If we have failed in our relief work, the children of the widow are not the only ones who have suffered. Upon the children of disabled fathers, of incompetent and neglectful parents, of all those tragic families who fall outside the commission’s category of “worthy,” our sins are visited still more heavily. The commission was charged only with the duty of studying the condition of widows; but it seems to have taken some note of families of other types. We read: “Consistently, widows through death of husbands by disease or other industrial cause ... deserve an utterly different kind of treatment from that accorded to the lazy and shiftless, the victims of drink, gambling or other dissipation or persons in transitory or emergency destitution. The commission does not believe that the same persons who administer the general poor law should alone determine the aid for worthy widows. Administration of such aid is sufficiently complicated, difficult and frequent to deserve separate care.” It might be noted incidentally that the cause of a husband’s death is not always a satisfactory test of a wife’s moral habits, and that “widows through death of husbands by disease, etc.” are not infrequently of the unsatisfactory type described by the commission. But a still more important comment is the following from Mr. Pear of Boston: “It is well understood by social workers that those whom your correspondent terms the incompetent, and willingly leaves to the care of overseers of the poor are really in need of the most skillful ministration. They too have children. To assume that they may well be left to officials considered incapable of caring for respectable widows is evidence of a complacency which social workers cannot share.” The report of the commission gives us much that suggests the fact of our failure to provide adequately or helpfully for the families of widows, a fact of which we had already become conscious. What we need, however, is not so much evidence of the fact of failure as a clear understanding of why we have failed. Why have public outdoor relief and private charity conceived in as deep an interest in the destitute widow as any mother’s subsidy program, failed to satisfy either the widow or the charitable or society at large? The failure has rarely been due to lack of aggregate resources. Nobody familiar with the enormous totals spent for relief, public and private, could doubt that. It must lie somewhere in the quality of the service which brings relief with it. To determine just where it does lie calls for a study requiring money, time and the sure touch of somebody who knows what to look for. The mothers’ pension schemes which the various states have worked out give us very little that is new or of higher promise in the service that goes with relief. The subsidy plan that follows the study of the Massachusetts commission is no exception.