There seemed at first no good explanation for the desertion of Alfred West.  Both his record and his wife’s were good, and their mutual fondness for the children seemed a strong bond.  They constantly bickered, however, over the small income Alfred was able to earn, and his wife and her relatives “looked down” upon him as being lower than they in the social scale.  Inquiry into past history showed that he had grown up in a southern community where there were no facilities for education, and that he could not even read and write until after his marriage.  Although of average capacity, he was restricted by his early lack of training in his choice of a job; and the mortification and sense of inferiority which his wife fostered led to discouragement and indifference, which ended in desertion.  A thorough understanding of the two backgrounds involved enabled a social worker to effect a real reconciliation, with the woman’s eyes opened to her ungenerous behavior and the man taking steps to improve his education in a night school.

6.  Occupational Faults.—­Closely allied to the foregoing, and in some respects growing out of it, are the shortcomings on the employment side that contribute to marital instability.  Most of these can be referred back to lack of education or opportunity in youth, or to defects of character.  Laziness, incompetence, lack of skill in any trade, lack of application, or, on the other hand, the possession by a man with no business “stake” in the community of a trade at which he can work wherever he takes a fancy to go, or of a trade which is seasonal and shifting—­all these have a direct relation to desertion.

The wife’s competence and willingness to earn often seems to have a causal connection with the man’s failure as “provider."[12]

Corresponding to and complementing the man’s industrial defects, and springing from the same causes, is the woman’s failure in the business of being a housewife.  The wife’s laziness, incompetence, lack of interest, and lack of skill and knowledge create, as one case worker puts it, “the sort of home that tends to get itself deserted.”  These faults of the wife are responsible for as many desertions, probably, as are the faults of the husband.  When the man and the wife are both industrial failures we get the extremity of family breakdown to be found in records of “chronic non-support” cases.

7.  Wanderlust.—­As a cause of family desertion this has probably been overestimated.  Some item of this sort appears in every list of causes of desertion which has ever been compiled, and there are more or less exceptional cases in which it probably plays a part.  The boy who becomes a vagabond in childhood and early takes to the road does not, however, seem to be a marrying man; and the instances from case work in which it is clear that the thirst for adventure was at the bottom of desertion are rare.  The man whose line of work before marriage led him from place to place seems, in fact, hardly to contribute his quota to the ranks of wife-deserters, and it is unusual to find sailors or other wanderers from force of circumstance figuring among them.