found, or better jobs obtained; questions as to our savings institutions; problems involving their own desire to learn English and to educate their children; matters concerned with sending for relatives or getting in touch with members of their families who are supposed to have arrived in this country or are expected; questions in regard to becoming citizens and matters which concern medical care. Immigrants need to be told where to go for work and to be put in touch with the leaders of their race who can be trusted. They need to be directed to public agencies that will assist them, such as immigration bureaus, night schools and recreation centers, and the skill with which this is accomplished means everything for the future of those who come to us. Every inquiry carries with it the responsibility of so answering that the immigrant leaves with a clear understanding of the matter in which he is interested and feeling encouraged to return if again puzzled.

Enough has been said to make the point that in immigrant case work more frequently than not the problem is one of putting persons in touch with resources that are unknown to them. The immigrant comes to us strong, eager, ambitious. Give him a chance and he will do the rest. Difficult personal idiosyncrasies

do not play a large part in case work with the alien nor does family discord. Would that the same were true of the second generation!

THE SECOND GENERATION OF IMMIGRANTS

His

Our contact with the immigrant straight from the old country convinces us that he is seldom unable to care for himself. children, however, are found on our relief lists and in the ranks of the unemployed to too large an extent. No fair-minded person can lay this fact to anything other than our own American neglect. Two lines of effort open up here for the case worker.

First: a far more refined fitting of individual ability to opportunity than has been carried out and a more drastic attack on certain environmental conditions which weigh heavily upon the immigrant. At present the immigrant is fed into industry as nothing more than a unit of man power. The time is approaching when the government employment agency will use the vocational method of considering special aptitudes for particular jobs. Immigration brings in a mass of unskilled labor, it is true, but there have been hundreds of instances of men whose skill as machinists or craftsmen

has been wasted because they have not known where to go for guidance or because an employment agency has not taken the pains to consider anything but the fact that a man needed work and that any job would do.

Not only are the government employment agencies moving on toward the point of greater care in classifying workers, but industry itself is concentrating on lessening the labor turnover and is engaging persons to test out special ability.

Further, considering the European environment from which certain of our immigrant groups come, it is essential that we get those with an agricultural bent out on to the land. Although some gain has been made in this matter of distribution during the past few years, we have only begun to attack the problem so that the case worker with immigrants will find a fertile field in this direction. for individual suggestion and individual encouragement.

Case work records of an agency tell their own story of difficulty. They present the effects of heredity, the overpowering result of disorganized family life and the insuperable difficulties of environmental conditions. With the immigrant we find not so much difficulties of heredity as lowered family unity. We find bad housing, the evils of congested areas and industrial exploitation playing their part in breaking down the natural mental power, moral rectitude and physical tone of the immigrant. Since this is true, efforts to assist individuals stand indicted unless, coupled with these, case workers use every means for attacking environmental handicaps.

A native of this country is often not in close enough touch with European family standards to realize fully how very important it is to go back continually to the family relationship in given individual difficulties or in thinking out a plan of action for a boy or girl, man or woman. Two extremes are often faced in immigrant situations: the instances where persons have no relatives in this country and so are free from all family restraints, and the instances where family dominance is so strong as completely to submerge the individual and create an almost insuperable obstacle to necessary freedom of action.

The case worker should work sympathetically with the latter situation, remembering how important a part the family has played in the history of certain foreign races and in a negative way reasoning back from forms of anti-social traits which, particularly in

young people, develop because parental respect and the ideal of the home circle has broken down. The family ceremonial should be honored and interpreted to our young foreign citizens in its American setting.

IMPORTANT FACTORS IN THE PROBLEM

It is never safe in any form of problem not to reason from the physical, mental and the moral responsibilities of a person back to assets or defects in family situations as well as to consider the helps or handicaps that may spring from association. With the immigrant the surrounding groups of which he is one are all important. Custom has at once a binding effect which may need to be modified and at the same time a protective influence that must be brought to bear on many a situation, and in this regard no two nations are alike. There is all the variation of temperamental reactions as well as traditional code. A case worker is treading on dangerous ground unless these distinctions are recognized.

With a person who has no family ties, the building up of acquaintanceships among those who have enough at stake in a neighborhood to be acted upon by public opinion cannot be brought about too quickly. It is more and more coming to be accepted that the judgment of one's peers acts as a centripetal force in holding one up to accepted standards of thought and action. When persons are free from the obligations of family and are outside the pale of the effect of community requirements, a decidedly unnatural situation is created. Example after example could be given where the building up of community ties has swung persons from danger into resistant self-assertion.

By way of summary we may say that aside from the usual identifying data of the name, address, et cetera, which need not be detailed here, it is essential not only to get the country from which a person comes but also the section of the country. Occupational circumstances should be gone into carefully since in many parts of Europe lines of work may be similar to lines of work here and yet vary greatly as to the technical requirements and the conditions under which labor is carried on.

Moreover, it is not always safe to assume that an immigrant is uneducated, in its broadest meaning, even though he may have had little schooling. In certain sections, the folk organizations of the

people have for many years been such as to develop a depth of thought and a sort of philosophy, to say nothing of a practical kind of reasoning. Only a limited training in symbols of languages is needed to remove such a person far from the illiterate group. It must be remembered, too, that the importance of the church varies markedly in certain parts of Europe.

One of the most important considerations is getting at the reason why the person came to this country. These factors are extremely important in helping to bring out the right kind of assets in a case of need or to make possible connections with persons who would be willing to extend the advantages of good fellowship to a stranger or to connect a person with any of our organized forces of civic or social life.

In facing any given problem one reasons first in terms of the power of the individual. What has he within himself? What has been given him by nature? What has been added by training? What does he possess in the way of experience and how does he fit into his circle of associates? Then, what is there in the family situation which will push him forward or draw him back? What does the community offer in the way of giving play to the possibilities made apparent by these two lines of deduction?

THE SOLDIERS' AND SAILORS' FAMILIES

BY W. FRANK PERSONS,

Director General of Civilian Relief, the American Red Cross.

Although in the very nature of the case, soldiers and sailors are separated from their families, the Home Service of the American Red Cross reaches both the men, wherever they may be, and their loved ones at home. It is at once the means of sustaining the spirits of our fighting men and of preserving the welfare of their families. It is a tie that binds them together. Men may be the best soldiers in the world, but if things are not well with their families at home they lose efficiency through worry, and the morale of the army--that all-important factor-begins to fail.

So it is the patriotic duty as well as the humanitarian opportunity of Home Service workers of the American Red Cross to care for the lonely families of our fighting men. They must be encouraged to "carry on" without faltering. Their families must not be allowed to bear personal privation and so to double the willing sacrifices they have made. Every report from the training camps and from the French front mentions the excellent spirit of our troops. Will they maintain this morale while thousands of miles from home, through trench-life and battle, to the victorious end? The answer will be determined largely by the Home Service of the Red Cross, which must be the nation's assurance that no enlisted man's family will suffer for any essential thing that lies within its power to give. There are representatives of the Home Service of the Red Cross in every training camp for soldiers and sailors in this country; they are with our troops in France; and their offer of help is on the bulletinboard of every ship of the Navy. They invite the confidence of the men, and win and deserve it. They learn of the anxieties of the enlisted men and of needs in their homes. Such messages are then promptly sent to the Home Service Sections of the Red Cross Chapters and their families are visited and helped. Then the encouraging news goes back to the husband or brother. He also is helped. That result is not hidden from those on this side the trenches. Daily letters are received like the following: