A HISTORY OF SOCIAL SERVICES

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21975, 26 December 1936, Page 13

A HISTORY OF SOCIAL SERVICES

The Social Services. A Historical Survey. By W. Hardy Wickwar, with the collaboration of K. Margaret Wickwar. Cobdcn-Sanderson. (10/6 net.) This work gives a comprehensive account of the rise and development of corporate attempts to ensure the means of living and of improving the general condition of all in need of such assistance. Poor relief, education, and health services come under Mr Wickwar’s survey, together with provision for such contingencies as old age or unemployment. These different types of “social services” are considered in turn, and in the concluding two chapters attention is drawn to features common to the development of them all. The most striking of these common features is the tendency for all the various services to move out of private hands into those of various public authorities. It is shown that a large part was played by the Church in the original organisation of these forms of corporate assistance, though the writer shows little sympathy with the Church’s frequent reluctance to hand over their management to the State when circumstances seemed increasingly to demand such a transfer. Mr Wickwar plainly approves, for instance, of the rise of secular education, and stresses the insufficiency of purely charitable organisations in the relief of the poor. Social services were often also originated through the work of friendly societies and insurance companies. Much discussion has gone on and is still going on as to whether old age and unemployment benefits are to be received as a form of compulsory insurance or paid out of rates and taxes. The varying responsibilities of the nation and of local administrative units are also described in some detail. The interdependence of the different services is also made clear throughout the book. In the matter of health, for instance, the action of public authorities was first confined to hygienic preventive measures, such as the ensuring of good drainage; but the mutual connexions of this work and that of the public hospitals, and of both with the relief of poverty, have become increasingly plain. The same is true of the connexions of both health services and poor relief with education. Mr Wickwar shares the opinion of John Ruskin and Octavia Hill that “the discussion whether the slum caused the slum-mind or the slum-mind the slum was an irrelevant abstraction.” In all this development a new conception of the task of the State has emerged. The State is no longer conceived as existing merely for the defence of the community against interntl and external enemies, but as having a great many more positive responsibilities in promoting the welfare of its members. The struggle for the recognition of these responsibilities has been as important in recent years as was the struggle for the liberty of the individual last century, and has, in fact, grown out of it by the curious logic of history. Mr Wickwar is careful, however, to avoid drawing a rigid distinction between the older and the newer views of the State’s duties. He points out that the growth and extension of the social services have made for the diminution of crime, and that defence against external enemies is strengthened when people are enabled to “feel that their country is worth defending.” Nor has he any illusions about the possibility of a nation’s problems being solved by national social services alone: “The re-integration of the state in the World community is as hard as the re-integration of the individual in the nation-state.' ;