whose sex relationships are unsatisfactory, nevertheless maintain the fabric of family life and support and bring up their children with an average degree of success.  None of these three factors alone will serve, therefore, as a fundamental causation unit in desertion.  Many statistical attempts have been made to study the causes of desertion, and to assign to each its mathematical percentage of influence.  The report of a court of domestic relations gives such an analysis of over 1,500 cases, listing 25 causes, and carefully calculating the percentage of cases due to each.  A summary of these percentages grouped under five heads is as follows: 

Percentage
1.  Distinct sex factors 39.03
2.  Alcohol and narcotic drugs 37.00
3.  Temperamental traits 15.40
4.  Economic issues 6.27
5.  Mental and physical troubles 2.30
------
100.00

It would be easy to criticize the foregoing on the score of grouping.  Can alcoholism and drug addiction be separated from mental and physical disorders?  And how distinguish infallibly between sex factors, temperamental traits, and mental disabilities?  But the main defect in such statistical studies is that they assume in each case one cause, or at least one cause sufficiently dominant to dwarf the rest; and few of the causes listed are really fundamental.  The mind instinctively begins to reach back after the causes of all these causes.  The social worker who made the sweeping assertion that there are two great reasons for marital discord—­“selfishness in men and peevishness in women,”—­came a good deal nearer to an accurate statement of fact with infinitely less trouble.

Looked at from the point of view of the social worker, desertion is itself only a symptom of some more deeply seated trouble in the family structure.  The problem presented, if it could have been recognized in time, is not essentially different from what it would have been before the man’s departure.  Without attempting, therefore, any statistical analysis of the causes of desertion, we may nevertheless be able to examine one by one a number of possible contributory factors in marital unhappiness and therefore in desertion.  No attempt will be made in the list that follows to distinguish between primary and secondary causes, nor to arrange them in any order of importance.  An effort to get from case workers lists so arranged resulted only in confusion, each person emphasizing a different set of factors.  The groupings here given, therefore, are no more than a placing of the more obviously related factors together and a leading from past history up to the present.

Considering first the personal as distinguished from the community factors in desertion, these may be listed as follows: 

CONTRIBUTORY FACTORS IN THE MAN AND WOMAN