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Updated: May 19, 2025
Out of a group of 51 non-supporters selected at random from the records of the Buffalo Charity Organization Society in 1917, 46 showed some serious moral fault other than non-support. Alcoholism is probably the commonest of these complications; and, as has been pointed out in the previous chapter, is probably a primary cause as well.
It is not safe, however, to regard even the most leisurely of non-supporters as beyond the possibility of awakening. One district secretary who had thus given a man up had the experience of seeing him transformed into a steady worker after a few months of intensive effort by a first-year student in a school of social science, whose only equipment for the job was personality and enthusiasm.
So remarkable are some of the reclamations that have been brought about with seemingly hopeless non-supporters that all possible measures should be tried before giving one of them up. His Scotch ancestry, a good wife, luck, and a friend with insight and skill, pulled Aleck Gray out of that bottomless pit, the gutter.
It will be a matter of great interest to social workers whether the "non-support rate" is reduced after July 1, 1919. Grounds for hope that it may be are found in the fact that some remarkable results have been obtained by moving alcoholic non-supporters and their families from "wet" into "dry" territory.
With the non-supporters rather than with the deserters should be put the group of men whose wives tire of supporting them and either put them out or leave them. These men are often not only morally, but mentally and physically, so handicapped that there is nothing to be gained by constantly pursuing and arresting them, although some wives extract the sweets of revenge from doing just this.
"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.
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."
See the Special Report of Mr. I use this word for want of a better, though it is not strictly accurate as applied to Upper Canada, where there were no clearly prescribed standards of religious faith from which non-supporters of Episcopacy could be said to dissent. The word "Nonconformist" is objectionable for a similar reason. See Seventh Grievance Committee's Report, p. 164. Ante, p. 51.
Do we know enough about non-supporters who later become deserters; and isn't it possible that every non-support case, certainly every beginning non-support case, is a potential desertion case?"
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