ABSTRACT
Social legislation and society Statutory social services are an essential element of British life in the 196os, as they are in the life of all developed countries. In developing countries new services are constantly being established and the modern world, in some measure, judges the standard of development of a country by its social services. In all countries such services are growing both in extent and in depth, and with their growth comes greater sophistication in planning and greater refinement in execution. They are part of the modem scene in a way that would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors a hundred years ago, or even to people of the early 1900s. We cannot think of a modem state without them. This is true even of the United States, a country which, in theory at any rate, disapproves of intervention by the state in this field on anything beyond a minimal level, and which finds itself providing statutory services on a much wider scale than is generally knowna scale which is increasing.
