Its essential inability to develop any compact body of doctrine may also be handicapping it in a more fundamental way. It is said that social work does not get its proportionate share of the best students taking professional training. May not this be because a course which offers an acquaintance with the high lights of half a dozen subjects and mastery of none is not likely to recommend itself to able students as promising to lead to dignified and responsible work? Social work can only hope that when more time and more ability have gone into the development of its separate fields such discipline may be developed along special lines as will give it better intellectual status and the power to attract and hold recruits by something beside that appeal to their imagination or their humanity exerted by its general possibilities. “I treat philanthropy seriously,” wrote one of its historians, “because of what it implies; its professors have commonly not been very efficacious.”[79] But scientific social work is something more than philanthropy and its history is yet to be made.
Whatever is in store for social work it is pre-ordained that its functions can only persist by adaptive variation of its practices, that it will never be perfected, never be satisfied, never even, in any final and completed sense, successful. Its object is to correct the mistakes of nature and man in the making of human lives and its undertakings grow with our hopes for life. Such presumption can never succeed, but its mere instalments of success would be triumphs in a lesser enterprise. For social work each new triumph opens only a new range of possibilities. It might well take as its motto the proud words of Masefield, “Success is the brand on the forehead for having aimed too low.”[80]
FOOTNOTES:
[61] Philanthropy and the State, p. 303.
[62] John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, p. 577.
[63] Ibid., p. 575.
[64] William McDougal, An Introduction to Social Psychology, p. 14, et seq.
[65] Porter R. Lee, at the National Conference of Social Work, 1920, p. 468.
[66] Charities Review, 1898, p. 9.
[67] Hamlet, Act III, Sc. 2, line 379.