1.  Actual Mental Deficiency.—­Character weaknesses such as were spoken of earlier in this chapter grade down by degrees into real mental defect or disorder, and not even the psychiatrist can always draw the line.

A physician connected with the Municipal Court in Boston gives as his opinion that while the percentage of actually insane or feeble-minded among deserters is no higher than among other offenders they are extremely likely to present some of the phenomena of psychopathic personality.  Such people have to be studied by the social worker and the psychiatrist, and not from the behavior side only, but with a view to discovering what sort of equipment for life was handed down to them from their family stock.

The plan for the future of a fifteen-year-old boy which was made by a society for family social work was markedly modified when it was discovered that not only his father but his grandfather had been a man of violent and abusive temper, who drank habitually and neglected their family obligations.  With this sort of heredity and an ineffective mother, whom he was accustomed to seeing treated with abuse and disrespect, it was felt important to remove the boy, who showed some promise, to surroundings where he could be under firm discipline and learn decent standards of family life.

Feeble-mindedness, closely connected as it usually is with industrial inefficiency in the man, bad housekeeping in the woman, and lack of self-control in both, is of course, a potent factor in non-support and probably also in desertion.

2.  Faults in Early Training.—­To low ideals of home life and of personal obligation, which were imbibed in youth, can be traced much family irresponsibility.  It is by no means the rule, however, for children always to follow in the footsteps of weak or vicious parents; and it is the experience of social workers that such children, taught by observation to avoid the faults seen in their own homes, often make good parents themselves.  Perhaps even more insidious in its effect on later marital history is the home in which no self-control is learned.  The so-called “good homes” in which children are exposed to petting, coddling, and overindulgence—­and these homes are not confined to the wealthy—­produce adults who do not stand up to their responsibilities.  A probation officer in Philadelphia tells of the mother of a young deserter who could not account for her son’s delinquency.  “He ought to be a good boy,” she complained; “I carried him up to bed myself every night till he was eleven years old.”

3.  Differences in Background.—­Even though both man and wife come from good homes, if those homes are widely different in standards and in cultural background strains may develop in later life between the couple.  Differences in race, religion and age are recognized as having a causative relation to desertion.  Miss Brandt[9] found that, in about 28 per cent of the cases where these facts were ascertained,