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Page 34
With all good wishes,
Sincerely yours,
DISTRICT SECRETARY.
But when all is said and done, there are no unbreakable rules about
treatment. A form of treatment is sometimes to do nothing at all.
Charles Morgan, a middle-aged machinist with a wife, a comfortable
home, and seven children (the two eldest grown), picked up his tools
and disappeared, after a quarrel over his wife's extravagance. He
had been earning $50 a week in a shop where he had worked for
eighteen years and he would not endure having his wages garnisheed
for debt.
An experienced case worker to whom furious Mrs. Morgan made her
complaint, decided, after studying Mr. Morgan's record, that he
ought not to be prosecuted, and refused to be party to it. As he was
a man of domestic habits, search was made in a nearby city where he
had relatives. He was easily traced. Mr. Morgan was both proud and
reticent, so the case worker made no attempt to approach him, but
told the woman she must devise some way to get him back, preferably
to write him and say she was sorry. This she refused to do and on
her own responsibility adopted the clumsy device of wiring him that
a favorite child was sick. This brought him "on the run," and, being
back, he stayed. _The case worker has never seen Mr. M._, nor has
his wife been encouraged to come any more to the office, although
reports have been received from time to time through the son and
daughter that things at home continue to go well.
FOOTNOTES:
[33] See p. 179 regarding equity powers of the courts.
[34] Massachusetts social workers succeeded in 1917 in securing the
passage of a law which permits the ordinary non-support law to be
invoked in case of the man's failure to pay the amount ordered after a
legal separation.
[35] See p. 13 sq.
[36] Colcord, J.C.: Article on "Desertion and Non-support." _Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science_, May, 1918, p. 95.
[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]
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