hands, an understandable action when we know its setting.
Similarly, our attitude toward the man who apparently is listless and uninterested in his work changes when we learn that he is having to stay up most of the night nursing a sick wife. There was a time when truancy was thought to be entirely due to difficulties innate with the schoolboy, difficulties that might be corrected by sending him to a special school, but experience has shown that often the home from which the child comes is chiefly responsible for his trouble. The parents may be discouraging him, they may be ill-treating him, or they may not be taking enough interest in him. In his setting may lie the explanation of his truancy.
Immediate environment and recent events are not always enough to enable one to understand the man in trouble. Sometimes his difficulty lies deeper. Its solution may be determined by his early life and training. Facts of this kind which have to do with the previous, as contrasted with the current history of the individual, social case workers call background.
It was the knowledge of the background of George McKloskey which made possible an un-
