The following history of a Baltimore married vagabond will illustrate the need of separation in certain cases: Several years ago the Baltimore Charity Organization Society made the acquaintance of the family of a good-looking German shoemaker, who had married a plain, hard-working woman some years his senior. Soon after their marriage he began to neglect his work, and, depending more and more on his wife's exertions for his support, he took to drink. Child-bearing often incapacitated the wife for work, and church and charitable friends aided at such times. When the sixth child was a year old, he deserted his family for a while, but came back again, after having been in jail for disorderly conduct. The Charity Organization Society, seeing no chance of reforming the man, suggested that his wife leave him, but the German pastor strongly objected to any separation of man and wife, and nothing was done. A discouraging aspect of the situation was that the man taught his children to deceive the hard-working mother. When the seventh baby was born, and charity had supplied a registered nurse, baby linen, {56} a doctor, fuel, and food, it was discovered that the man had sold the fuel supplied by the relief society, and had gone on a spree. He was a good workman, and could always have work when sober, but even when at work he neglected to provide properly for his family. Stung at last into active resistance, his wife had him arrested for non-support. While the man awaited trial, the Charity Organization Society removed his family, found work for the wife where she could keep three of her children, placed one with a relative, and two others temporarily in institutions. When he was released, he had no family to attract charitable aid, and was thrown, for the first time in many years, entirely upon his own resources. Many good people may think that to deprive a man of family ties is to hasten his downfall; but what downfall could be more complete than the downfall of the man who not only permits his wife to support him, but abuses her and his children? In making this no longer possible we are sometimes doing the one thing that can be done to save him from {57} spreading the contagion of his brutality, and so assuming a still heavier burden of sin.