st, the
inheritance of spirit and character from our ancestors, are guarded and
preserved for our descendants. And it is the great discipline through
which each generation learns anew the lesson of citizenship that no man
can live for himself alone."[4] It follows that the most trying and
discouraging feature of social work with deserted wives; namely, their
determination to take worthless men back and back again for another
trial, is often only a further manifestation of the extraordinary
viability of the family.

It is true that, into this enduring quality, many elements enter, some
homely or merely material. A desire for support, or for a resumption of
sex relations, may play a part in a wife's decision to forgive the
wanderer. There are many other factors--use and wont; pride in being
able to show a good front to the neighbors; a feeling that it is
unnatural to be receiving support from other sources. Just the mere
desire to have his clothes hanging on the wall and the smell of his pipe
about, the hundreds of small details that go to make up the habit of
living together, have each their separate pull on the woman whose
instinct to be wife and mother to her erring man is urging her to give
in; Home is, in both their minds,

" ... the place where when you have to go there
They have to take you in....
Something you somehow haven't to deserve."[5]

A woman who had left her home town and found clerical work in a strange
city, in order not to be near her syphilitic husband from whom she had
determined to separate, said, "When you've been married to a man, you
can't get over feeling your place is with him."

However we may deplore the results in a given case, the spineless woman
who takes her husband back many times may nevertheless be giving a
demonstration of the thing we are most interested in conserving--the
durability and persistence of the family. And so the social worker who
is enabled by experience or imagination to enter into the real meaning
of family life is neither scornful nor amused when Mrs. Finnegan is
found, on the morning when her case against Finnegan is to come up in
the domestic relations court, busily washing and ironing his other shirt
in order that he may make a proper appearance and not disgrace the
family before the judge.

* * * * *

An attempt will be made in this small book to analyze some causal
factors in the problem of the deserter, to touch