The success or failure of the mothers’ pension movement must depend largely upon our ability to avoid the mistakes which have characterized outdoor relief and other gratuitous payments to individuals from the public treasury, and to read into the proposed remedy a new and dignified meaning which outdoor relief has never had. It may be that both these ends will be difficult to attain. Certainly they can only be attained after the most careful study of the operation of outdoor relief, both public and private, to ascertain to what extent it has succeeded or failed and why. Such a study has long been necessary in the interests of the poor and of efficient relief work. To be successful it cannot be hasty, inexpensive or inexpert. Quite as important as this study of outdoor relief will be a study of the conditions under which children are admitted to institutions which must be undertaken with much the same end in view. Those who have felt the need of more facts before enacting mothers’ pension legislation have been much interested in the study which Massachusetts has been making. If all the possibilities of such a study were realized in this report, a good many of our stumbling blocks would be removed. The existing outdoor relief machinery, public and private, an analysis of its success or failure and a standard for future procedure would all have been revealed. The report of the Massachusetts commission, however, gives us very little help. It is marked by evident earnestness of purpose; but its conclusions are of little value because they represent in almost every case inferences from inadequate data. To a large extent this is to be charged to the commission’s inadequate resources; but whatever the reason the report as it stands does not give us a model for other states. It does not give us even a clear relation between the commission’s own findings and their recommendations. Because the right kind of an outdoor relief study is necessary and because the example of Massachusetts is likely to be followed by other states, it is important to subject this report to somewhat critical examination. The commission’s method of study was five-fold: 1. A questionnaire to fifty-seven child helping societies and several public departments caring for dependent children as to the circumstances under which the children in their care were committed. 2. A questionnaire to various children’s agencies asking why children are separated from their mothers in poverty. 3. A questionnaire to public and private relief agencies asking for “the total income and the sources thereof, together with certain other facts in each widow’s family receiving through it (the agency) regular relief” for a definite period. 4. Special study of the Juvenile Court records of Boston and of the results of a day nursery investigation.