THE TRAMP
Mr. Francis O'Neil, General Superintendent of Police, Chicago,
speaking of the tramp, says: "Despite the most stringent police
regulations, a great city will have a certain number of homeless
vagrants to shelter through the winter." "Despite,"--mark the word,
a confession of organized helplessness as against unorganized
necessity. If police regulations are stringent and yet fail, then
that which makes them fail, namely, the tramp, must have still more
stringent reasons for succeeding. This being so, it should be of
interest to inquire into these reasons, to attempt to discover why
the nameless and homeless vagrant sets at naught the right arm of
the corporate power of our great cities, why all that is weak and
worthless is stronger than all that is strong and of value.
Mr. O'Neil is a man of wide experience on the subject of tramps. He
may be called a specialist. As he says of himself: "As an old-time
desk sergeant and police captain, I have had almost unlimited
opportunity to study and analyze this class of floating population,
which seeks the city in winter and scatters abroad through the
country in the spring." He then continues: "This experience
reiterated the lesson that the vast majority of these wanderers are
of the class with whom a life of vagrancy is a chosen means of
living without work." Not only is it to be inferred from this that
there is a large class in society which lives without work, for Mr.
O'Neil's testimony further shows that this class is forced to live
without work.
He says: "I have been astonished at the multitude of those who have
unfortunately engaged in occupations which practically force them to
become loafers for at least a third of the year. And it is from
this class that the tramps are largely recruited. I recall a
certain winter when it seemed to me that a large portion of the
inhabitants of Chicago belonged to this army of unfortunates. I was
stationed at a police station not far from where an ice harvest was
ready for the cutters. The ice company advertised for helpers, and
the very night this call appeared in the newspapers our station was
packed with homeless men, who asked shelter in order to be at hand
for the morning's work. Every foot of floor space was given over to
these lodgers and scores were still unaccommodated."
And again: "And it must be confessed that the man who is willing to
do honest labor for food and shelter is a rare specimen in this vast
army of shabby and tattered wanderers who seek the warmth of the
city with the coming of the first snow." Taking into consideration
the crowd of honest laborers that swamped Mr. O'Neil's station-house
on the way to the ice-cutting, it is patent, if all tramps were
looking for honest labor instead of a small minority, that the
honest laborers would have a far harder task finding something
honest to do for food and shelter. If the opinion of the honest
laborers who swamped Mr. O'Neil's station-house were asked, one
could rest confident that each and every man would express a
preference for fewer honest laborers on the morrow when he asked the
ice foreman for a job.
And, finally, Mr. O'Neil says: "The humane and generous treatment
which this city has accorded the great army of homeless unfortunates
has made it the victim of wholesale imposition, and this well-
intended policy of kindness has resulted in making Chicago the
winter Mecca of a vast and undesirable floating population." That
is to say, because of her kindness, Chicago had more than her fair
share of tramps; because she was humane and generous she suffered
whole-sale imposition. From this we must conclude that it does not
do to be HUMANE and GENEROUS to our fellow-men--when they are
tramps. Mr. O'Neil is right, and that this is no sophism it is the
intention of this article, among other things, to show.
In a general way we may draw the following inferences from the
remarks of Mr. O'Neil: (1) The tramp is stronger than organized
society and cannot be put down; (2) The tramp is "shabby,"
"tattered," "homeless," "unfortunate"; (3) There is a "vast" number
of tramps; (4) Very few tramps are willing to do honest work; (5)
Those tramps who are willing to do honest work have to hunt very
hard to find it; (6) The tramp is undesirable.
To this last let the contention be appended that the tramp is only
PERSONALLY undesirable; that he is NEGATIVELY desirable; that the
function he performs in society is a negative function; and that he
is the by-product of economic necessity.
It is very easy to demonstrate that there are more men than there is
work for men to do. For instance, what would happen tomorrow if one
hundred thousand tramps should become suddenly inspired with an
overmastering desire for work? It is a fair question. "Go to work"
is preached to the tramp every day of his life. The judge on the
bench, the pedestrian in the street, the housewife at the kitchen
door, all unite in advising him to go to work. So what would happen
tomorrow if one hundred thousand tramps acted upon this advice and
strenuously and indomitably sought work? Why, by the end of the
week one hundred thousand workers, their places taken by the tramps,
would receive their time and be "hitting the road" for a job.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox unwittingly and uncomfortably demonstrated the
disparity between men and work. {1} She made a casual reference, in
a newspaper column she conducts, to the difficulty two business men
found in obtaining good employees. The first morning mail brought
her seventy-five applications for the position, and at the end of
two weeks over two hundred people had applied.
Still more strikingly was the same proposition recently demonstrated
in San Francisco. A sympathetic strike called out a whole
federation of trades' unions. Thousands of men, in many branches of
trade, quit work,--draymen, sand teamsters, porters and packers,
longshoremen, stevedores, warehousemen, stationary engineers,
sailors, marine firemen, stewards, sea-cooks, and so forth,--an
interminable list. It was a strike of large proportions. Every
Pacific coast shipping city was involved, and the entire coasting
service, from San Diego to Puget Sound, was virtually tied up. The
time was considered auspicious. The Philippines and Alaska had
drained the Pacific coast of surplus labor. It was summer-time,
when the agricultural demand for laborers was at its height, and
when the cities were bare of their floating populations. And yet
there remained a body of surplus labor sufficient to take the places
of the strikers. No matter what occupation, sea-cook or stationary
engineer, sand teamster or warehouseman, in every case there was an
idle worker ready to do the work. And not only ready but anxious.
They fought for a chance to work. Men were killed, hundreds of
heads were broken, the hospitals were filled with injured men, and
thousands of assaults were committed. And still surplus laborers,
"scabs," came forward to replace the strikers.
The question arises: WHENCE CAME THIS SECOND ARMY OF WORKERS TO
REPLACE THE FIRST ARMY? One thing is certain: the trades' unions
did not scab on one another. Another thing is certain: no industry
on the Pacific slope was crippled in the slightest degree by its
workers being drawn away to fill the places of the strikers. A
third thing is certain: the agricultural workers did not flock to
the cities to replace the strikers. In this last instance it is
worth while to note that the agricultural laborers wailed to High
Heaven when a few of the strikers went into the country to compete
with them in unskilled employments. So there is no accounting for
this second army of workers. It simply was. It was there all this
time, a surplus labor army in the year of our Lord 1901, a year
adjudged most prosperous in the annals of the United States. {2}
The existence of the surplus labor army being established, there
remains to be established the economic necessity for the surplus
labor army. The simplest and most obvious need is that brought
about by the fluctuation of production. If, when production is at
low ebb, all men are at work, it necessarily follows that when
production increases there will be no men to do the increased work.
This may seem almost childish, and, if not childish, at least easily
remedied. At low ebb let the men work shorter time; at high flood
let them work overtime. The main objection to this is, that it is
not done, and that we are considering what is, not what might be or
should be.
Then there are great irregular and periodical demands for labor
which must be met. Under the first head come all the big building
and engineering enterprises. When a canal is to be dug or a
railroad put through, requiring thousands of laborers, it would be
hurtful to withdraw these laborers from the constant industries.
And whether it is a canal to be dug or a cellar, whether five
thousand men are required or five, it is well, in society as at
present organized, that they be taken from the surplus labor army.
The surplus labor army is the reserve fund of social energy, and
this is one of the reasons for its existence.
Under the second head, periodical demands, come the harvests.
Throughout the year, huge labor tides sweep back and forth across
the United States. That which is sown and tended by few men, comes
to sudden ripeness and must be gathered by many men; and it is
inevitable that these many men form floating populations. In the
late spring the berries must be picked, in the summer the grain
garnered, in the fall, the hops gathered, in the winter the ice
harvested. In California a man may pick berries in Siskiyou,
peaches in Santa Clara, grapes in the San Joaquin, and oranges in
Los Angeles, going from job to job as the season advances, and
travelling a thousand miles ere the season is done. But the great
demand for agricultural labor is in the summer. In the winter, work
is slack, and these floating populations eddy into the cities to eke
out a precarious existence and harrow the souls of the police
officers until the return of warm weather and work. If there were
constant work at good wages for every man, who would harvest the
crops?
But the last and most significant need for the surplus labor army
remains to be stated. This surplus labor acts as a check upon all
employed labor. It is the lash by which the masters hold the
workers to their tasks, or drive them back to their tasks when they
have revolted. It is the goad which forces the workers into the
compulsory "free contracts" against which they now and again rebel.
There is only one reason under the sun that strikes fail, and that
is because there are always plenty of men to take the strikers'
places.
The strength of the union today, other things remaining equal, is
proportionate to the skill of the trade, or, in other words,
proportionate to the pressure the surplus labor army can put upon
it. If a thousand ditch-diggers strike, it is easy to replace them,
wherefore the ditch-diggers have little or no organized strength.
But a thousand highly skilled machinists are somewhat harder to
replace, and in consequence the machinist unions are strong. The
ditch-diggers are wholly at the mercy of the surplus labor army, the
machinists only partly. To be invincible, a union must be a
monopoly. It must control every man in its particular trade, and
regulate apprentices so that the supply of skilled workmen may
remain constant; this is the dream of the "Labor Trust" on the part
of the captains of labor.
Once, in England, after the Great Plague, labor awoke to find there
was more work for men than there were men to work. Instead of
workers competing for favors from employers, employers were
competing for favors from the workers. Wages went up and up, and
continued to go up, until the workers demanded the full product of
their toil. Now it is clear that, when labor receives its full
product capital must perish. And so the pygmy capitalists of that
post-Plague day found their existence threatened by this untoward
condition of affairs. To save themselves, they set a maximum wage,
restrained the workers from moving about from place to place,
smashed incipient organization, refused to tolerate idlers, and by
most barbarous legal penalties punished those who disobeyed. After
that, things went on as before.
The point of this, of course, is to demonstrate the need of the
surplus labor army. Without such an army, our present capitalist
society would be powerless. Labor would organize as it never
organized before, and the last least worker would be gathered into
the unions. The full product of toil would be demanded, and
capitalist society would crumble away. Nor could capitalist society
save itself as did the post-Plague capitalist society. The time is
past when a handful of masters, by imprisonment and barbarous
punishment, can drive the legions of the workers to their tasks.
Without a surplus labor army, the courts, police, and military are
impotent. In such matters the function of the courts, police, and
military is to preserve order, and to fill the places of strikers
with surplus labor. If there be no surplus labor to instate, there
is no function to perform; for disorder arises only during the
process of instatement, when the striking labor army and the surplus
labor army clash together. That is to say, that which maintains the
integrity of the present industrial society more potently than the
courts, police, and military is the surplus labor army.
It has been shown that there are more men than there is work for
men, and that the surplus labor army is an economic necessity. To
show how the tramp is a by-product of this economic necessity, it is
necessary to inquire into the composition of the surplus labor army.
What men form it? Why are they there? What do they do?
In the first place, since the workers must compete for employment,
it inevitably follows that it is the fit and efficient who find
employment. The skilled worker holds his place by virtue of his
skill and efficiency. Were he less skilled, or were he unreliable
or erratic, he would be swiftly replaced by a stronger competitor.
The skilled and steady employments are not cumbered with clowns and
idiots. A man finds his place according to his ability and the
needs of the system, and those without ability, or incapable of
satisfying the needs of the system, have no place. Thus, the poor
telegrapher may develop into an excellent wood-chopper. But if the
poor telegrapher cherishes the delusion that he is a good
telegrapher, and at the same time disdains all other employments, he
will have no employment at all, or he will be so poor at all other
employments that he will work only now and again in lieu of better
men. He will be among the first let off when times are dull, and
among the last taken on when times are good. Or, to the point, he
will be a member of the surplus labor army.
So the conclusion is reached that the less fit and less efficient,
or the unfit and inefficient, compose the surplus labor army. Here
are to be found the men who have tried and failed, the men who
cannot hold jobs,--the plumber apprentice who could not become a
journeyman, and the plumber journeyman too clumsy and dull to retain
employment; switchmen who wreck trains; clerks who cannot balance
books; blacksmiths who lame horses; lawyers who cannot plead; in
short, the failures of every trade and profession, and failures,
many of them, in divers trades and professions. Failure is writ
large, and in their wretchedness they bear the stamp of social
disapprobation. Common work, any kind of work, wherever or however
they can obtain it, is their portion.
But these hereditary inefficients do not alone compose the surplus
labor army. There are the skilled but unsteady and unreliable men;
and the old men, once skilled, but, with dwindling powers, no longer
skilled. {3} And there are good men, too, splendidly skilled and
efficient, but thrust out of the employment of dying or disaster-
smitten industries. In this connection it is not out of place to
note the misfortune of the workers in the British iron trades, who
are suffering because of American inroads. And, last of all, are
the unskilled laborers, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the
ditch-diggers, the men of pick and shovel, the helpers, lumpers,
roustabouts. If trade is slack on a seacoast of two thousand miles,
or the harvests are light in a great interior valley, myriads of
these laborers lie idle, or make life miserable for their fellows in
kindred unskilled employments.
A constant filtration goes on in the working world, and good
material is continually drawn from the surplus labor army. Strikes
and industrial dislocations shake up the workers, bring good men to
the surface and sink men as good or not so good. The hope of the
skilled striker is in that the scabs are less skilled, or less
capable of becoming skilled; yet each strike attests to the
efficiency that lurks beneath. After the Pullman strike, a few
thousand railroad men were chagrined to find the work they had flung
down taken up by men as good as themselves.
But one thing must be considered here. Under the present system, if
the weakest and least fit were as strong and fit as the best, and
the best were correspondingly stronger and fitter, the same
condition would obtain. There would be the same army of employed
labor, the same army of surplus labor. The whole thing is relative.
There is no absolute standard of efficiency.
Comes now the tramp. And all conclusions may be anticipated by
saying at once that he is a tramp because some one has to be a
tramp. If he left the "road" and became a VERY efficient common
laborer, some ORDINARILY EFFICIENT common laborer would have to take
to the "road." The nooks and crannies are crowded by the surplus
laborers; and when the first snow flies, and the tramps are driven
into the cities, things become overcrowded and stringent police
regulations are necessary.
The tramp is one of two kinds of men: he is either a discouraged
worker or a discouraged criminal. Now a discouraged criminal, on
investigation, proves to be a discouraged worker, or the descendant
of discouraged workers; so that, in the last analysis, the tramp is
a discouraged worker. Since there is not work for all,
discouragement for some is unavoidable. How, then, does this
process of discouragement operate?
The lower the employment in the industrial scale, the harder the
conditions. The finer, the more delicate, the more skilled the
trade, the higher is it lifted above the struggle. There is less
pressure, less sordidness, less savagery. There are fewer glass-
blowers proportionate to the needs of the glass-blowing industry
than there are ditch-diggers proportionate to the needs of the
ditch-digging industry. And not only this, for it requires a glass-
blower to take the place of a striking glass-blower, while any kind
of a striker or out-of-work can take the place of a ditch-digger.
So the skilled trades are more independent, have more individuality
and latitude. They may confer with their masters, make demands,
assert themselves. The unskilled laborers, on the other hand, have
no voice in their affairs. The settlement of terms is none of their
business. "Free contract" is all that remains to them. They may
take what is offered, or leave it. There are plenty more of their
kind. They do not count. They are members of the surplus labor
army, and must be content with a hand-to-mouth existence.
The reward is likewise proportioned. The strong, fit worker in a
skilled trade, where there is little labor pressure, is well
compensated. He is a king compared with his less fortunate brothers
in the unskilled occupations where the labor pressure is great. The
mediocre worker not only is forced to be idle a large portion of the
time, but when employed is forced to accept a pittance. A dollar a
day on some days and nothing on other days will hardly support a man
and wife and send children to school. And not only do the masters
bear heavily upon him, and his own kind struggle for the morsel at
his mouth, but all skilled and organized labor adds to his woe.
Union men do not scab on one another, but in strikes, or when work
is slack, it is considered "fair" for them to descend and take away
the work of the common laborers. And take it away they do; for, as
a matter of fact, a well-fed, ambitious machinist or a core-maker
will transiently shovel coal better than an ill-fed, spiritless
laborer.
Thus there is no encouragement for the unfit, inefficient, and
mediocre. Their very inefficiency and mediocrity make them helpless
as cattle and add to their misery. And the whole tendency for such
is downward, until, at the bottom of the social pit, they are
wretched, inarticulate beasts, living like beasts, breeding like
beasts, dying like beasts. And how do they fare, these creatures
born mediocre, whose heritage is neither brains nor brawn nor
endurance? They are sweated in the slums in an atmosphere of
discouragement and despair. There is no strength in weakness, no
encouragement in foul air, vile food, and dank dens. They are there
because they are so made that they are not fit to be higher up; but
filth and obscenity do not strengthen the neck, nor does chronic
emptiness of belly stiffen the back.
For the mediocre there is no hope. Mediocrity is a sin. Poverty is
the penalty of failure,--poverty, from whose loins spring the
criminal and the tramp, both failures, both discouraged workers.
Poverty is the inferno where ignorance festers and vice corrodes,
and where the physical, mental, and moral parts of nature are
aborted and denied.
That the charge of rashness in splashing the picture be not
incurred, let the following authoritative evidence be considered:
first, the work and wages of mediocrity and inefficiency, and,
second, the habitat:
The New York Sun of February 28, 1901, describes the opening of a
factory in New York City by the American Tobacco Company. Cheroots
were to be made in this factory in competition with other factories
which refused to be absorbed by the trust. The trust advertised for
girls. The crowd of men and boys who wanted work was so great in
front of the building that the police were forced with their clubs
to clear them away. The wage paid the girls was $2.50 per week,
sixty cents of which went for car fare. {4}
Miss Nellie Mason Auten, a graduate student of the department of
sociology at the University of Chicago, recently made a thorough
investigation of the garment trades of Chicago. Her figures were
published in the American Journal of Sociology, and commented upon
by the Literary Digest. She found women working ten hours a day,
six days a week, for forty cents per week (a rate of two-thirds of a
cent an hour). Many women earned less than a dollar a week, and
none of them worked every week. The following table will best
summarize Miss Auten's investigations among a portion of the
garment-workers:
Industry Average Average Average
Individual Number of Yearly
Weekly Weeks Earnings
Wages Employed
Dressmakers $.90 42. $37.00
Pants-Finishers 1.31 27.58 42.41
Housewives and 1.58 30.21 47.49
Pants-Finishers
Seamstresses 2.03 32.78 64.10
Pants-makers 2.13 30.77 75.61
Miscellaneous 2.77 29. 81.80
Tailors 6.22 31.96 211.92
General Averages 2.48 31.18 76.74
Walter A. Wyckoff, who is as great an authority upon the worker as
Josiah Flynt is on the tramp, furnishes the following Chicago
experience:
"Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of the
winter that they were no longer in condition for effective labor.
Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to
turn men away because of physical incapacity. One instance of this
I shall not soon forget. It was when I overheard, early one morning
at a factory gate, an interview between a would-be laborer and the
boss. I knew the applicant for a Russian Jew, who had at home an
old mother and a wife and two young children to support. He had had
intermittent employment throughout the winter in a sweater's den,
{5} barely enough to keep them all alive, and, after the hardships
of the cold season, he was again in desperate straits for work.
"The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of
unskilled labor, when, struck by the cadaverous look of the man, he
told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his coat and his
ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly
gone, and the blue-white transparent skin stretched over sinews and
the outlines of the bones. Pitiful beyond words was his effort to
give a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the
upward movement of the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an
oath and a contemptuous laugh; and I watched the fellow as he turned
down the street, facing the fact of his starving family with a
despair at his heart which only mortal man can feel and no mortal
tongue can speak."
Concerning habitat, Mr. Jacob Riis has stated that in New York City,
in the block bounded by Stanton, Houston, Attorney, and Ridge
streets, the size of which is 200 by 300, there is a warren of 2244
human beings.
In the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets, and
Amsterdam and West End avenues, are over four thousand human
creatures,--quite a comfortable New England village to crowd into
one city block.
The Rev. Dr. Behrends, speaking of the block bounded by Canal,
Hester, Eldridge, and Forsyth streets, says: "In a room 12 by 8 and
5.5 feet high, it was found that nine persons slept and prepared
their food. . . . In another room, located in a dark cellar, without
screens or partitions, were together two men with their wives and a
girl of fourteen, two single men and a boy of seventeen, two women
and four boys,--nine, ten, eleven, and fifteen years old,--fourteen
persons in all."
Here humanity rots. Its victims, with grim humor, call it "tenant-
house rot." Or, as a legislative report puts it: "Here infantile
life unfolds its bud, but perishes before its first anniversary.
Here youth is ugly with loathsome disease, and the deformities which
follow physical degeneration."
These are the men and women who are what they are because they were
not better born, or because they happened to be unluckily born in
time and space. Gauged by the needs of the system, they are weak
and worthless. The hospital and the pauper's grave await them, and
they offer no encouragement to the mediocre worker who has failed
higher up in the industrial structure. Such a worker, conscious
that he has failed, conscious from the hard fact that he cannot
obtain work in the higher employments, finds several courses open to
him. He may come down and be a beast in the social pit, for
instance; but if he be of a certain caliber, the effect of the
social pit will be to discourage him from work. In his blood a
rebellion will quicken, and he will elect to become either a felon
or a tramp.
If he have fought the hard fight he is not unacquainted with the
lure of the "road." When out of work and still undiscouraged, he
has been forced to "hit the road" between large cities in his quest
for a job. He has loafed, seen the country and green things,
laughed in joy, lain on his back and listened to the birds singing
overhead, unannoyed by factory whistles and bosses' harsh commands;
and, most significant of all, HE HAS LIVED! That is the point! He
has not starved to death. Not only has he been care-free and happy,
but he has lived! And from the knowledge that he has idled and is
still alive, he achieves a new outlook on life; and the more he
experiences the unenviable lot of the poor worker, the more the
blandishments of the "road" take hold of him. And finally he flings
his challenge in the face of society, imposes a valorous boycott on
all work, and joins the far-wanderers of Hoboland, the gypsy folk of
this latter day.
But the tramp does not usually come from the slums. His place of
birth is ordinarily a bit above, and sometimes a very great bit
above. A confessed failure, he yet refuses to accept the
punishment, and swerves aside from the slum to vagabondage. The
average beast in the social pit is either too much of a beast, or
too much of a slave to the bourgeois ethics and ideals of his
masters, to manifest this flicker of rebellion. But the social pit,
out of its discouragement and viciousness, breeds criminals, men who
prefer being beasts of prey to being beasts of work. And the
mediocre criminal, in turn, the unfit and inefficient criminal, is
discouraged by the strong arm of the law and goes over to trampdom.
These men, the discouraged worker and the discouraged criminal,
voluntarily withdraw themselves from the struggle for work.
Industry does not need them. There are no factories shut down
through lack of labor, no projected railroads unbuilt for want of
pick-and-shovel men. Women are still glad to toil for a dollar a
week, and men and boys to clamor and fight for work at the factory
gates. No one misses these discouraged men, and in going away they
have made it somewhat easier for those that remain.
So the case stands thus: There being more men than there is work
for men to do, a surplus labor army inevitably results. The surplus
labor army is an economic necessity; without it, present society
would fall to pieces. Into the surplus labor army are herded the
mediocre, the inefficient, the unfit, and those incapable of
satisfying the industrial needs of the system. The struggle for
work between the members of the surplus labor army is sordid and
savage, and at the bottom of the social pit the struggle is vicious
and beastly. This struggle tends to discouragement, and the victims
of this discouragement are the criminal and the tramp. The tramp is
not an economic necessity such as the surplus labor army, but he is
the by-product of an economic necessity.
The "road" is one of the safety-valves through which the waste of
the social organism is given off. And BEING GIVEN OFF constitutes
the negative function of the tramp. Society, as at present
organized, makes much waste of human life. This waste must be
eliminated. Chloroform or electrocution would be a simple, merciful
solution of this problem of elimination; but the ruling ethics,
while permitting the human waste, will not permit a humane
elimination of that waste. This paradox demonstrates the
irreconcilability of theoretical ethics and industrial need.
And so the tramp becomes self-eliminating. And not only self!
Since he is manifestly unfit for things as they are, and since kind
is prone to beget kind, it is necessary that his kind cease with
him, that his progeny shall not be, that he play the eunuch's part
in this twentieth century after Christ. And he plays it. He does
not breed. Sterility is his portion, as it is the portion of the
woman on the street. They might have been mates, but society has
decreed otherwise.
And, while it is not nice that these men should die, it is ordained
that they must die, and we should not quarrel with them if they
cumber our highways and kitchen stoops with their perambulating
carcasses. This is a form of elimination we not only countenance
but compel. Therefore let us be cheerful and honest about it. Let
us be as stringent as we please with our police regulations, but for
goodness' sake let us refrain from telling the tramp to go to work.
Not only is it unkind, but it is untrue and hypocritical. We know
there is no work for him. As the scapegoat to our economic and
industrial sinning, or to the plan of things, if you will, we should
give him credit. Let us be just. He is so made. Society made him.
He did not make himself.
