I have gotten myself disliked."_ _The fairness of the article is disputed by Neil Robinson, secretary of the West Virginia Mining Association. His protest is published in the forepart of the magazine._--Ed.] For nearly a year a state of turmoil amounting in practical effects to a civil war has existed in the coal fields of West Virginia. The situation centers in the Kanawha Valley, hardly more than twenty miles from Charleston, the capital of the state. The military power of the state has been used with only temporary effect; martial law has been declared and continues in force; the governor of the state has been defied and denounced from the state house steps and within his hearing; men and women have been thrown into prison and are still there for espousing the cause of the miners, and the grim hillsides of the canons in which the mines are situated are dotted with the graves of men who have been arrayed against one another in this conflict between capital and labor.