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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.

The article focuses on the treatment of the dependent unemployed in Saint Louis, Missouri in the Winter of 1931-32. The discussion deals with the structure of social work in St. Louis, so far as it is concerned with the relief of the unemployed. Saint Louis has no public outdoor relief. The only exception is the administration of a generous state provision for blind relief and a very niggardly mothers' allowance. Neither has any appreciable effect upon the problem of unemployment. Of all the large cities in the United States, St. Louis is unique in having but one relief-giving agency serving the entire community-the Provident Association. It is one of the oldest organizations of its sort in the country, undertaking what is now called family welfare work. It is a private agency, managed by a self- perpetuating board of directors, and has been supported, up to the present time, practically without any aid from tax funds in the more than 70 years of its existence.