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The article discusses the social work aspects of the Social Security Act of the United States as of December 1936. According to the author, the Social Security Bill is a landmark in American social legislation. After lagging behind every other modern nation, the United States, for the first time, acknowledges its obligation to equalize some of the sharp differences in economic conditions of its citizens, and this it accomplishes by the two devices in which the other industrial nations have had considerable experience: social insurance and national, public assistance. Up to the Great Depression, welfare projects outside institutions had been largely left to the initiative and generosity of local units. The states had ample power to step in and to promote decent cave for its out-door dependents, but until the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, only a few had taken any responsibility of this sort, except such as had been forced upon them by the administration of the loans to states for relief purposes under the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932-33 and grants by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration since 1933 in the U.S.