there will be neither social services nor the benefit hoped for from them. And we shall not only have fallen short in our duties; we shall have helped to spread yet another likeness of the official bureaus and the routine transactions whose way of working and of handling matters we ourselves complain of.

Surely some of the women who work in this field remember the failure and the shame that befell them—or that ought to have befallen them—when it happened that they received certain European and American visitors, specialists or women of renown, and found that the sumptuous buffets, the magnificent mansions, and the lush gardens did not draw the eyes of the guests of honor; nor did these take comfort in the lavish hospitality with which they were met, so much as they felt the disappointment that accompanied their request to see something, their desire to become acquainted with some aspects of social activity and actual services, to talk with the disabled and the afflicted, and to eat in the kitchen of the shelters, with the vagrants and the wretched...

We must treat matters in our own way, and from the impulse of our own feeling and conscience; let us not follow man and imitate him in the individualistic spirit rooted in him and in his denial of the spirit of community, which our societies lack most sorely.

We must work to rouse public opinion and to draw its attention to the social problems under whose weight it groans—by visiting homes, by offer-ing counsel and advice to their mis-tresses, and by opening the way to women of ability and of specialization and preparing them for this end...

For how can the problems of a society be solved before that society is understood by scientific, technical, and statistical methods, and before work and tasks are distributed according to those statistics and data?... And is there any pleasure greater than that which a person feels in helping the wretched, serving the needy, entertaining the crippled, feeding the infirm and the neglected, cheering the confined, directing the wayward, and guiding the miser-able?... Is there not in this saying a lesson and a ring—'The best cure for your sorrows is to acquaint yourself

with the sorrows of others and to throw yourself into seeking out one who grieves, to console him'—.. Ask what is felt by Father Yaacoub the Capuchin, founder of the home for the crippled in Lebanon, and by Mrs. Nazik al-Abid Bayhum, foundress of an orphanage and a school for refugee women, and by Mrs.

Katinko Siksek, foundress of the refuge for the sick in Beit Jala, and by Mrs. Matilda Salem, proprietor of the George Salem School in Aleppo, and others... Ask about the pleasure they sense in their social services, and you will be assured of it—if they can express their feeling with ease.