social worker’s point of view.  In communities where no such facilities exist, social workers are in a good position to collect illustrative material and push for desirable changes in law and law enforcement.  Especially advantageous is the position of the legal social agencies such as legal aid societies and special bureaus and committees for increasing the efficiency of the courts, many of which are affiliated with or maintained by the large family work societies.

1.  Measures for the Discovery, Extradition or Deportation of the Deserter.—­The nation-wide registration of males between certain ages, under the Selective Service Act, was widely utilized by social workers in finding deserting men, with the hearty co-operation usually of the draft boards.  This fact forms no argument for universal registration as it was carried on in Germany before the war; no system which meant such cumbersome machinery or so much interference with the freedom of the individual ought to be advocated for a moment if it were solely for the purpose of keeping track of the small percentage of citizens who wish to evade their responsibilities, marital and other.  Even such a non-military device as that which obligates every person to register successive changes of address with the postal authorities to facilitate delivery of mail would be contrary to the American spirit and easily evaded by people interested in concealing their whereabouts, unless enforced with all the rigor of the European police system.  But though we can advocate no system of manhood registration, we can avail ourselves of the incidental benefits of any that may be in force.

The Federal Employment Service offers a promising means of help in discovering the movements of deserters whose trade and probable destination are known.  It should be entirely possible to work out a system by which the managers of the local employment bureaus should be furnished with name, description, copy of photograph, and so on, of a deserter who is being sought, so that the man if recognized could be traced or quickly apprehended if a warrant is already in the hands of the local police authorities.  It may even be possible, under the federal employment service, to develop the long wished for national registration of casual and migratory labor.  Need for some such system has been felt by all agencies trying to deal constructively with vagrants and homeless men.  Little track can be kept not only of the individual wanderer but of the ebb and flow of the tides of “casual labor” without some system of this sort.  If employment bureaus were required to forward to a central registry the names and some identifying particulars of every non-resident who applied for employment, the problem of finding the deserter would be rendered ten times easier than it is now.