The Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, soon after its establishment, formed a Housing and Tuberculosis Committee. The field workers in all such associations have helped to educate the executive bodies of the organization and the Executive Committee has helped to educate the people and municipal officials, and thus the whole social movement verges toward an increase of public functions. Indeed, everywhere charity workers are saying: “The people who come to us should be thrown back upon industry. It is a poor sort of an industrial system that cannot support those willing and able to work in it.” COMMUNITY RESPONSIBILITY Finally social workers have come to the conclusion, many of them, that in most cases these are not private problems at all but socio-economic ones for which the social system, through government, is responsible. They therefore talk “community and public responsibility” and insist more and more that there shall be no public shirking or shrinking. With the trend toward public social service, organized charity itself becomes more and more a clearing house for other agencies or, in its effort to maintain itself through the self-preservative instinct that all institutions have, it assumes also the task of prevention by offering employment; opening hospitals and rest homes, milk stations, day nurseries; circulating educational pamphlets and the like. Thus duplication of work is occasionally found where the social workers of a hospital, of a settlement, and of a charity branch visit in the same day a tenement mother and force her to repeat the story of her problems. The only way in which such duplication can be avoided is through the organization of social service and the extension of municipal functions in that line. When the hospital is a municipal enterprise, its social service department would seem to be the proper and legitimate one to have the right of way and of support; and this is especially justified through the ability of the municipality to coöperate systematically among its departments: the health department working with the education and police departments; public works with health and education; and so on. The beginnings of the coördinated social service under municipal control are already on the horizon. Take, for instance, the Board of Public Welfare of Kansas City, Missouri. This Board is four years old. Women are active on it as district superintendents, investigators, factory inspectors; in the social service department, parole department, department of lunches and unemployed, and women’s reformatory.