ere are developed in our large cities consultation facilities under
social auspices for people who feel their marriages going wrong, and
want help and advice in righting them, such bureaus as those described
above would be excellent "feeders" for this new form of social service.

Family social agencies have been distinctly backward in some of their
approaches to the fundamental problems of family life. The failure of
most of them, for instance, to study or seek improvements in the laws
governing marriage or in their administration, is difficult of
explanation. Such a consultation service as that suggested does,
however, indicate a new point of departure in dealing with marital
relations which would seem to fall distinctly within the field of the
family case work agencies. It is time that these agencies began to find
means of dealing, not with the dependent family alone but with the
family in danger of becoming dependent--not with the family broken and
estranged only, but with the one whose bonds, even if cracking and
ill-adjusted, still hold.

Concretely, why should not family agencies establish such consultation
bureaus as have just been mentioned, distinct from their regular
activities and hampered by no suggestion in their title of association
with problems of dependency? Dr. William Healy of Boston ascribes much
of his success in getting the parents of defective and backward children
to bring them voluntarily for examination to the fact that the name of
his organization (the Judge Baker Foundation) conveys no hint of stigma
or inferiority. Here is a valuable lesson in right publicity.

A bureau of family advice such as has been suggested should be under
unimpeachable auspices from the point of view of medicine and
psychiatry; it should have the services not only of expert social
workers and experts in household management, but of doctors and
psychiatrists as well. If it could be run as a joint-stock enterprise,
in which courts and social agencies might be equally interested, so much
the better. Its investigations should be searching enough to discourage
applications from curiosity-mongers; but its services, like those of any
clinic, should be given for whatever the patient is able to pay. Its
relations, needless to say, should be entirely confidential, and as
privileged in the eyes of the law as are those of doctor, lawyer, and
priest.

It may be objected that people guard their marital infelicities too
jealousl