Page:The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble (1924).pdf/216

 Mrs. Henshaw answered for the social worker.

"You can't go because of your TB."

"But wouldn't you like to go to the Lakeview Sanatorium?" the social worker suggested. "Mrs. Henshaw and I have been talking it over."

"I guess it's the next best place," Mrs. Henshaw said.

While the conversation was far more devious and prolonged than these quotations indicate, this remark clinched the matter, and before the social worker left, Mr. Henshaw had signed the application for his admission to the sanatorium where ten days later he was comfortably established.

If in a situation of this sort one is known and liked by the individual in trouble there frequently comes the temptation to make a personal appeal to him: "Do this because I want it." Nothing is weaker, less constructive and less permanent. The contact between helper and helped usually is temporary. Remove the personality of the one who makes this plea and the reason for the course of conduct which he urges is likely also to disappear. This objection obviously does not hold where, as in the interview with the