faith; yet they may fail to recognize certain manifestations of this permanence as part and parcel of the end for which they are striving.  They would see no point in the practice adopted by a certain social agency which deals with many cases of family desertion.  This society, when it has had occasion to print copies of a deserter’s photograph to use in seeking to discover his present whereabouts, often presents his wife with an enlargement of the picture suitable for framing.  The procedure displays, nevertheless, a profound insight not only into human nature but into the human institution called marriage.

In the next chapter will be considered some of the causes that make men leave their homes.  To deal effectively with the situation created by desertion, however, we have need of a wider knowledge than this.  Not only what takes men away but what keeps them from going, what brings them back, what leads to their being forgiven and received into their homes again, are matters that seriously concern the social case worker.  What is it that makes this plant called marriage so tough of fiber and so difficult to eradicate from even the most unfriendly soil?

It is fortunate (since the majority of case workers are unmarried) that simply to have been a member of a family gives one some understanding of these questions.  The theorist who maintains that marriage is purely economic, or that it is entirely a question of sex, has either never belonged to a real family or has forgotten some of the lessons he learned there.

Many volumes have been written upon the history of marriage, or rather of the family, since, as one historian justly puts it, “marriage has its source in the family rather than the family in marriage."[2] In all these studies the influence of law, of custom, of self-interest, and of economic pressure, is shown to have molded the institution of marriage into curious shapes and forms, some grievous to be borne.  But is it not after all the crystallized and conventionalized records of past time which have had to be used as the source material of such studies, and could the spiritual values of the family in any period be found in its laws and learned discourses?  We might rather expect to find students of these sources preoccupied with the outward aspects, the failures, the unusual instances.  It is as true of human beings as of nations, that the happy find no chronicler.  “Out of ... interest and joy in caring for children in their weakness and watching that weakness grow to strength, family life came into being and has persisted."[3] It is hardly conceivable that in any society, however primitive, there were not some real families—­even when custom ran otherwise—­in which marriage meant love and kindness and the mutual sharing of responsibilities.  And these families, today as always, are the creators and preservers of the spiritual gains of the human race.  It has been beautifully said of the family in such a form, that “it