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A study of the kind Miss Marcus has made in this book becomes increasingly of importance, as the question of relief looms, for the time at least, ever larger. Though in no way touching on the sociological or economic significance of relief, it supplies convincing testimony of the significance to the recipient of what relief can do, and of the consequences of the manner in which it is conducted.
The book brings to a focus the development in regard to relief giving, toward which casework has been tending, in a more or less hit or miss fashion, since the early days when it treated poverty as the sine qua non of social work and attempted to cure it on that level. As the author has pointed out, it is necessarily inconclusive. It is, perhaps, for that reason more valuable, as indicating in an articulate way the direction to be taken if casework is to become increasingly fruitful. Thus it lays a foundation for future development.
A conclusion of importance drawn from the study of the casework material, upon which the book is based, is to place the symptom of poverty in its proper relative position in the myriad symptomology of the material. It has brought out, through the study of actual cases, the misconception that poverty of income and poverty of native endowment are logically allied. And from that conclusion it is inferred that the same kind of stigma removed from the clients was also removed from social work itself. It shows that social work deals with distresses, from which few are immune, and of which poverty is but one symptom. Thus it helps to break down the unfortunate prejudice that the field, and the service, of social work is confined alone to the economically underprivileged. The foregoing conclusion was made possible probably because this study brought out the greater importance of attitudes, both in the client and in the worker, in diagnosing and solving social problems—attitudes common to, and back of, nearly everyone's ills. As discussion of this phase deve