[37] Philadelphia Municipal Court, Report for 1916, p. 64.

[38] See p. 133.

[39] Miss Richmond, writing in 1895, says:  “We would rather have a hundred visitors, patient, intelligent and resourceful, to deal with the married vagabonds of our city, than the best law ever framed, if, in order to get such a law, we must lose the visitors.”

VIII

THE HOME-STAYING NON-SUPPORTER

Many of the case workers consulted in gathering material for this book urged that a discussion of the treatment of the non-supporter who had not deserted be included in its pages.  In so far as non-support is a pre-desertion symptom and the non-supporter a potential deserter, much that has been said applies also to him.  But are the two groups co-terminous, or do they only partially overlap?

The law makes little difference in its treatment of the two, the fact of failure to support being the chief ground of its interest.[40] Indeed, in Massachusetts, the law under which deserters are extradited for abandonment is habitually spoken of as the “non-support law.”

No study of which the results are available has been made to learn what difference, if any, exists between the non-supporter who leaves home and the one who does not.  Miss Breed, in making the point that the true analogy of the deserted family is with the non-supported family and not with the widow and her children, says:  “The deserting husband is at home the non-supporting husband."[41]

A case reader of experience writes:  “When I look back over the many records I have read and studied, it seems to me that it is very difficult to draw a line between desertion and non-support cases, either in the kind of problem they present, or in the treatment of them.  Do we know enough about non-supporters who later become deserters; and isn’t it possible that every non-support case, certainly every beginning non-support case, is a potential desertion case?”

There is no doubt that the two groups grade imperceptibly into each other; but of the twenty or more case workers who were consulted in the preparation of this material, nearly all felt that the out-and-out deserter, if he can be got hold of, is more promising material to work with than the man who sits about the home and lets others maintain it.  They all recognize a common middle ground where the two groups merge into each other; but they see decided differences in the two “wings” so to speak, outside of this common ground.

Seen through their eyes, the non-supporter has less courage, initiative and aggressiveness than the deserter.  “He is less deliberately cruel—­for at least he ‘sticks around.’” He has not the roving disposition, but is apt to be intemperate and industrially inefficient as compared with the deserter.  Often the married vagabond, as he has been called, is a “home-loving man who simply