There were excellent reasons underlying much of the practice.  Few laws were at that time in existence or at all adequately enforced, and any man who desired was at liberty, so far as the community was concerned, to walk off and leave his family at any time.  The multiplicity of sources of relief in the large communities and the absence of anything resembling investigation constituted almost an invitation to men to desert.  It did not occur to the charitable public to draw any line between the widow and the deserted wife, or indeed to inquire which of these two a woman was, so long as she was a good mother and “seemed worthy.”  No wonder that the pioneering social agencies, busy forging tools out of the very ore, took a rigid stand on such a question of social policy as this.  Although their deterrents failed to eradicate the evil of desertion or indeed to touch its sources, there is little doubt that they did lessen its volume by creating a wholesome respect for the power of the law in the mind of the would-be deserter and by fostering in his wife a disposition to stand up for her rights.  The more lenient and more constructive policies now in force have been made possible in part by these changes of attitude.  The very fact that the collusive desertion, once fairly common, is now seldom met with, illustrates the salutary effects of the earlier methods of treatment.

But the fact remains that no marked change has been seen in the desertion rate, that successive desertions have not been prevented in individual cases.  Hardly any statistical figure in the work of family social agencies shows so little fluctuation from year to year and between different cities, as the percentage of deserted families.  It generally forms from ten to fifteen per cent of the work of any such society.

Gradually, therefore, the repressive features of the earlier treatment have been abandoned, and there has come about a realization of the complexity of causes that bring about family breakdowns.  In particular, the relation of sex maladjustments to failure in marriage have received the serious attention of the social worker.  On the question of court intervention there has been almost a right-about face; the best social practitioners now say, unhesitatingly and unequivocally, that they take cases into court only as a matter of last resort, after case work methods have been tried and have failed.  In no other case where court action is undertaken by one individual against another does the relation between them remain unchanged.  One could not conceive of a business partnership failing to be annulled by one partner who brought suit against another; yet we expect the marriage relation to survive this.  As a matter of fact, such is its vitality that it often does.  But many times the result of court action is only to deaden once and for all the tiny spark from which marital happiness might have been rekindled.  As long as it survives, both man and wife feel in their inmost hearts that,