Although in practice the possibility of a collusive desertion is not the first and most important thing to keep in mind, it is frequent enough not to be entirely forgotten.  And for yet other reasons it is well to keep a watchful eye upon the neighborhood in which the family is living for reports about the man.  Often obscure impulses seem to bring him back; jealousy of the wife or a desire to show himself in a spirit of bravado, or even sometimes a fugitive affection for the children he has abandoned may cause him to appear in the neighborhood.  “The deserter, like the murderer, harks back to the scene of his misdeeds” was the generalization of one district secretary.

Even when he does not appear in the flesh the deserter may seek news of his family.  “One deserter was found through the Attendance Department [of the public school system] to which he wrote after a three years’ absence asking the address of one of the children of whom he was especially fond.”

There is little in the literature of the subject covering methods of discovering deserters, nor do case workers generally appear to have developed a special technique.  The decided reaction against detective methods which has been apparent in the profession during later years may help to explain this fact.  Most social workers feel a subconscious sense of injustice in having to do this work at all, since it is properly a function of the police.  Prosecutors and police officials generally take very little interest in following up deserters, and have little idea of giving any treatment to the deserter who has been found other than arraignment and conviction.  It is difficult for the probation officer or the family case worker to hold up the machinery of the law, once it has been started, and to do this long enough to find out whether some other form of treatment best suits the case.  For these reasons the social worker usually prefers to do or else is forced to do the work of the detective in desertion cases up to the point where arrest is in his judgment necessary.

A probation officer in D——­ found that he could not work through the local police in searching for a certain deserter, because the missing man’s political affiliations made them friendly to him.  The probation officer knew in a general way that the man was likely to be in the city of S——­ in the same state, so he secured a warrant and sent it with such slight clues as were at hand, to a probation officer of that city who was successful in the search.  Avoiding the usual procedure, the warrant was served by the police in S——.  “Several instances of this kind have occurred lately,” writes the probation officer at D——.

The necessity of doing the detective’s work raises at once the question of how far the social worker can afford to adopt the detective’s methods.  If reformation of the man is the end sought it would seem an axiom that he must be given from the first every reason to believe that the social worker will