Few institutions have been subject to more criticism than public outdoor relief. No institution has been under fire so long with so little real effort to find out what makes it criticizable. It may well be that public assistance in some form is indispensable in this country and will be made to yield the results we seek. If so, its administration must be revolutionized. Giving existing outdoor relief officials new duties and responsibility to a new authority for part of their work, which is an important part of the proposal resulting from the Massachusetts report, will not revolutionize it. Nor will the giving of new names to old practices not otherwise shorn of the defects which popularize the new name do so. Again and again we have started with a clear call to do justice to the widow. Every time we try to translate our zeal into legislation we come square up against our outdoor relief machinery. Some one of these United States has a golden opportunity to make a study which will point the way to justice not only for the widow and her children but for every other person, old or young, who through our stupidity or his own fault, or both, finds himself forced to seek assistance. But the Massachusetts report does not point the way. [Illustration: CALL TO MASS MEETING IN ARABIC] THE LADINO SPEAKERS MARY BROWN SUMNER For four years New York has had a steadily growing colony of Castilian speaking Oriental Jews. The major part of them speak a Spanish dialect known as Ladino, but use Hebrew characters in writing. Knowing no English, they have lived in isolation, the largest group between Essex, Rivington, Christie and Canal streets. The rest are east of Lenox avenue in about twenty blocks north of 100th street. The biggest step toward the Americanization of this group, which now numbers 15,000 and is not yet too large or scattered to be handled by a group plan, was the calling at the University Settlement last month of a mass meeting of the race. Here Joseph Gedalecia, manager of the Free Employment Agency for the Handicapped established by the Jewish community of New York, and president of the Federation of Oriental Jews, and other speakers proposed plans for lectures on American institutions and opportunities and suggested classes in English for the adults of the race. In 1492 or thereabouts persecutions drove from the shores of Spain the Jewish merchants and scholars to whom the nation owed not a little of its development. They were welcomed by the Mohammedans and settled both in European Turkey and on the Asiatic coast. Most of the settlements of refugees preserved their Castilian speech, and the Ladino dialect, which they use today, is only slightly mixed with Greek or Bulgarian or Turkish or Arabic words, according to the section of the Turkish empire in which they happened to settle. [Illustration: THE CALL IN LADINO ]