social workers
in finding deserting men, with the hearty co-operation usually of the
draft boards. This fact forms no argument for universal registration as
it was carried on in Germany before the war; no system which meant such
cumbersome machinery or so much interference with the freedom of the
individual ought to be advocated for a moment if it were solely for the
purpose of keeping track of the small percentage of citizens who wish to
evade their responsibilities, marital and other. Even such a
non-military device as that which obligates every person to register
successive changes of address with the postal authorities to facilitate
delivery of mail would be contrary to the American spirit and easily
evaded by people interested in concealing their whereabouts, unless
enforced with all the rigor of the European police system. But though
we can advocate no system of manhood registration, we can avail
ourselves of the incidental benefits of any that may be in force.

The Federal Employment Service offers a promising means of help in
discovering the movements of deserters whose trade and probable
destination are known. It should be entirely possible to work out a
system by which the managers of the local employment bureaus should be
furnished with name, description, copy of photograph, and so on, of a
deserter who is being sought, so that the man if recognized could be
traced or quickly apprehended if a warrant is already in the hands of
the local police authorities. It may even be possible, under the federal
employment service, to develop the long wished for national registration
of casual and migratory labor. Need for some such system has been felt
by all agencies trying to deal constructively with vagrants and homeless
men. Little track can be kept not only of the individual wanderer but of
the ebb and flow of the tides of "casual labor" without some system of
this sort. If employment bureaus were required to forward to a central
registry the names and some identifying particulars of every
non-resident who applied for employment, the problem of finding the
deserter would be rendered ten times easier than it is now.

One present obstacle to this and other improvements is the attitude of
authorities--city, state, and federal--toward wife desertion. We have
already mentioned the way in which the task of tracing the deserter has
been thrust back upon the wife and the social worker, as if he were not
an offender against