e area of secondary contacts, in which relationships
are relatively impersonal, formal, and conventional. It is in this
region of social life that the individual gains, at the same time, a
personal freedom and an opportunity for distinction that is denied him
in the primary group.

As a matter of fact, many, if not most, of our present social problems
have their source and origin in the transition of great masses of the
population--the immigrants, for example--out of a society based on
primary group relationships into the looser, freer, and less controlled
existence of life in great cities.

The "moral unrest" so deeply penetrating all western societies,
the growing vagueness and indecision of personalities, the
almost complete disappearance of the "strong and steady
character" of old times, in short, the rapid and general
increase of Bohemianism and Bolshevism in all societies, is an
effect of the fact that not only the early primary group
controlling all interests of its members on the general social
basis, not only the occupational group of the mediaeval type
controlling most of the interests of its members on a
professional basis, but even the special modern group dividing
with many others the task of organizing permanently the
attitudes of each of its members, is more and more losing
ground. The pace of social evolution has become so rapid that
special groups are ceasing to be permanent and stable enough to
organize and maintain organized complexes of attitudes of their
members which correspond to their common pursuits. In other
words, society is gradually losing all its old machinery for
the determination and stabilization of individual
characters.[54]

Every social group tends to create, from the individuals that compose
it, its own type of character, and the characters thus formed become
component parts of the social structure in which they are incorporated.
All the problems of social life are thus problems of the individual; and
all problems of the individual are at the same time problems of the
group. This point of view is already recognized in preventive medicine,
and to some extent in psychiatry. It is not yet adequately recognized in
the technique of social case work.

Further advance in the application of social principles to social
practice awaits a more thoroughgoing study of the problems, systematic
soci