turn on the question whether or not it was his tilling of the soil that had brought the farmer an increased yield of fruit. The court would deal in the main with the same facts as the social worker, namely, with the testimony of witnesses, with government reports, or with an inspection of the premises; the difference would be that a court would guard with scrupulous care the admission of hearsay evidence and would exclude rumors; that it would, in short, hold each witness to a responsibility for his statements, allowing him in the main to say nothing of which his own knowledge was not firsthand. This evidence might or might not satisfy the court beyond a reasonable doubt that it was justified in concluding that tillage had increased the farmer's yield. But these restrictions upon evidence are necessary in law because of the obligation the judge is under of sifting evidence for a jury who are liable to allow undue weight to items which have small value as proof.

The common difference between the point of view of social worker and court stands out in the following instance of alleged parental neglect:

SOCIAL EVIDENCE WHICH LED
A CASE WORK AGENCY TO ASK
COURT ACTION THROUGH A SO-
CIETY TO PROTECT CHILDREN

1. Three rachitic children aged seven,
five, and three years; the oldest could
not walk at all at four years; the second
and third had bowed legs and walked
with difficulty at three years old. Al-
though the oldest child has been three
and a half years in a hospital where it
was sent by a social agency, the parents
omitted to take the other children to
the dispensary for examination and ad-
vice. The social worker made seven
calls to urge them to do this. They as-
sented each time, but were increasingly
resentful at what they regarded as an
intrusion into their private affairs, and
did nothing. The social worker con-
strued this as parental neglect.

REASONS WHY THE SOCIETY TO
PROTECT CHILDREN BELIEVED
THAT THE COURT WOULD NOT
ACT

1. "No doctor has yet made a definite
statement as to the serious result of
failure on the parents' part to follow di-
rections in the treatment of these chil-
dren." A court would not accept a lay-
man's judgment even on so obvious a
matter as extremely bowed legs, because
this might establish a precedent which
in most instances would work badly. A
layman's opinion in such a case as this
is a less responsible one than a doctor's,
since the latter's professional standing is
involved in his statements. Even with
a physician's statement "it is very dif-
ficult to make such neglect the basis of a
case in court." The father supports his
family, the mother gives good care as
she understands it. The court, fearing
that doctors may disagree, hesitates to

2. This family has lived for six years in two tiny rooms on the top floor. Although their tenement rooms are sunny and clean, the children do not get sufficient exercise or air. The parents refuse to move, as the rent is small.

3. A year and a half after having been urged to have the two younger children examined, the mother took the youngest child to the hospital and promised to bring the second child. Eight months later she had not done this.

force a debatable treatment upon wellmeaning, if ignorant parents. One might venture to predict that courts will more readily consider neglect of this sort as they grow inclined to take common sense risks instead of resting on the letter of precedent.

2. The sunniness of the tenement and the fact that the mother keeps it clean would prevent a court from regarding these cramped quarters as evidence of culpable neglect. Public opinion would not uphold the court in making an issue over home conditions that were not considerably below the ideal held by social workers. The social worker often forgets this.

3. "While it looks as if the family had been neglected in years past either deliberately or through ignorance, or both, the situation today is not clear." The oldest child is still in the hospital, the youngest has received hospital care, and the mother has promised to take the second child to the out-patient department. With this evidence of good intentions, a doctor's statement (see 1) would be necessary to satisfy a court of present neglect.

Here was a deadlock. In asking court action on the ground of parental neglect the social worker was in effect calling upon the court to accept his interpretation of the evidence as establishing the fact of neglect, and to order the children to be submitted to physicians for treatment. The court, on the other hand, as interpreted by the society to protect children, would require the physician's testimony as a link in establishing the fact of neglect and would be unlikely to act until the social worker himself had done the thing he was asking the court to do; namely, confront the case with a doctor. It would seem to a layman as if in such a case the court might safely summon the parents and child into court, admit the child's bowed legs and the social worker's efforts to persuade

the family as evidence, and put this father and mother on probation to consult any reputable doctor they chose.

It is clear, then, that whereas social evidence is distinguished from that used in natural science by an actual difference in the subject matter, it differs from legal evidence not in the sort of facts offered, but in the greater degree of probative value required by the law of each separate item. The additional testimony which the court would have asked in the instance cited was not different in kind from what the social worker already had.

In short, social evidence may be defined as consisting of any and all facts as to personal or family history which, taken together, indicate the nature of a given client's social difficulties and the means to their solution. Such facts, when duly tested in ways that fit the uses to which they are to be put, will influence, as suggested in the preceding chapter, the diagnosis of physical and mental disorders, will reveal unrecognized sources of disease, will change court procedure with reference to certain groups of defendants, and will modify methods in the school class room. To a certain extent social evidence is already exerting this influence, but the demand for such evidence is likely far to outstrip the supply during this next decade.

II. THE WIDER USE OF SOCIAL EVIDENCE

ކ

Scattered and tentative as they still are, the signs of such coming demand are nevertheless unmistakable; the uses of social evidence in the older professions are beginning to multiply, as the following illustrations will show:

A specialist in the diagnosis of feeble-mindedness committed two difficult girls to custodial care, largely on the facts supplied him from first-hand observations by a children's aid society as to the characteristics of these girls and of their families. The "stream pictures" furnished in summaries of two case records, covering two years in one instance and nine in the other, were his most conclusive evidence.

The nature of these stream pictures may be gathered from Dr. W. E. Fernald's discussion of the evidence needed by the psychiatrist for making a diagnosis of mental defect. Some of this evidence, although obtainable by social workers, is of course medical in character, that is, delayed dentition, late walking, delayed speech, a history of convulsions in the first few years of life, the presence

of degenerative stigmata. Much of it, however, is precisely the slight but cumulative evidence which social workers habitually gather as bearing on disabilities; namely, facts of family and personal history with special reference to the period of infancy and early childhood, a relatively long continuance of untidy habits (of childhood), the public school grade in relation to age, inability on the part of the patient to apply himself continuously either in school or in any other occupation without constant supervision. In some cases with only slight intellectual defect, the inability to "make good" socially will be a deciding factor in the diagnosis.1

All of this information, including the medical, should be given in the history of a client which the social worker is preparing to submit to a psychiatrist.

The contributions of social work to medicine are not confined to the diagnosis of feeble-mindedness. As we have seen in the first chapter, medical diagnosis and treatment are beginning to show the influence of the social evidence gathered in the medical-social departments of hospitals and dispensaries.

We have also seen in the discussion of Beginnings that the children's courts of the United States owe their existence to social workers. These courts supplement legal evidence by social. Not only have the courts come to recognize the value of a more liberal inclusion of imperfectly relevant evidence in disposing of child offenders; they are growing to feel that even the method of gathering this evidence has an influence upon the welfare of the child. They believe that such investigation should be inspired not by the ambition to run down and convict a criminal but by a desire to learn the best way to overcome a boy's or girl's difficulties. The need of modifying in these courts the usual legal procedure is thus commented upon by Flexner and Baldwin:

The best interests of the child make it necessary for the court to consider hearsay and other evidence of a more or less informal kind which would ordinarily under strict rules of evidence be excluded. It is of the utmost importance that the court should avail itself of just the kind of evidence that the investigator [the probation

1 Fernald, Walter E., M. D. (Superintendent of the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-minded, Waverly, Mass.): The Imbecile with Criminal Instincts, p. 745. American Journal of Insanity, Vol. LXV, No. 4, April, 1909, pp. 731-749.

See also questionnaire regarding a Child Possibly Feeble-minded in this volume, Chapter XXVII.

officer] presents. If it should finally be determined that the laws as drawn do not permit the introduction of such evidence, express provision should be inserted in the statutes allowing its use.1

Another court having its origin in needs brought to light by social work is the court of domestic relations, which may in time be merged with the children's court. It suffers at present from inability to secure and use the necessary social evidence. This experiment, like many others, will continue to fall short of full usefulness until social workers develop the diagnostic skill that will enable them to offer to the court authenticated and pertinent information. The following is a case in point:

A court of domestic relations sentenced a man for desertion and non-support on the testimony of his wife. The wife then applied to a charity organization society for relief for herself and four children. The district secretary, assuming that on the face of it this convicted man was good-for-nothing, asked her committee to arrange for assistance to the family. It was with reluctance that the secretary at the suggestion of her committee agreed to make what she regarded as a superfluous investigation of the man's side of the story. This inquiry, however, brought statements from employers, former neighbors, relatives, etc., which showed that the trouble lay not with the man, who was a decent enough fellow, but with the woman, who was probably mentally unbalanced. Instead of voting relief, therefore, the district committee asked the judge to release the man.

In short, the secretary in question would hardly have been qualified to persuade a court of the helpfulness of social evidence, while she herself was capable of treating an inference-that as to the man's character-as if it were an evidential fact.

Many educators, even though not thinking in terms of social work, are recognizing their need of obtaining social histories of pupils and of giving differential treatment based upon them. The social worker's method they sometimes take over with little understanding of its details. For instance, Madame Montessori in her Pedagogical Anthropology makes a plea for differential treatment of pupils and gives a whole chapter to the question of securing the biographical history of the pupil and of his antecedents; but she apparently has little conception of the varying reliability of the

1 Flexner, Bernard, and Baldwin, Roger N.: Juvenile Courts and Probation, p. 52. New York, Century Co., 1914.

Montessori, Marie: Pedagogical Anthropology (Translated from the Italian by Frederic Taber Cooper), pp. 404-453. New York, Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1913.