shirks responsibility and dislikes effort.”  He may “sometimes feel parental responsibility even though he does not support,” and he is likely to have less physical and mental stamina than the deserter.  That phrase in which the psychiatrists take refuge, “constitutional inferiority,” is more likely to describe the stay-at-home than the wanderer.  However, one social worker (non-medical) says “a mental twist more often enters into the problem of the deserter than into that of the non-supporter, from my experience.”

The head of a large probation department writes:  “Many of the deserters with whom we have dealt were non-supporters before coming to our attention.  Among the men convicted of abandonment, however, is a group which is above the average in intelligence—­skilled workers or men in professional occupations.”

If this concurrence of observation is sound the reason for the social worker’s preference for the deserter as material with which to work is not far to seek.  With the deserter as described, the problem is chiefly to alter his point of view; with the non-supporter it is, in addition, to stiffen his will and to increase his capacity—­a far more complicated task.

“The deserter is likely to have less justification than the non-supporter,” says an observer of long experience.  Studies which have been made of the relative capacity of the wives of deserters and of non-supporters seem to agree that the latter have the weaker characters and are less competent and successful workers.  A comment made upon one such study points out the impossibility of sound conclusions, if both chronic and incipient cases are included in the two groups.  The progressive demoralization in the family of the “intermittent husband” makes such a study of little value unless this distinction is taken into account.

The influence of ill-kept homes in the manufacture of non-supporting husbands has been widely recognized.

A drunkard’s daughter, who had never known a decent home, married a young man who soon began to drink too.  Luckily, the young couple were brought in touch with a volunteer visitor who, on finding that the wife possessed only two kitchen utensils, a teakettle and a “frypan,” and actually did not know the names of any others, undertook to give her lessons in home management.  She proved teachable, and her husband stopped drinking and braced up.  Some years later the visitor was able to report a well established home, although the family refused to move out of the poor neighborhood in which they lived because the husband had been elected councilman for that district.

If the inefficient wife contributes her share to this form of family breakdown so also does the overefficient one.  Many a non-supporter got his first impulse in that direction when his wife became a wage-earner in some domestic crisis.  “There’s only one rule for women who want to have decent homes for their children and themselves,” advised a wise neighbor.  “If your husband comes home crying, and says he can’t find any work, sit down on the other side of the fire and cry until he does."[42]