PART IV--THE TRAMP'S JARGON

THE TRAMP'S JARGON 381

GLOSSARY 392

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

JOSIAH FLYNT, ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA, AUGUST 8, 1897 _Frontispiece_

DISCOURAGED CRIMINALS 15

THE MODE OF TRAVEL THAT ATTRACTS BOYS 35

YOUTHFUL TRESPASSERS 51

TELLING "GHOST-STORIES" 59

A GATHERING OF "OLD BUCKS" 73

MIDNIGHT 87

A "TIMBER LESSON" 101

TOMATO-CAN TRAMPS 115

A CITY TRAMP AT WORK 125

A WESTERN ROADSTER 149

AN AUCTION 157

THE FOURTH-CLASS CAR 173

HUNTING FOR HIS PASS 179

ON THE ROAD 187

DANCING AROUND A BONFIRE 193

SLEEPING IN A BARN 209

A LODGING-HOUSE 223

AN ENGLISH TYPE 235

A MOOCHER 245

A REST BY THE WAYSIDE 257

A DIVISION 275

ASLEEP IN A FREIGHT-CAR 283

RIDING ON THE BUMPERS 295

A BRAKEMAN OF A FREIGHT-TRAIN COLLECTING FARES 305

A TRAMPS' DEPOT 311

OLD BOSTON MARY'S SHANTY 327

OLD BOSTON MARY 335

BEATING A PASSENGER-TRAIN 343

A RIDE ON A TRUCK 357

PART I

STUDIES

PART I

STUDIES

PAGE

I. THE CRIMINAL IN THE OPEN 1

II. THE CHILDREN OF THE ROAD 28

III. CLUB LIFE AMONG OUTCASTS 67

IV. THE AMERICAN TRAMP CONSIDERED GEOGRAPHICALLY 91

V. THE CITY TRAMP 113

VI. WHAT THE TRAMP EATS AND WEARS 137

I

THE CRIMINAL IN THE OPEN

Up to the present time the criminal has been studied exclusively behind

prison-bars, after he has been caught, tried, and convicted. Out of

durance he is his own master, and is naturally averse to being measured

and experimented upon by scientists; hence the criminologist has been

forced to await the almost certain vicissitudes which bring him once

more inside a prison-cell. Here he has been subjected to the most minute

examinations; and there exists a bulky literature on the results which

these examinations have brought to light. We have volumes, for instance,

about the criminal's body, skull, and face, his whimsical and obscene

writings on prison-walls, the effect of various kinds of diet on his

deportment, the workings of delicate instruments, placed on his wrists,

to test the beat of his pulse under various conditions, the stories he

has been persuaded to tell about his life, his maunderings when under

the influence of hypnotism, and numerous things, anthropological and

psychological, which have been noted down, compared, and classified.

Out of this mass of information, gathered in great part by prison

doctors and other prison officials, the conclusion has been drawn that

the criminal is a more or less degenerate human being. There are

differences of opinion in regard to the degree of his degeneracy; but

all investigators agree upon the main fact, while some go so far as to

claim that he is abnormally deficient in mental and moral aptitudes,

and, in a large number of instances, should be in an insane asylum

rather than in a penitentiary. Human justice recoils from a severe

treatment of the man who, though an outbreaking sinner, bears evidence

of being sinned against as well as sinning; and yet, before we can

safely fall in with this view, we must carefully consider the theory on

which it is based, and its claims to a scientific foundation.

The first question with which to begin a scientific investigation of

this sort is, it seems to me, this: "Where may we hope to find the

criminal in his most natural state of body and mind--in confinement, a

balked and disappointed man, or in the open, faring forth on his

plundering errands, seeking whom and what he may devour?" That he should

be studied when undergoing punishment goes without saying; but I claim

that imprisonment should be considered rather as an incident in his

existence than its normal sphere, and that, because it has not been so

regarded, we have to-day a distorted view of the criminal and an

illogical tendency in penology.

It is now more than a decade since I became acquainted with tramps. My

purpose in seeking them out was to learn about their life; and I soon

saw that, to know it well, I must become joined to it and be part and

parcel of its various manifestations. At different times during this

period,--some of them lengthening out into months,--I have lived

intimately with the vagabonds of both England and the United States. In

the tramp class, or so near it that the separation is almost

imperceptible, are to be found any number of criminals associating

freely, either for purposes of business or sociability, with their less

ambitious brethren. In nearly every large city of the two countries

mentioned I know something about them, and in not a few instances I have

succeeded in becoming well acquainted with notorious members of their

class. My desire is to tell of the impression they make on one who

studies them in their own habitat, that I may be able to show how

different is the outdoor criminal from his convicted brother shut in

behind prison-bars.

I

I must first note the species of criminal that I have met in the open.

Lombroso and other investigators classify the cases they have studied as

political, instinctive, occasional, habitual, and professional; but, so

far as my finding is concerned, only one class is of any great

importance--the professional. That there are also instinctive criminals,

as well as occasional, I am well aware; but they form a very small part

of that outcast world that I know best, and cannot be taken as

definitely representative of it. It is the man who wilfully and

knowingly makes a business of crime or is experimenting with it from

commercial motives that I have found in largest numbers "on the road";

and it is he, I believe, who appears oftenest in our criminal courts.

To be sure, he tries to make out that he is not a wilful offender, and

often succeeds in convincing a jury that he is not; but this is due to

his cleverness and trained abilities.

Contrary to a more or less popular opinion, I must also say that the

criminals I am acquainted with are not such because they are unable to

keep body and soul together in any other way. The people who go into

crime for this reason are far less numerous than is generally supposed.

It is true that they come, as a rule, from the poverty-stricken

districts of our large cities, and that the standard of life in these

districts, particularly for families, is pitifully low; but a single

person can live in them far more easily than the philanthropists think.

The necessaries of life, for instance, can be had by simply begging; and

this is the way they are found by the majority of people who are not

willing to work for them. The criminal, however, wants the luxuries of

life as well; he seeks gold and the most expensive pleasures that gold

can buy; and to get them he preys upon those who have it. He thinks that

if all goes well he may become an aristocrat; and having so little to

lose and so much to gain, he deliberately takes his chances.

I most say furthermore that those criminals who are known to me are not,

as is also popularly supposed, the scum of their environment. On the

contrary, they are above their environment, and are often gifted with

talents which would enable them to do well in any class, could they only

be brought to realize its responsibilities and to take advantage of its

opportunities. The notion that the criminal is the lowest type of his

class in society arises from a false conception of that class and of the

people who compose it. According to my experience, they are mainly

paupers; and they have been such so long, and are so obtuse and

unaccustomed to anything better, even in the United States, that they

seldom make any serious effort to get out of their low condition.

Indeed, I think it can be said that the majority of them are practically

as happy and contented in their squalor and poverty as is the aristocrat

in his palace. In Whitechapel as well as in the worst parts of New York,

for example, I have met entire families who could not be persuaded to

exchange places with the rich, provided the exchange carried with it the

duties and manners which wealth presupposes; they even pity the rich,

and express wonder at their contentment "in such a strait-jacket life."

In this same class, however, there are some who are born with ambitions,

and who have energy enough to try to fulfil them. These break away from

class conditions; but, unfortunately, the ladder of respectable business

has no foothold in their environment. No one of their acquaintance has

gone springing up its rounds in tempting promotions; and although the

city missionary tells them that there are those who thus succeed, they

will not believe him--or, rather, they prefer to believe the, to them,

far more probable stories of success which they read in the "Police

Gazette" and the "Criminal Calendar." Most of them know perfectly well

that the success thus portrayed is the result of law-breaking, and that

they will be punished if caught trying to achieve it; but it is a choice

between the miserable slum, which they hate, and possible wealth, which

they covet, and they determine to run the risk.

Not all of these ambitious ones are endowed with an equal amount of

energy. Some are capable only of tramp life, which, despite its many

trials and vicissitudes, is more attractive than the life they seek to

escape. Those with greater energy go into crime proper; and they may be

called, mentally as well as physically, the aristocracy of their class.

This is my analysis of the majority of the criminal men and women I have

encountered in the open, and I believe it will hold good throughout

their entire class.

Concerning their nationalities, I must say that most of them are

indigenous to the countries in which they live. In this country it is

often said that foreigners are the main offenders, and a great deal has

been written about the dumping of European criminals on American shores;

but the main offenders, in the open at least, are natives, and are

generally of Irish-American parentage. In England, unmixed blood is a

little more noticeable. Ireland is said to be the least criminal land in

all Europe, and this may be the case so far as local crime is concerned;

but more criminals trace their ancestry back to that country than to any

other where English is spoken. Indeed, in America it is considered

something quite out of the ordinary if the criminal cannot attach

himself somehow or other to the "Emerald Isle"; and nothing has hindered

me more in my intercourse with him than the fact that my own connection

with it is very slight.

In regard to the ages of the criminals I have met, it is difficult to

write definitely; but the average, I think, is between twenty-five and

thirty years. The sex is predominantly masculine. For every female

criminal I have found twenty males; and the proportion in the United

States is even higher. It cannot, however, be inferred that the women of

the same original environment are less ambitious than the men; but they

take to the street, instead of to crime, to satisfy their love of high

living, and they hope to find there the same prizes that their brothers

are seeking by plunder. It is a mistake to say that all these women are

driven to the street by the pangs of hunger. A great many are no doubt

thus impelled; but I believe there are multitudes who are there merely

to satisfy their ambitious and luxurious tastes.

As the degeneration of the criminal is said by the criminologists to be

physical, mental, and moral, I shall take up the subject, as it pertains

to the criminals I have studied, from these different points of view.

II

It has of course been impossible for me, a fellow-traveler with tramps

and but a casual observer of criminals, to conduct my investigations as

scientific observers of prison specimens have done. I have not been

permitted, for instance, to measure their skulls; neither have I been

able to weigh them, to inspect their teeth and palates, nor even to test

their pulse under excitement. It has been possible for me, however, to

study their countenances, to get acquainted with their type, as it is

called, and to compare it, as I have seen it in the open day, with its

pictorial representation in books and pamphlets. As a rule, these

pictures are very different from the type that I know. Only in a few

cases have they ever approximated to the truth; and why artists have

given us such as their models is more than I can understand. In New York

I once showed a criminal one of these caricatures and asked what he

thought of it. He replied, "Why, I wouldn't be found dead lookin' like

that!"--a sentiment which I consider both justified and representative.

The trouble is that writers about crime have usually picked out as

illustrations for their books the very worst specimens possible; and the

public has been led to consider these as true representatives of the

entire class. A retreating forehead, for example, and the most depraved

expressions of the eyes and mouth are to-day considered typical stigmata

of the criminal's face. The majority of those that I am acquainted with,

particularly those under thirty years of age, if well dressed, could

pass muster in almost any class of society; and I doubt very much

whether an uninitiated observer would be able to pick them out for what

they are. After thirty years of age, and sometimes even younger, they do

acquire a peculiar look; but, instead of calling it a criminal look, in

the sense that the instinctive offender is criminal, I should describe

it as that of a long resident in a penitentiary. Prison life, if taken

in large doses and often enough, will give the most moral men in the

world prison features; and it is no wonder that men who make a business

of crime and are so much in prison possess them. Even men who are busied

in the detection of crime have more or less similar facial

characteristics. I have never met a detective who had been long in the

service that did not have some features or habits common to the

criminals he was engaged in hunting down; and I know several detectives

who have been taken for criminals by criminals, simply because of their

looks.

In regard to other abnormalities, such as absence of hair on the face,

remarkable eyesight, length of certain fingers, insensibility to pain,

unusual development of the lower jaw, high cheek-bones, fixed eyes,

projecting ears, and stooping shoulders, which are said to differentiate

the criminal from the ordinary human being, I can only report that I

have not found them to be any more noticeable in the criminal class than

among normal people. In the majority of cases the criminal can grow a

beard, and is glad that he can do so. Without this ability to change his

looks he would be greatly handicapped in his business; and, as I know

him, he usually has a beard once in two years. It has been said that his

habit of tattooing is evidence of his obtuseness to pain; but it is not

easy to see why. At the worst, it is not a trying ordeal; and the little

suffering that it does occasion is as much felt by the criminal as by

any one else. Moreover, those that I know are not so prone to be

tattooed as is reported. Indeed, it is considered a mistake to have

marks on the body, for they naturally aid detection.

On all these questions of the senses, criminologists have relied

altogether on what the criminal himself has told them. They give him

something to taste or smell, or prick him with a needle, and his reply

is noted down as scientific evidence. How do they know that he has not

some object in view in telling them what he does? He may want to appear

degenerated or queer, or is perhaps simply mischievous and says the

first thing that comes into his head. Until instruments have been

invented which can discover the truth quite independently of the

criminal's personal testimony, nothing really positive can be known

concerning whatever freaks of the senses may have been wrought in the

criminal's organization.

The general health of the criminal is good. Up to twenty-five years of

age he is as hardy and vigorous as the average person. Although he comes

from the slums, he gets somehow a very fair constitution; and if he

would only take care of it, he might live to a good old age. When he

nears his thirtieth year, however, his strength and vigor begin to fail

him. By that time he has served a number of terms in prison, and it is

this existence that drags him down. In the open he seems able to endure

a great deal and still keep his health; but behind the bars, care for

him as the penologists will, he weakens and withers away. This side of

his life has scarcely received the attention it deserves from

investigators who find the criminal diseased. That he becomes diseased

must be readily admitted; but, as a rule, it is only after society has

shut him up in its penal institutions. Stand, for instance, at the doors

of one of these institutions when a ten-year convict is released, and

see how he looks. I once did this; and a worse wreck of a formerly

strong man I have never encountered--a being ruined in both body and

mind, a victim of passions which in the open he would have abhorred.

There is no better proof that it is the prison, and not his life and

business, that makes the criminal diseased than that furnished by

tramps. These men live almost entirely in the open, and, as a general

rule, have a harder life than a criminal; yet they are about the

healthiest people in the world. In the United States it is one of their

superstitions that they simply cannot die, like other men, of disease,

but have to be killed. This is what happens to a great many of them.

They fall from freight-trains at night, or are found starved to death,

locked fast in a box-car on some distant side-track.

III

Finding the criminal diseased and abnormal physically, it is only

natural that investigators should have found him equally abnormal in

mind; but this, too, I have not discovered.

Lack of will-power, for example, is one of the first delinquencies noted

in criminology; and yet out of prison and in the open, the will is one

of the criminal's strongest points. Most of them have enough of it, at

least while they are young, to satisfy any one; and could they but be

brought to use it in honest industry, they might become the most

successful people in the world. The trouble is that they will do the

things which society considers and punishes as crime. They think that

they can "get on" faster in their profession than in any other; and they

bend every energy to achieve their ambition. Because this ambition is so

flatly contradictory to what is upright and honest, it is common, not

only among criminologists, but with the general public as well, to

speak of the criminal as one weak of will. I think this is one of the

greatest mistakes in psychology. Napoleon I, for instance, was

instrumental, directly or indirectly, in the deaths of nearly two

million people, and was one of the most unscrupulously ambitious human

beings that have ever lived; yet his passes for one of the strongest

wills the world has known. The unimperial criminal, on the other hand,

if he be unsuccessful, is catalogued by prison psychologists as a

pathological specimen simply because he wills to do wrong.

This strange classification is doubtless to be accounted for on the

ground that the criminal in prison has been taken to be the natural

criminal. Behind the bars he does indeed become somewhat volatile, and

finds it hard to concentrate his mind; but this is due to imprisonment

and its harassing trials rather than to innate deficiency. The strongest

of wills would deteriorate under such conditions, and perhaps even more

rapidly than that of the criminal who, from the very nature of his

trade, expects and plans for a certain amount of exile.

The charge of impatience, which is so often brought against him, may be

explained in the same way; and the tramps are again good illustrations.

As a class they are the most patient people imaginable, and are able to

endure pleasantly any amount of ruffling circumstances. Where, for

example, is there a calmer and more stoical human being than the

American "hobo," waiting through rain or shine at the railway

watering-tank for the freight-train that shall carry him farther on the

road? He will stay there for days, if necessary, rather than pay the

regular fare on the passenger-trains; and nothing arouses his scorn more

than the dilettante, or "gay-cat," as he calls him, who gives up waiting

and buys a regulation ticket. The criminal, after a certain age, often

lacks this ability to hang on; but his nerves and general equipoise have

been disturbed by imprisonment. Even the tramp is a less patient person

in county jails than he is in the open; but his stay there is so short,

and the confinement, compared with that in convict prisons, is so much

easier to bear, that he soon recuperates. I can write from personal

experience on this point; for, as an American tramp, I have had to take

my share of jail life, and I have never been so nervous and impatient as

when undergoing it. In the open, on the other hand, I have never been so

healthy and under control. If a few days' confinement can have such an

effect upon an absolutely voluntary prisoner, what must be the effect of

years of this sort of life upon the man who hates prison as he does

poison, and is not sure that when he is released an officer may not be

waiting to read him a warrant for another arrest? Criminologists who

believe in the innate nervous weakness of the criminal would do well to

test their own nerves during even voluntary residence in prison-cells in

order to estimate their power to disturb a natural equilibrium.

It is also said that the criminal is more or less an epileptic. Lombroso

makes a great deal of this supposition; and there are other students of

the subject who go quite as far as he does. I have never met a pure

epileptic criminal on the road, and I cannot recall having heard the

subject discussed by tramps or criminals in any way that would lead me

to believe the disorder at all common among them. Among tramps a

favorite trick is to feign epilepsy; and I have seen it done with a

fidelity to the "real thing" that was remarkable. Whether or not

criminals also feign in prison, I am not prepared to say; but if they

are as clever as tramps at it, I can well believe that they might

deceive even the very elect among specialists.

I have also failed to find insanity common among criminals. Among those

under twenty-five years of age, I have never known one clear case; and

the few cases that I have known after that period have been men who have

had long sentences in prison, and whose confinement, I have no doubt,

has had much to do with their mental derangement.

[Illustration: DISCOURAGED CRIMINALS.]

There is no better evidence of the criminal's ability to reason than the

fact that, the minute he is convinced that crime does not pay, he gives

it up. Even at the start he is not sure that it will pay; but, as I have

said, having so little to lose and so much to gain, he takes his

chances. After a time, long or short according to his success, he

generally comes to the conclusion that it does not pay, or at least that

he lacks the wit to make it successful; and he drops it, becoming what I

call a discouraged criminal. There is a difference of opinion among

criminals as to how much imprisonment is necessary to convince a man

that he is not getting his fair share of the prizes of his profession;

but, so far as I have been able to make inquiries, I should say that

between ten and fifteen years are enough to frighten the average man

out of the business. Some stick to it with even twenty years spent

behind the bars; but they are generally those who have been uncommonly

successful in making large catches, and have risked "just one more job"

in order to win the "great stake" that is to make them rich.

The main reason why the criminal is afraid to go beyond the fifteen-year

limit is that, after that time, unless he be an uncommonly clever man,

he is likely to get what is called "the shivers"--one of the weirdest

disorders to which the human body ever yields. Men describe it

differently; but, by all accounts, the victim is possessed by such a

terror of capture that each member of his body is in a constant tremor.

Instances have been known where, owing to a sudden attack of this

shivering palsy, he has had to quit a "job" that was almost finished. If

these fits once become customary the man is unqualified for any kind of

work ever after, and usually ends his life in the lowest class of the

outcasts' world--the "tomato-can tramp class."

It is interesting to note where criminals draw the dividing-line between

success and failure. Generally speaking, they consider a man fairly

successful if between imprisonments he gets a "vacation," as they call

it, of eight or ten months, and is lucky enough during this period to

make sufficient "hauls" to compensate him for the almost inevitable

punishment that follows. The understanding, of course, in all this is

that he gets the benefit, either in carousals or more practical

investments, of the money he has been lucky enough to win. As a rule,

however, the plunder usually goes in debauches, and very quickly, too;

but the criminal always hopes to recoup himself by a great stake which

is to be put away in safety. If he be a man of average criminal wit and

experience, particularly the latter, he can frequently secure the

vacation of eight months for a number of years. But the more confinement

he suffers the more reckless he becomes, and the less able to think

carefully; and there are a great many men who soon find that even six

months is the most that they can count on. This time, however, is not

enough, as a rule, for the hauls necessary to offset the expected term

in prison; and the criminal is usually clever enough to get out of the

business. He then bids good-by to his more tenacious brethren and joins

the tramp class, where he is made welcome by others who have joined it

before him. He becomes a tramp because it is the career that comes

nearest to the one he hoped to do well in. Besides affording

considerable amusement, it also permits the discouraged man to keep

track of the comrades whom he used to know in the higher walks of

outlawry; and this is an attraction not to be overlooked.

It is usual to classify the criminal according to the crimes he commits.

One classification, for example, makes murderers the least intelligent;

vagabonds, sexual offenders, and highwaymen a little more so; while the

fraudulent class, pickpockets and burglars, are accounted the most

gifted of all. I think this a fair division and one that will generally

hold good; but I have found that criminals who commit crimes against

property, or the fraudulent class, are far and away in the majority.

Their native intelligence will compare favorably with that of the

average run of people; and I have been unable to discover any mental

defects until they have been a long time in prison. Nearly all of them

can read and write very well indeed; and there are many who have read

far more than the ordinary business man. I have met men, very low-born

men too, who, while in prison, have read through more volumes of

philosophy and history than even the usual college student can boast in

his reading; and they have been able to converse very wisely on these

subjects. These same men have acquired the rudiments of their studies in

reformatory and industrial institutions, and have succeeded in

continuing them in the libraries of penitentiaries. I know one criminal

who in his prison-cell informed himself about a branch of chemistry

simply for purposes of business: he was thought at the time to be more

or less crazy.

Prison officials are often deceived by criminals in regard to their

acquirements in learning. In many prisons, diligence and progress in

study earn as much promotion as general good conduct does; and as the

average prisoner has every reason to desire the benefits which

promotions bring with them, he tries after a fashion to progress. But

what is this fashion? Very frequently this: On his arrival at the

prison, instead of telling the truth to the officials who quiz him about

his abilities, he says that he does not even know the alphabet, and is

consequently given very light mental work. He is thus able to advance

rapidly, and his teachers pride themselves on his quickness to learn and

their ability to teach. Ere long he gets into a better class, and so on

until he has enjoyed all the benefits which precocity can earn. There

are other men who profess ignorance in order to appear simple and

unknowing, and thus create the impression that they are not so guilty as

they are taken to be. Many times and in many cases the criminal is a

little cleverer than the people who are examining him; and one cannot

set a high value on statistics concerning his intelligence. If the

student of criminology could and would eavesdrop for a while at some

"hang-out" in the open, and hear the criminal's own account of the way

he is investigated, he might learn "foxier" methods of dealing with his

subject.

One other fact belongs properly to this division: The professional

criminal is not, in his own class, the revolutionary creature that he

seems when preying upon the classes above him. His attitude toward

society in general is without doubt disrespectful and anarchistic, and

it is usually immaterial to him what happens to society as such, so long

as he can make a "stake"; but in his own environment he is one of the

most conservative of human beings. There is no class, for instance,

where old age and mature opinion receive more respect and carry more

weight; and, as a general thing, the young men in it--the radical

element--are expected to take a back seat. At a hang-out gathering they

must always show deference to the older men, and nothing is so severely

judged as "freshness" on their part.

I think this is a characteristic of the criminal that might be turned to

good account if he should ever be won over to respectable living: in

affairs of the State, provided he had a fair share of this world's

goods, he would be found invariably on the conservative rather than on

the radical side.

IV

I come now to the question of the criminal's moral responsibility. Can

he be held definitely answerable for his evil-doing, or is he morally

insane and unable to distinguish between right and wrong? The

instinctive criminal must be irresponsible, and his treatment should be

such as we give to insane people. As I know him, he cannot help his

criminal actions; it is in him to do them; and the only merciful thing

is to put him where he at least cannot continue his depredations on

society, and where, if cure be possible, he may be in the hands of

specialists best fitted to help him. But, as I said at the outset, he is

not the sort of criminal that I have found in largest numbers in the

open. It is the commercial criminal that predominates there; and, as a

rule, he can be held responsible for his evil-doing.

It is often said that his lack of remorse for his crimes proves him to

be morally incompetent; but this opinion is founded on insufficient

knowledge of his life. He has two systems of morality: one for his

business, and the other for the hang-out. The first is this: "Society

admits that the quarrel with me is over after I have served out my

sentence; and I, naturally enough, take the same view of the matter. It

is simply one of take and pay. I take something from society and give in

exchange so many years of my life. If I come out ahead, so much the

better for me; if society comes out ahead, so much the worse for me, and

there is no use in whimpering over the transaction." So long as he

remains in the business he thinks it only fair to "stick up for it"; and

he dislikes and will not associate with men who denounce it in public.

This is his attitude toward the world at large. He puts on a bold front,

and, as he himself says, "nerves" the thing through. In the bosom of his

hang-out, however,--and this is where we ought to study his ethics,--he

is a very different man. His code of morals there will compare favorably

with that of any class of society; and there is no class in which fair

dealing is more seriously preached, and unfair dealing more severely

condemned. The average criminal will stand by a fellow-craftsman through

thick and thin; and the only human being he will not tolerate is the one

who turns traitor. The remorse of this traitor when brought to bay by

his former brethren I have never seen exceeded anywhere. It was my fate

some years ago, while living with tramps, to be lodged in a jail where

one of the prisoners was a "State's evidence" witness. He had been

released from prison by promising to tell tales on an old man,--who was

supposed to be the main culprit in the crime in question,--and was

lodging in the jail until the trial was over. Unfortunately for him,

some of the prisoners had known him prior to this episode in his career;

and they sent him to Coventry so completely that his life in the jail

became unbearable, and he almost died ere he could give his testimony.

At night we could hear him groaning in his sleep as if he were

undergoing the most fearful torture, and in the daytime he slunk around

the corridors like a whipped dog. He lived to give his evidence in the

trial, and was released from durance; but a few days later he was found

dead by his own hand. When the inmates of the jail heard of his fate

they relented a little in their hatred of him; but the final opinion was

that suicide was the best solution of the problem.

It is thought by criminologists that the good fellowship of the criminal

is due to self-preservation and the fear that each man will hang

separately if all do not hang together. They maintain that his good

feeling is not genuine and spontaneous emotion, and that it is

immaterial what happens to a "pal" so long as he himself succeeds. This

is not my experience in his company. He has never had the slightest

intimation that I would return favors that he did me; and in the

majority of instances he has had every reason to know that it was not in

my power to show him the friendliness he wanted. Yet he has treated me

with an altruism that even a Tolstoi might admire. At the hang-out I

have been hospitably entertained on all occasions; and I have never met

a criminal there who would not have given me money or seen me through a

squabble, had I needed his assistance and he was able to give it. This

same comradeship is noticeable in all his relations with men who are in

the least connected with his life and business; and it is a notorious

fact that he will "divvy" his last meal with a pal. To have to refuse

the request of one of his fellows, or to do him an unkindness, is as

much regretted by the criminal as by any one else; and I have never

known him to tell me a lie or to cheat me or to make fun of me behind

my back.

There are also some things in his relations with the outside world

which, in his heart of hearts, he regrets and repents of as much as he

does the misdeeds in his own world. He always feels bad, for instance,

when he takes money from the poor. It sometimes happens in his raids

that he makes mistakes and gets into the wrong house, or has been

deceived about the wealth of his victims; and if he discovers that he

has robbed a poor man, or one who cannot conveniently bear the loss, he

is ashamed and never enjoys the plunder thus won. He is too near the

poor, in both birth and sentiment, not to feel remorse for such an

action; and I have known him to send back money after he has discovered

that the person from whom he took it needed it more than he.

The taking of life is another deed that he regrets far more than he has

been given credit for. One thinks of the criminal as the man who has no

respect for life, as one who takes it without any twitchings of

conscience; but this is not the general rule. The business criminal

never takes a life, if he can help it; and when he does, he expects, in

court, to receive the death-penalty. Indeed, he believes, as a rule,

that murder deserves capital punishment; and I have often heard him

express wonder at the lightness of the penalties which murderers

receive.

At the hang-out a favorite topic of discussion is, which penalty is

preferable--life-imprisonment or death. The consensus of opinion has

generally run in favor of life-imprisonment, even with no hope of

pardon; but I have never heard a whimper against the justice of the

death-sentence.

It is also true that the majority of criminals regret finding a man in

their class who has once belonged to a better one. They are invariably

sorry that he has lost caste, no matter what the circumstances have been

that have brought him low, and are more likely to help him back to

decent society, providing he shows repentance and willingness to do

better, than they are to help themselves.

Philanthropists might learn a great deal of charity from the criminal.

His idea is that it is better to keep a member of a respectable class of

society from falling than it is to raise some one in a lower class to a

higher one--a philosophy which I think very sound.

One more regret which nearly all criminals of the class I am considering

have experienced at one time or another in their lives, is that

circumstances have led them into a criminal career. Their remorse may be

only for a moment, and an exaggerated indifference often follows it; but

while it lasts it is genuine and sincere. I have never known a criminal

well who has not confessed to me something of this sort; and he has

often capped it with a further confidence--his sorrow that it was now

too late to try anything else.

V

Such, in hurried and transitory outline, is the impression the criminal

has made upon me in the open day. The mistakes which criminologists

have made in regard to his case seem to me to be these: They have failed

to take note of the fearful effects of confinement upon his health; they

have allowed themselves to be deceived by him in regard to his

intelligence; and they have judged of his moral status simply from his

"faked" attitude toward the world at large, failing to take into account

his ethics among his fellows. I believe, too, that they are on the wrong

track in their studies of the criminal's skull. They have examined it in

all manner of ways with an ever-varying result; for each investigator

comes to a different conclusion. Far better for criminology to study the

criminal's _milieu_; and until this is done thoroughly and

conscientiously, he cannot be reasonably apprehended and scientifically

treated.

So far as our present knowledge of his case can help us, he himself

teaches what ought to be done with him. I have written of the

discouraged criminal--the man who has given up crime because he has

discovered that it was not worth the pains it cost him. Punishment, or

expiatory discipline, if you please, has brought him to this conclusion.

Here is good penology for us. If a man does wrong, wilfully and

knowingly, he must be disciplined till he learns that society will not

tolerate such conduct. The discouraged criminal is one who has been thus

instructed. Now that he is a tramp, the same principle must be applied

to him again: make him a discouraged vagabond. Such is the treatment

which society must bring to bear on the deliberate law-breaker.

If I have studied the criminal to any purpose, it is with the resulting

conviction that he is physically, mentally, and morally responsible; and

that, though unhappy in his birth and environment, the very energy which

has enabled him to get away from his poverty is the "promise and

potency" of a better life. And human hope looks forward to a day when,

in the regeneration of his class, he shall be born into better things

than crime.

II

THE CHILDREN OF THE ROAD

I

The real "road" is variously named and variously described. By the

"ambulanter" it is called Gipsyland, by the tramp Hoboland; the fallen

woman thinks it is the street, the thief, that it means stealing and the

penitentiary; even the little boy who reads dime novels and fights

hitching-posts for desperados believes momentarily that he too is on the

real road. All these are indeed branches of the main line. The road

proper, or "the turf," as the people who toil along its stretches

sometimes prefer to call it, is low life in general. It winds its way

through dark alleys and courts to dives and slums, and wherever

criminals, hoboes, outcast women, stray and truant children congregate;

but it never leads to the smiling windows and doorways of a happy home,

except for plunder and crime. There is not a town in the land that it

does not touch, and there are but few hamlets that have not sent out at

least one adventurer to explore its twists and turnings.

The travelers, as I have said, are of all kinds, conditions, and ages:

some old and crippled, some still in their prime, and others just

beginning life. To watch in thought the long and motley procession

marching along is to see a panorama of all the sins, sorrows, and

accidents known to human experience. Year after year they trudge on and

on, and always on, seeking a goal which they never seem to find.

Occasionally they halt for a while at some half-way house, where they

have heard that there is a resting-place of their desire; but it

invariably proves disappointing, and the tramp, tramp, tramp begins

afresh. Young and old, man and woman, boy and girl, all go on together;

and as one dies or wearies of the march, another steps into his

heel-tracks, and the ranks close up as solidly as ever.

The children of the road have always been to me its most pitiful

investiture, and I have more than once had dreams and plans that looked

to the rescue of these prematurely outcast beings. It needs skilled

philanthropists and penologists, however, for such a work, and I must

content myself with contributing experiences and facts which may perhaps

aid in the formation of theory, and thus throw light upon the practical

social tasks that are before us.

There are four distinct ways by which boys and girls get upon the road:

some are born there, some are driven there, others are enticed there,

and still others go there voluntarily.

Of those who are born on the road, perhaps the least known are the

children of the ambulanters. The name is a tramp invention, and not

popular among the ambulanters themselves. They prefer to be called

gipsies, and try at times, especially when compelled by law to give some

account of themselves, to trace their origin to Egypt; but the most of

them, I fear, are degenerated Americans. How they have become so is a

question which permits of much conjecture, and in giving my own

explanation I do not want it to be taken as applicable to the entire

class. I know only about fifty families, and not more than half of these

at all familiarly; but those whom I do know seem to me to be the victims

of a pure and simple laziness handed down from generation to generation

until it has become a chronic family disease. From what they have told

me confidentially about their natural history, I picture their

forefathers as harmless village "do-nothings," who lounged in corner

groceries, hung about taverns, and followed the fire-engine and the

circus. The second generation was probably too numerous for the home

parish, and, inheriting the talent for loafing, started out to find

roomier lounges. It must have wandered far and long, for upon the third

generation, the one that I know, the love of roaming descended to such a

degree that all North America is none too large for it. Go where one

will, in the most dismal woods, the darkest lanes, or on the widest

prairies, there the ambulanter may be found tenting with his large and

unkempt family. He comes and goes as his restless spirit dictates, and

the horse and wagon carry him from State to State.

It is in Illinois that I know his family best. Cavalier John, as he

proudly called himself, I remember particularly. He gave me shelter one

night in his wagon, as I was toiling along the highway south of Ottawa,

and we became such good friends that I traveled with his caravan for

three days. And what a caravan it was! A negro wife, five little

mulattoes, a deformed white girl, three starved dogs, a sore-eyed cat, a

blasphemous parrot, a squeaking squirrel, a bony horse, and a

canvas-topped wagon, and all were headed "Texas way." John came from

Maine originally, but he had picked up his wife in the West, and it was

through their united efforts in trickery and clever trading that they

had acquired their outfit. So far as I could learn, neither of them had

ever done an honest stroke of business. The children ranged from three

years to fourteen, and the deformed girl was nearly twenty. John found

her among some other ambulanters in Ohio, and, thinking that he might

make money out of her physical monstrosities as "side-shows," cruelly

traded off an old fox for her. She ought to have been in an insane

asylum, and I hope John has put her there long ago. The other "kidlets,"

as they were nicknamed, were as deformed morally as was the adopted girl

physically. They had to beg in every town and village they came to, and

at night their father took the two oldest with him in his raids on the

hen-roosts. It was at town and county fairs, however, that they were the

most profitable. Three knew how to pick pockets, and the two youngest

gave acrobatic exhibitions. None of them had ever been in school, none

could read or write, and the only language they spoke was the one of

their class. I have never been able to learn it well, but it is a

mixture of Rom and tramp dialects with a dash of English slang.

On the journey we met another caravan, bound West by way of Chicago.

There were two families, and the children numbered sixteen; the oldest

ranging from fifteen to twenty, and the youngest had just appeared. We

camped together in a wood for a night and a day, and seldom have I

sojourned in such company. John had given me a place with him in the

wagon, but now the woman with the babe was given the wagon, and John and

I slept, or tried to, "in the open." In the other wagon, both sexes,

young and old, were crowded into a space not much larger than the

ordinary omnibus, and the vermin would have made sleep impossible to any

other order of beings. The next day, being Sunday, was given over to

play and revel, and the poor horses had a respite from their sorrows.

The children invented a queer sort of game, something like "shinny," and

used a dried-up cat's head as block. They kicked, pounded, scratched,

and cursed one another; but when the play was over all was well again,

and the block was tucked away in the wagon for further use. Late at

night the journeys were taken up once more, one caravan moving on toward

Dakota, and the other toward the Gulf.

"Salawakkee!"[1] cried John, as he drove away; and the strangers cried

back, "Chalamu!"[2]

I wonder what has become of that little baby for whom I sat the night

out? It is over ten years ago now, and he has probably long since been

compelled to play his part in crime, and scratch and fight as his older

brothers and sisters did on that autumn Sunday morning. Certainly there

is nowhere in the world a more ferocious set of children than these of

the ambulanters. From morning till night it is one continual snap and

bite, and the depraved fathers and mothers look on and grin. They have

not the faintest ideal of home, and their only outlook in life is some

day to have a "rig" of their own and prowl throughout the land, seeking

whom they may devour. To tame them is a task requiring almost divine

patience. I should not know how to get at them. They laugh at

tenderness, never say "Thank you," and obey their parents only when

driven with boot and whip. I wish that I could suggest some gentle

method by which they could be rescued from the road and made good men

and women. It always seems harsh to apply strict law to delinquents so

young and practically innocent, but it is the only remedy I can offer.

They must be put under stiff rule and order, and trained strictly and

long. Although lacking gipsy blood, they have acquired gipsy character,

and it will take generations to get it out of them. Just how many

children are born on the road is a question which even the ambulanter

would find difficult to answer. They are scattered so widely and in such

out-of-the-way places that a census is almost impossible. In the

families that I have met there have never been less than four children.

Gipsy Sam once told me that he believed there were at least two hundred

ambulanter families in the United States, but this will strike every one

as a low estimate; however, if this is true, and each family has as many

boys and girls as those that I have met, then there must be at least a

thousand of their kind.

Another kind of ragamuffin, also born on the road, and in many ways akin

to the ambulanter, although wanting such classification, is the one

found so often in those families which every community supports, but

relegates to its uttermost boundary-lines. They are known as "the

McCarthys," "the Night-Hawks," or "the Holy Frights," as the case may

be. I have found no town in the United States of twenty thousand

inhabitants without some such little Whitechapel in its vicinity, and,

like the famous original, it is often considered dangerous to enter

unarmed. Speaking generally, there is a great deal of fiction afloat

concerning these tabooed families, a number of them being simply poor or

lazy people whom the boys of the vicinity have exaggerated into gangs of

desperados. There are, however, some that are really very bad, and I

have found them even in new little villages. They are not exactly

out-and-out criminals whom the police can get hold of, but moral lepers

who by public consent have been sentenced to live without the pale of

civilization.

Some years ago I had occasion to visit one of these miniature

Whitechapels. It was situated in a piece of woods not far from St. Paul,

Minnesota, and belonged by right of appropriation to three families who

were called "the Stansons." A tramp friend of mine had been taken sick

in their camp, and I was in duty bound to go out to see him. I managed

to find the settlement all right, but was stopped about a hundred yards

from the log shanties by a bushy-bearded man, barefooted and clad only

in trousers, who asked my errand. My story evidently satisfied him, for

he led the way to the largest of the shanties, where I found my friend.

He was lying in the middle of the floor on some straw, the only

furniture in the room being a shaky table and a three-legged chair. All

about him, some even lying in the straw beside him, were half-clothed

children of both sexes, playing "craps" and eating hunks of bread well

daubed with molasses. I counted nine in that shanty alone, and about as

many again in the other two. They belonged severally to six women who

were apportioned after Mormon custom to three men. The tramp told me in

his dialect that they really were Mormons and came from Utah. He was

passing by their "hang-out," as he called it, when taken ill, and they

hospitably lodged him. He said they had not been there long, having come

up the river from Des Moines, Iowa, where they had also had a camp; but

long enough, I discovered on my return to St. Paul, to acquire a

reputation among the city lads for all kinds of "toughness." I suppose

they were "tough" when considered from certain viewpoints, but, as the

tramp said, it was the silliest kind he had known. They were not

thieves, and only luke-warm beggars, but they did seem to love their

outlandish existence. The children interested me especially, for they

all spoke a queer jargon which they themselves had invented. It was

something like the well-known "pig Latin" that all sorts of children

like to play with, but much more complicated and difficult to

understand. And, except the very youngest, who naturally cried a little,

they were the jolliest children I have ever seen in such terrible

circumstances. The mothers were the main breadwinners, and while I was

there one of them started off to town on a begging trip, with a batch of

children as "guy." The men sat around, smoked, and talked about the

woods. The tramp told me later, however, that they occasionally raided a

hen-roost. Since my visit to the Stansons I have seen three of the

children in different places: one, a cripple, was begging at the World's

Fair; another was knocking about the Bowery; and the third, a girl, was

traveling with an ambulanter in the Mohawk valley.

Not all of these families are like the Stansons. A number are simply

rough-and-tumble people who haunt the outskirts of provincial towns, and

live partly by pilfering and partly from the municipal fund for the

poor. Somehow or other the children always dodge the school

commissioners, and grow up, I am sorry to say, very much like their

usually unmarried parents. On the other hand, there are several

well-known organized bands, and they thrive mainly, I think, in the

South and West. Near New Orleans there used to be, and for aught I know

they are still there, "the Jim Jams" and "the Rincheros"; near Cairo,

Illinois, "the River Rats"; near Chicago, "the Dippers"; and not far

from New York, in the Ramapo Mountains, I knew of "the Sliders," but

they have since moved on to new fields. Each of these families, or

collection of families, had its full quota of children. Very often the

public becomes so enraged at their petty thefts that an investigation is

ordered, and then there is a sudden packing of traps and quick departure

to a different neighborhood, where a new name is invented. But the

family itself never dies out entirely.

There are a few children who are born in Hoboland. Now and then, as one

travels along the railway lines, he will come to a hastily improvised

camp, where a pale, haggard woman is lying, and beside her a puny

infant, scarcely clothed, blinking with eyes of wonder upon the new

world about him. I know of no sadder sight than this in all trampdom.

Not even the accident of motherhood can make the woman anything but

unhuman, and the child, if he lives, grows up in a world which I believe

is unequaled for certain forms of wickedness. Fortunately, his little

body usually tires of the life ere he comes to realize what it is, and

his soul wanders back to regions of innocence, unsoiled and unscarred.

I wonder whether there are still men in Hoboland who remember that

interesting little fellow called "the Cheyenne Baby"? Surely there are

some who have not forgotten his grotesque vocabulary, and his utterly

overpowering way of using it. There are different stories concerning his

origin, and they vary in truthfulness, I have heard, as one travels

southward from the Northern Pacific to Santa Fé. I give the one told in

Colorado. It may be only a "ghost-story," and it may be true; all that I

know is that it is not impossible. According to its teaching, his mother

was once respectable and belonged to the politest society in the Indian

Territory. When quite a young girl she carelessly fell in love with a

handsome Indian chief, and, much to the disgust of her friends, married

him and went away into his camp. It must have been a wild life that she

led there, for within a year she was separated from him and living with

another Indian. It is the same pitiful story for the next five years;

she was knocked about from tent to tent and camp to camp. Her enemies

say that she liked that kind of life, but her friends know better, and

claim that she was ashamed to go home. However it was, she went over to

the cow-boys after a while, and it was then that the baby was born, and

she met the man, whoever he was, that introduced her into Hoboland. She

appeared one night at a hang-out near Denver, and there was something so

peculiarly forlorn about her that the men took pity on her and pressed

her to stay. This she did, and for some time traveled with the hoboes

throughout the districts lying between Cheyenne and Santa Fé. The boy

became a sort of "mascot," and was probably the only child in Hoboland

who was ever taught to be really good. The mother had stipulated with

the men that they should never teach him anything bad, and the idea

struck them as so comical that they fell in with it. Though they swore

continually in his presence, they invariably gave him some respectable

version of the conversation; and while about the only words he knew were

curses, he was made to believe they signified the nicest things in the

world. He died just as unknowing as he had lived, but it was a cruel

death. He and his mother, together with some companions, were caught one

night in a wreck on the Union Pacific, and all that the survivors could

find of him to bury was his right arm. But that was bravely honored,

and, unless the coyotes have torn down the wooden slab, the grave can

still be found on the prairies.

I cannot leave this division of my theme without saying something about

that large army of unfathered children who, to my mind, are just as much

born on the road as the less known types. True, many of them are handed

over at birth to some family to support, but the great majority of these

families are not one whit better than the ambulanters. They train the

orphans put into their care, in sin and crime, quite as carefully as the

hobo does his beggar boy. These are the children who make up the main

body of the class I have been considering, and it seems to me that they

increase from year to year. At present the only legitimate career for

them is that of the outcast, and into it they go. Few, indeed, succeed

in gaining a foothold in polite society. Their little lives form the

border-land of my second class, the children driven to the road.

II

Concerning the children who are forced upon the road there is a great

deal to be said, but much of this talk should be directed against the

popular belief that their number is legion. Socialists particularly

think that hundreds upon hundreds of boys and girls are compelled by

hunger to beg and steal for a living. In England I once heard a labor

agitator declare that there are a million of these juvenile "victims of

capital" in the United States alone. I do not know where the man got his

information, but if my finding counts for anything it is deplorably

unsound. I cannot claim to have studied the subject as carefully as is

necessary to know it absolutely, but in most of our large cities I have

given it close attention, and never have I found anything like the state

of affairs which even the general public believes to exist. For every

child forced by starvation to resort to the road I have met ten who were

born there, and nearly the same number who were enticed there. In saying

this, however, I do not want to draw emphasis or sympathy away from that

certainly existing class of children who really have been driven into

outlawry. But it is an injustice to our sober poor to say that they

exist in those large numbers that are so often quoted. Not long ago I

made it my special business for a while to look into the condition of

some of these compulsory little vagabonds in New York city. I picked out

those children whom one sees so often pilfering slyly from the

groceryman's sidewalk display. It is an old, old trick. The youngsters

divide themselves into "watchers" and "snatchers"; the former keeping an

eye on the police as well as the owners of the things coveted, and the

latter grabbing when the wink is given. The crime itself is not a heavy

one according to the calendar, but it is only a step from this to

picking pockets, and only a half-step farther to highway robbery. I

chose this particular class because I had often noticed the members of

it in my walks through the city, and it had seemed to me the least

necessary of all. Then, too, there was something in the pinched faces

that made me anxious to know the children personally on grounds of

charity. The great majority of youthful travelers on the road are

comparatively well fed, to say the least, and, much as one pities their

fate, he will seldom have cause to weep over their starved condition.

But here was something different, and I fancied that I was to get a

glimpse into the life of those people to whom the socialist points when

asked for living examples of human woe caused by inhuman capitalists.

It was not hard to "get in" with the children. Finding that I was

willing to play with them at their games in the alleys and on top of

their rickety tenement-houses, they edged up to me rather cordially, and

we were soon "pals." There was nothing very new in their life, but I was

struck with the great interest they took in their petty thefts. In the

midst of the most boisterous play they would gladly stop if some one

suggested a clever plan by which even a can of preserves could be

"swiped," as they called it, and the next instant they were trying to

carry it to a finish. They were not what I could call instinctive

criminals--far from it; but a long intimacy with the practices of

outlawry, though small in their way, had so deadened their moral sense

that sneak-thieving came to them almost as naturally as it does to the

kleptomaniac. Even in their games they cheated whenever it was possible,

and it seemed to me that the main fun was seeing how cleverly and yet

boldly they could do so without being detected. I recall distinctly one

afternoon when we were playing "Hi spy." A little fellow called Jamie

took me aside, and in the most friendly way advised me not to be so

"goody-goody." I had been very unlucky in getting caught, and he said

that it was because I gave in too quickly.

"When ye hear yer name," he continued, "jus' lie low, 'cause like as not

the catcher ain't seen ye, 'n' if he has he can't prove it; so ye 'r'

all right anyhow. Ye'll always be 'It' if ye don't do something like

that; 'n' there ain't no fun in that, is there?" he added, winking his

left eye in a truly professional manner.

So much for their native endowment. Their accomplishment in thieving, I

have no doubt, kept them often from going hungry, notwithstanding the

fact that there was honest industry at home, generally that of the

mother, while the father's earnings went almost bodily into the

publican's till.

I found it much more difficult to make friends with the parents, but

succeeded in several cases--that is, with the mother; the father I

usually found drunk at the saloon. I shall not try to give an account of

the squalor and sorrow that I encountered; this has been done in other

places by far more able pens than mine; but I cannot forbear making a

note of one little woman whom I saw sewing her very life away, and

thinking all the while that she was really supporting her hungry

children. I shall never forget the picture she made as she sat there by

the alley window, driving the needle with lightning-like rapidity

through the cloth--a veritable Madonna of the Needle. Her good cheer was

something stupendous. Not once did she murmur, and when her brute of a

husband returned, insanely intoxicated, she took care of him as if he

were the best man in the world. I was careful that she did not hear from

me about the tricks of her wayward children. Some day, however, I fear

that one of them will be missing, and when she goes to the police

station to make inquiries I should rather not confront her. The main

reason why hungry boys and girls are found upon the road is drunken

fathers.

There are also children who, instead of being forced to steal, are sent

out into the streets by their parents to beg. From morning till night

they trudge along the busy thoroughfares, dodging with cat-like agility

the lumbering wagons that bear down upon them, and accosting every

person whom their trained eyes find at all likely to listen to their

appeals. Late at night, if perchance they have had the necessary luck

during the day, they crawl back to their hovels and hand over the

winnings to their heavy-eyed fathers. Or, as often happens, if the day

has been unsuccessful and the pennies are not numerous enough to

satisfy their cruel masters, they take refuge in some box or barrel, and

pray to the beggar's Providence that the next day will go better.

They come, as a rule, from our foreign population. I have never found

one with American-born parents, and in many instances the children

themselves have emigrated from Europe, usually from Italy. There is no

doubt that they have to beg to live; but when one looks a little further

into their cases, a lazy or dissipated parent is usually the one to

blame. Then, too, mendicancy is not considered disgraceful among many of

our immigrants, and they send their children into the streets of our

cities quite as freely as they do at home. They also are mainly at fault

for that awful institution which some of our large towns support, where

babies are rented to grown-up beggars to excite the sympathy of the

passers-by. I looked into one of these places in San Francisco, while

traveling with the hoboes, and it was the very counterpart of an African

slave-market. A French-Canadian woman, old enough to be the

great-grandmother of all her wares, kept it. She rented the babies from

poverty-stricken mothers, and re-rented them at a profit to the begging

women of the town. There were two customers in the place when I entered,

and the old wretch was trying in true peddler style to bring out the

good points of four little bits of humanity cuddled together on a plank

bed.

"Oh, he's just the kind you want," she said to one of the women; "never

cries, and"--leaning over, she whispered in a Shylock voice--"he don't

eat hardly anything; _half a bottle o' milk does him the whole day_."

The woman was satisfied, and, paying her deposit of two dollars, took

the sickly thing in her arms and went out into the town. The other could

find nothing that suited her, but promised to return the next day, when

a "new batch" was expected.

Such are the main avenues by which boys and girls are driven to the road

in the United States. Hunger, I candidly admit, is the whip in many

instances, but the wielder of it is more often than not the drunken

father or mother. It is the hunger that comes of selfish indulgence, and

not of ill adjusted labor conditions.

III

[Illustration: THE MODE OF TRAVEL THAT ATTRACTS BOYS.]

Of my third class, those who are enticed to the road,--and their number

is legion,--I have been able to discover three different types. The old

roadster knows them all. Wherever he goes they cross his path, and beg

him to stop awhile and tell them of his travels. They seem to realize

that they have been swindled--that the road is, after all, only a

tantalizing delusion; but they cannot understand why it appeals to so

many of their elders, and it is in the hope that these will in the end

put them on the right track for the fun they are seeking that they hail

them, and cry, "What cheer?" It is a pitiful call, this, and even the

"old stager" winces at times on hearing it; but he cannot bring himself

to go back on "the profession," and quickly conquering his emotion, he

gives the tiny traveler fresh directions. The boy starts out anew,

hoping against experience that he is at last on the right route, and

plods on eagerly until stopped again at some troublesome cross-road

where he does not know which turn to take. Once more he asks for

directions, once more receives them, and so the ceaseless trudge goes

on. It is mainly at the cross-roads that I have learned to know these

children. Notwithstanding my alien position, they have hailed me too,

and inquired for sign-posts. I have seldom been able to help them, even

in the way that I most desired, but surely there are others who can.

The children of this third class that one meets oftenest are what the

older travelers call "worshipers of the tough." They have somehow got

the idea that cow-boy swagger and the criminal's lingo are the main

features of a manly man, and having an abnormal desire to realize their

ideal as quickly as possible, they go forth to acquire them. The hunt

soon lures them to the road, and up and down its length they scamper,

with faces so eager and intent that one is seldom at a loss to know what

they are seeking. There are different explanations of the charm that

this wild life has for them. A great many people believe that it is

purely and simply the work of the devil on their evil-bent natures;

others, that it is the result of bad training; and still others, that it

is one form of the mimicry with which every child is endowed in larger

or smaller degree. I favor the last opinion. In the bottom of their

hearts they are no worse than the average boy and girl, but they have

been unfortunate enough to see a picture or hear a story of some famous

rascal, and it has lodged in their brains, until the temptation to "go

and do likewise" has come upon them with such overwhelming force that

they simply cannot resist. Each one has some particular pattern

continually before his eyes, and only as he approaches it does he feel

that he is becoming tough. Now it is "Blinkey Morgan" that fascinates

him, and, despite his terrible end, he strives to be like him; then it

is "Wild Bill," whoever he may be; and not unfrequently it is a

character that has existed only in dime novels, or not even so

substantially as that.

I remember well a little fellow, about thirteen years old, who appeared

in Indian-scout attire one night at a hang-out near McCook, Nebraska. He

dropped in while the tramps were cooking their coffee, and seldom has

there been such a laugh on the "Q" railroad as they gave on seeing him.

It was impolite, and they begged his pardon later, but even his guardian

angel would have smiled. He was dressed from head to foot in leather

clothes each piece made by himself, he said, and at his belt hung an

enormous revolver, which some one had been careful enough to make

useless by taking out an important screw. It was in the hope of finding

one at the camp that he visited it, but the men made so much of him that

he remained until his story was told. It was not remarkably new, for all

that he wanted was a chance to shoot Indians, but his hero was a little

unusual,--Kalamazoo Chickamauga, he called him. When asked who he was

and where he had lived, all that the youngster could say was that he had

dreamed about him! I saw him again a week or so later, not far from

Denver, tramping along over the railroad-ties with long strides far

beyond his measure, and he hoped to be at "Deadtown," as he miscalled

Deadwood, in a few days. He had not yet found a screw for his "gun,"

but he was sure that "Buffalo Charley" would give him one.

Of course this is a unique case, in a way, for one does not meet many

lads in such an outfit, but there are scores of others just as sincere

and fully as innocent. If one could only get hold of them ere they reach

the road, nearly all could be brought to reason. They are the most

impressionable children in the world, and there must be a way by which

this very quality may be turned to their advantage. What this way shall

be can be determined only by those who know well the needs of each

child, but there is one suggestion I cannot forbear making. Let

everything possible be done to keep these sensitive boys and girls, but

particularly the former, from familiarity with crime. Do not thrust

desperadoism upon them from the shop-windows through the picture-covered

dime novels and the flaring faces of the "Police Gazette." It is just

such teaching by suggestion that starts many an honest but romantic boy

off to the road, when a little cautious legislation might save him years

of foolish wandering, and the State the expense of housing him in its

reformatories later on. I write with feeling at this point, for I know

from personal experience what tantalizing thoughts a dime novel will

awaken in such a boy's mind. One of these thoughts will play more havoc

with his youth than can be made good in his manhood, and lucky is he

whom it does not lure on and on until the return path is forever lost.

[Illustration: YOUTHFUL TRESPASSERS.]

Something like these children in temperament, but totally different in

most other respects, are those lads that one meets so often on our

railroads, drifting about for a month or so from town to town, seldom

stopping in any of them over a day, and then suddenly disappearing, no

one knows where, to appear again, later, on another railroad, frequently

enough a thousand miles distant. Occasionally they are missed from the

road for over a year, and there is absolutely no news of their

whereabouts; but just as they are almost forgotten they come forward

once more, make a few journeys on the freight-trains, and vanish again.

There are cases on record where they have kept this up for years, some

of them coming and going with such regularity that their appearances may

be calculated exactly. Out West, not very long ago, there was a little

chap who "showed up" in this way, to use the expression that the

brakemen applied to him, every six weeks for three years, but this was

all that was known concerning him. When asked who he was and where he

belonged, he gave such evasive answers that it was impossible to come to

any trustworthy conclusion about him. He would have nothing to do with

the people he met, and I have heard that he always rode alone in the

box-cars. In this last respect he was a notable exception, for, as a

rule, these little nomads take great pleasure in talking with strangers,

but they are careful not to say too much about themselves. They ask

questions principally, and skip from one subject to another with a

butterfly rapidity, but manage to pick up a great deal of knowledge of

the road.

The tramps' theory of them is that they are possessed of the

"railroad fever" and I am inclined to agree with them, but I accept the

expression in its broader sense of _Wanderlust_. They want to get out

into the world, and at stated periods the desire is so strong and the

road so handy that they simply cannot resist the temptation to explore

it. A few weeks usually suffice to cool their ardor, and then they run

home quite as summarily as they left, but they stay only until the next

runaway mood seizes them. I have been successful in getting really well

acquainted with several of these interesting wanderers, and in each case

this has been the situation. They do not want to be tough, and many of

them could not be if they tried; but they have a passion for seeing

things on their own hook, and if the mood for a "trip" comes, it seems

to them the most natural thing in the world to indulge it. If they had

the means they would ride on Pullman cars and imagine themselves

princes, but lacking the wherewithal, they take to the road.

I knew in New York State a boy of this sort who had as comfortable a

home as a child could wish, but he was cursed with this strange

_Wanderlust_, and throughout his boyhood there was hardly a month that

he did not run away. The queerest things enticed him to go. Sometimes

the whistle of a railway-engine was enough to make him wild with unrest,

and again the sight of the tame but to him fascinating village street

was sufficient to set him planning his route of travel. In every

escapade it was his imagination that stampeded him. Many a time, when he

was in the most docile of moods, some fanciful thought of the world at

large, and what it held in waiting for him, would dance across his

brain, and before he could analyze it, or detect the swindle, he was

scampering off for the railroad station. Now it was a wish to go West

and play trapper and scout, and then it was the dream of American

boyhood,--a life cramped but struggling, and emerging in glorious

success as candidate for the Presidency. Garfield's biography, I

remember, once started him on such a journey, and it took years to get

the notion out of his head that simply living and striving as Garfield

did was sure to bring the same results. Frequently his wanderings ended

several hundred miles from home, but much oftener in some distracting

vagabond's hang-out in a neighboring city. Fortunately the fever burned

itself out ere he had learned to like the road for its own sake, and he

lived to wonder how he had harbored or indulged such insane impulses. A

large number of these truants, however, have no good homes and indulgent

parents to return to, and after a while the repeated punishment seems to

them so unjust and cruel that there comes a trip which never ends. The

_Wanderlust_ becomes chronic, and mainly because it was not treated

properly in its intermittent stage. There is no use in whipping these

children; they are not to blame; all that one can do is to busy their

imaginations in wholesome ways, watch them carefully, and, if they must

wander, direct their wanderings. In many cases this is possible, for the

fever breaks out among children of the best birth as well as among those

of the lowest; and in these instances, at least, the parents have much

to answer for if the children reach the road. I look upon this fever as

quite as much of a disease as the craze to steal which is found now and

then in some child's character, and it deserves the same careful

treatment. Punishment only aggravates it, and develops in the boy a

feeling of hatred for all about him. I firmly believe that some day this

trouble in so many boys' lives will be pathologically treated by medical

men, and the sooner that day comes the better will it be for many

unfortunate children.

It is a different story that I have to tell of the children decoyed into

Hoboland. True, they also are, in a measure, seized with this same

_Wanderlust_, and without this it would be impossible for the tramp to

influence them as he does; but, on the other hand, without him to excite

and direct this passion, very few of them would ever reach trampdom. He

happens along at their very weakest moments, and, perceiving his

advantage, cruelly fires their imagination with tales of adventure and

travel, and before they discover their danger he has them in his

clutches. It is really one of the wonders of the world, the power that

this ugly, dissipated, tattered man has over the children he meets. In

no other country that I have visited is there anything like it. He stops

at a town for a few hours, collects the likely boys about him at his

hang-out, picks out the one that he thinks will serve him best, and then

begins systematically to fascinate him. If he understands the art well

(and it is a carefully studied art), he can almost always get the one he

wants. Often enough his choice is some well-bred child, unaccustomed,

outside his dreams, to any such life, but the man knows so perfectly how

to piece out those dreams and make them seducingly real that in a

moment of enthusiasm the youngster gives himself up to the bewitching

influence and allows the wretch to lead him away. As a rule, however,

his victims are the children of the poor, for they are the easiest to

approach. A few hours of careful tactics, provided they are in the mood,

and he has one of them riding away with him, not merely in the box-car

of a freight-train, but on the through train to Hoboland.

[Illustration: TELLING "GHOST STORIES."]

Watch him at his preliminary work. He is seated on the top of an

ash-barrel in a filthy back alley. A crowd of gamins gaze up at him with

admiring eyes. When he tells his ghost-stories, each one thinks that he

is being talked to just as much as the rest, and yet somehow, little by

little, there is a favorite who is getting more and more than his share

of the winks and smiles; soon the most exciting parts of the stories are

gradually devoted to him alone, but in such an artful way that he

himself fails to notice it at first. It is not long, however, before he

feels his importance. He begins to wink, too, but just as slyly as his

charmer, and his little mouth curls into a return smile when the others

are not looking. "I'm his favorite, I am," he thinks. "He'll take me

with him, he will, and show me things."

He is what the hobo calls "peetrified," which means, as much as anything

else, hypnotized. The stories that he has heard amount to very little in

themselves, but the way they are told, the happy-go-lucky manner, the

subtle partiality, the winning voice, and the sensitiveness of the boy's

nature to things of wonder, all combine to turn his head. Then his own

parents cannot control him as can this slouching wizard.

In Hoboland the boy's life may be likened to that of a voluntary slave.

He is forced to do exactly what his "jocker" commands, and disobedience,

wilful or innocent, brings down upon him a most cruel wrath. Besides

being kicked, slapped, and generally maltreated, he is also loaned,

traded, and even sold, if his master sees money in the bargain. There

are, of course, exceptions, for I have myself known some jockers to be

almost as kind as fathers to their boys, but they are such rarities that

one can never count upon them. When a lad enters trampdom he must be

prepared for all kinds of brutal treatment, and the sooner he forgets

home gentleness the better will it be for him. In payment for all this

suffering and rough handling, he is told throughout his apprenticeship

that some day he too will be able to "snare" a boy, and make him beg and

slave for him as he has slaved for others. This is the one reward that

tramps hold out to their "prushuns," and the little fellows cherish it

so long that, when their emancipation finally comes, nearly all start

off to do the very same thing that was done to them when they were

children.

West of the Mississippi River there is a regular gang of these

"ex-kids," as they are termed in the vernacular, and all are supposed to

be looking for revenge. Until they get it there is still something of

the prushun about them which makes them unwelcome in the old stager

class. So they prowl about the community from place to place, looking

eagerly for some weak lad whom they can decoy and show to the

fraternity as evidence of their full membership. They never seem to

realize what an awful thing they are doing. If you remonstrate with

them, they reply: "W'y, you don't think we've been slavin' all this

while fer nothing do you? It's our turn to play jocker now," and, with a

fiendish look in their eyes, they turn and stalk away. Ten years and

more of tramp life have killed their better natures, and all that they

can think of is vengeance, unscrupulous and sure. In this way the number

of boys in Hoboland is always kept up to a certain standard. Every year

a number are graduated from the prushun class, and go out into the world

immediately to find younger children to take the places they have left.

In time these do the same thing, and so on, until to-day there is no

line of outlawry so sure of recruits as vagabondage. Each beggar is a

propagandist, and his brethren expect of him at least one convert.

IV

There is not much that I can say of the children who go to the road

voluntarily. I am sure that there are such, for I have traveled with

them, but it has been impossible for me to get into their life

intimately enough to speak of it intelligently. Even the men constantly

in their company can say but little about them. When asked for an

explanation, they shake their heads and call them "little devils"; but

why they are so, what it is that they are seeking, and where they come

from, are questions to which they are unable to give any satisfactory

replies. I know about twenty, all told, and, as far as I have been

successful in observing them, they seem to me to belong to that class

of children which the criminologist Lombroso finds morally delinquent at

birth. Certainly it would be hard to account for their abnormal criminal

sense on any other ground. They take to the road as to their normal

element, and are on it but a short time ere they know almost as much as

the oldest travelers. Their minds seem bent toward crime and

vagabondage, and their intuitive powers almost uncanny. To hear them

talk makes one think, if he shuts his eyes, that he is in the presence

of trained criminal artists, and I have sometimes imagined that they

were not children, but dwarfed men born out of due time. They undertake

successfully some of the most dangerous robberies in the world, and come

off scot-free, so that old and experienced thieves simply stare and

wonder. The temptation is to think that they are accidents, but they

recur so frequently as to demand a theory of origin and existence. They

are, I do not doubt, the product of criminal breeding, and are just as

much admired in the criminal world as are the feats of some

_Wunderkind_, for instance, among musicians. Watch the scene in an

outcasts' den when one of these queer little creatures comes in, and you

may see the very same thing that goes on in the "artist's box" at some

concert where a prodigy is performing. The people swarm around him, pet

him, make him laugh and talk, till the proprietor finds him a valuable

drawing card for the establishment. The child himself seldom realizes

his importance, and, when off duty, plays at games in keeping with his

age. The instant business is suggested, however, his countenance assumes

a most serious air, and it is then that one wonders whether he is not,

after all, some skilful old soul traveling back through life in a fresh

young body. Indeed, there is so much in his case that appeals to my

sense of wonder that I simply cannot study him for what he is; but there

are those who can do this, and I promise them a most interesting field

of observation. I know enough about it to believe that if it can be

thoroughly explored there will be a great change in the punishment of

criminals. These boys have in them in largest measure what the entire

body of moral delinquents possesses in some degree; and when these

baffling characteristics have been definitely analyzed and placed,

penology will start on a fresh course.

It may be worth while to say what I can about their physical appearance.

The most of them have seemed to me to have fairly well-formed bodies,

but something out of the ordinary in their eyes, and in a few cases in

the entire face. Sometimes the left eye has drooped very noticeably, and

one boy that I recall had something akin to a description I once heard

of the "evil eye." It was a gipsy who explained it to me; and if he was

right, that a "little curtain," capable of falling over the eyeball at

will, is the main curiosity, then this boy had the evil eye. He could

throw a film over his eye in the most distressing fashion, and delighted

in the power to do so; indeed, it was his main way of teasing people. He

knew that it was not a pleasant sight, and if he had a petty grudge to

gratify, he chose this very effective torment. Concerning the faces, it

is difficult to explain just what was the matter. They were not exactly

deformed, but there was a peculiar depravity about them that one could

but notice instantly. At times I fancied that it was in the arrangement

of features rather than acquired expression of the life; but there were

cases where the effects of evil environment and cruel abuse were plain

to see. I have sometimes taken the pains to look up the parents of a

child who thus interested me, but I could not discover any similar

depravity in their countenances. There was depravity there, to be sure,

but of a different kind. I believe that the parents of these children,

and especially the mothers, could tell a great deal concerning them, and

the theorists in criminology will never be thoroughly equipped for their

work till all this evidence has been heard.

* * * * *

The foregoing is but a partial summary of several years' experience with

the children of the road. It is far from being what I should like to

write about them, but perhaps enough has been said to forestate the

problem as it appears to one who has traveled with these children and

learned to know them "in the open." Surely there is kindness and

ingenuity enough in the world to devise a plan or a system by which they

may be snatched from the road and restored to their better selves.

Surely, too, these little epitomes of _Wanderlust_, and even of crime,

are not to baffle philanthropy and science forever. I feel sure that,

whatever may be the answer to the thousand questions which center in

this problem, one thing can be done, and done at once. Wherever law is

able to deal with these children, let it be done on the basis of an

intelligent classification. In punishing them for their misdemeanors and

crimes, let them not be tumbled indiscriminately into massive reform

institutions, officered by political appointment and managed with an eye

to the immediate interests of the taxpayer instead of the welfare of the

inmates. The one practical resource that lies nearest to our hand as

philanthropic sociologists is the reform of the reformatories. We may

not hope to reach in many generations the last sources of juvenile

crime, but we are deserving of a far worse punishment than these moral

delinquents if, being well born and well bred, we do not set ourselves

resolutely to the bettering of penal conditions once imposed.

First of all, we must have a humane and scientific separation of the

inmates in all these reformatories. Sex, age, height, and weight are not

the only things to be taken into consideration when dealing with erring

children. Birth, temperament, habits, education, and experience are

questions of far more vital importance, and it is no unreasonable demand

upon the State that careful attention to each of these points be

required in the scheme of such institutions. Put an ambulanter's child

with a simple runaway boy, and there will be two ambulanters; associate

a youngster with the passion to be tough with a companion innately

criminal, and the latter will be the leader. The law of the survival of

the fittest is just as operative in low life as in any other. In such

spheres the worst natures are the fittest, and the partially good must

yield to them unless zealously defended by outside help. It is suicidal

to put them together, and wherever this is done, especially among

children, there need be no surprise if criminals, and not citizens, are

developed.

Second, the management of reformatories should be in scientific hands;

and just here I am constrained to plead for the training of young men

and women for the rare usefulness that awaits them in such institutions.

It is to these places that the children I have been describing will have

to go, and, with all respect to the officials now in charge, I believe

that there are apt and gifted young men and women in this country who

could bring to them invaluable assistance, if they could only be

persuaded to train for it and to offer it. I do not know why it is, but

for some reason these institutions do not yet appeal to any large number

of students who intend taking service in the ranks of reform. The

university settlement attracts many, and this is one of the finest

manifestations of the universal brotherhood which is to be. Meanwhile,

there is a moral hospital service to be carried on in penal and

reformatory houses. Shall it be done by raw, untrained hands, by selfish

quacks, or by careful, scientific students! Must the moral nurse and

physician be chosen for his ability to control votes, or to treat his

patients with skilled attention and consideration? If the treatment of

physical disease offers attractions that call thousands upon thousands

of young men and women into the nursing and medical professions, here is

a field even more fascinating to the student, and so full of opportunity

and interesting employment that it will be a matter of wonder if the

supply does not speedily exceed the demand.

There is one thing more. Reformatories, planned, officered, and

conducted according to the principles of scientific philanthropy, should

be stationed, not at the end of the road, but at the junction of all

by-paths that leads into it.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] So long.

[2] Live well.

III

CLUB LIFE AMONG OUTCASTS

I

One of the first noticeable features of low life is its gregariousness.

To be alone, except in a few cases where a certain morbidity and

peculiar fondness for isolation prevail, is almost the worst punishment

that can befall the outcast. There is a variety of causes for this, but

I think the main one is the desire to feel that although he is forbidden

the privileges and rights of a polite society, he can nevertheless

identify himself with just as definite and exclusive a community as the

one he has been turned out of.

His specialty in crime and rowdyism determines the particular form and

direction of his social life. If he is a tramp he wants to know his

partners, and the same instinct prevails in all other fields of

outlawry. In time, and as he comes to see that his world is a large

one,--so large, in fact, that he can never understand it all,--he

chooses as he can those particular "pals" with whom he can get on the

easiest. Out of this choice there develops what I call the outcast's

club. He himself calls it a gang, and his club-house a "hang-out." It is

of such clubs that I want to write in this chapter. I do not pretend to

know all of them. Far from it! And some of those that I know are too

vile for description; but the various kinds that I can describe, I have

chosen those which are the most representative.

II

Low life as I know it in America is composed of three distinct classes,

and they are called, in outcasts' slang, the "Kids," the "Natives," and

the "Old Bucks." The Kids, as their name suggests, are boys and girls,

the Natives are the middle-aged outcasts, and the Old Bucks are the

superannuated. Each of these classes has clubs corresponding in

character and purpose to the age of the members.

The clubs of the Kids are composed mainly of mischievous children and

instinctively criminal children. As a rule, they are organized by boys

alone, but I have known girls also to take part in their proceedings.

The lads are usually between ten and fifteen years old. Sometimes they

live at home with their parents, if they have any, and sometimes in

lodging-houses. They get their living, such as it is, by rag-picking,

selling newspapers, blacking boots, and doing odd errands fitted to

their strength. None of them, not even the criminally inclined, are able

to steal enough to support themselves.

To illustrate, I shall take two clubs which I knew, one in Chicago, and

one in Cincinnati. The Chicago club belonged exclusively to a set of

lads on the North Side who called themselves the "Wildcats." The most of

them were homeless little fellows who lived in that district as newsboys

and boot-blacks. They numbered about twenty, and although they had no

officially elected leader, a little fellow called Fraxy was nevertheless

a recognized "president," and was supposed to know more about the city

and certain tricks than the rest, and I think it was he who started the

club. He was an attractive lad, capable of exercising considerable

influence over his companions, and I can easily understand how he

persuaded them to form the club. For personality counts for as much in

low life as it does in "high life," and little Fraxy had a remarkably

magnetic one. He drew boys to him wherever he went, and before going to

Chicago had organized a similar club in Toledo, Ohio.

The club-house of the Wildcats was a little cave which they had dug in a

cabbage-field on the outskirts of the city. Here they gathered nearly

every night in the week to smoke cigarettes, read dime novels or hear

them read, tell tales, crack jokes, and plan their mischievous raids on

the neighboring districts. The cave contained a brickwork stove, some

benches, some old pots and cans, one or two obscene pictures, and an old

shoe-box, in which were stored from time to time various things to eat.

The youngest boy was ten and the oldest fourteen, and as I remember them

they were not especially bad boys. I have often sat with them and

listened to their stories and jokes, and although they could swear, and

a few could drink like drunkards, the most of them had hearts still

kind. But they were intensely mischievous. The more nuisances they could

commit the happier they were; and the odd part of it all was that their

misdemeanors never brought them the slightest profit, and were

remarkable for nothing but their wantonness. I remember particularly one

night when they stoned an old church simply because Fraxy had suggested

it as sport. They left their cave about nine o'clock and went to a

stone-pile near at hand, where they filled their pockets full of rocks.

Then they started off pell-mell for the church, the windows of which

they "peppered 'n' salted" till they looked like "'skeeter-nettin's," as

Fraxy said. The moment they had finished they scampered into town and

brought up at various lodging-houses.

They never thieved or begged while I knew them, and not one of them had

what could be called a criminal habit. They were simply full of

boyishness, and having no homes, no parents, no friends, no refined

instincts, it is no wonder that they worked off their animal spirits in

pranks of this sort. Sometimes they used to take their girl friends out

to the cave, too, and enlist them for a while in the same mischievous

work that I have described; but they always treated them kindly, and

spoke of them as their "dear little kidsy-widsies." The girls helped to

make the cave more homelike, and the lads appreciated every decoration

and knickknack given them.

Every city has clubs like this. They are a natural consequence of slum

life, and to better them it is first necessary to better the slums

themselves. Sunday-school lessons will not accomplish this;

reading-rooms will not accomplish it; gymnasiums will not accomplish it;

and nothing that I know of will accomplish it except personal contact

with some man or boy who is willing to live among them and show them, as

he alone can, a better life. There are many young men in the world who

have remarkable ability, I believe, for just such work, if they would

only go into it. By this I do not necessarily mean joining some

organization or "settlement"; I mean that the would-be helper shall live

his own individual life among these people, learn to understand their

whims and passions, and try to be of use to them as a personal friend.

If he is especially adapted to dealing with boys, he has only to take up

his residence in any slum in any city, and he will find plenty to do.

But whatever he does, he must not let them think that he is among them

as a reformer.

III

The club in Cincinnati was of a different kind. It is true that it

consisted of young boys, and that some of them were boot-blacks and

newsboys, but in other respects they were different. Their club name was

the "Sneakers," and their hang-out was an old deserted house-boat, which

lay stranded on the river-bank about a mile or so out of town. Some of

them had homes, but the majority lived in lodging-houses or on the boat.

When I first knew them they had been organized about three months, and a

few of them had already been caught and sent to the reform school. Their

business was stealing, pure and simple. Old metals were the things they

looked for chiefly, because they were the handiest to get at. They had

had no training in picking pockets or "sly work" of any particular sort,

but they did know some untenanted houses, and these they entered and cut

away the lead pipes to sell to dealers in such wares. Sometimes they

also broke into engine-houses, and, if possible, unscrewed the

brass-work on the engines, and I have even known them to take the wheels

off wagons to get the tires. Their boat was their storehouse until the

excitement over the theft had subsided, and then they persuaded some

tramp or town "tough" to dispose of their goods. They never made very

much profit, but enough to keep up interest in further crimes.

I became acquainted with them through an old vagabond in Cincinnati who

helped them now and then. He took me out to see them one night, and I

had a good opportunity to learn what their club was made of. Most of the

lads were over fourteen years of age, and two had already been twice in

reform schools in different States. These two were the leaders, and

mainly, I think, on account of certain tough airs which they "put on."

They talked criminal slang, and had an all-wise tone that was greatly

liked by the other boys. They were all saturated with criminal ideas,

and their faces gave evidence of crooked characteristics. How they came

to club together is probably best explained by the older vagabond. I

asked him how he accounted for such an organization, and he replied:

"Got it in 'em, I guess. It's the only reason I know. Some kids always

is that way. The divil's born in 'em."

I think that is true, and I still consider it the best explanation of

the Sneakers. They were criminals by instinct, and such boys, just as

mischievous boys, drift together and combine plots and schemes. I know

of other boys of the same type who, instead of stealing, burn barns and

outhouses. Young as they are, their moral obliquity is so definitely

developed that they do such things passionately. They like to see the

blaze, and yet when asked wherein the fun lies, they cannot tell.

How to reform such boys is a question which, I think, has never been

settled satisfactorily. For one, I do not believe that they can ever be

helped by any clubs organized for their improvement. They have no

interest in such things, and none can be awakened strong enough to kill

their interest in criminal practices. They are mentally maimed, and

practically belong in an insane asylum. In saying this I do not wish to

be understood as paying tribute to the "fad" of some philanthropic

circles, which regard the criminal as either diseased or delinquent--as

born lacking in mental and moral aptitudes, or perverted through no

fault of his own. Without any attempt to tone down the reproach of

criminality, or to account for the facts by heredity or environment, it

still remains true that in thousands of cases there is as direct

evidence of insanity in a boy's crimes and misdemeanors as in a man's,

and I firmly believe that a more scientific century will institute

medical treatment of juvenile crime, and found reform schools where the

cure of insanity will be as much an object as moral instruction and

character-building.

IV

Club life among the Natives,--the older outcasts,--although in many

respects quite different from that of the Kids, is in some ways

strikingly similar. There are, for instance, young rowdies and roughs

whose main pleasures are mischief and petty misdemeanors, just as among

the young boys in Chicago. But in place of breaking church windows and

turning over horse-blocks, they join what are called "scrappin' gangs,"

and spend most of their time in fighting hostile clubs of the same

order. They are not clever enough as yet to become successful criminals;

they are too brutal and impolite to do profitable begging, and as

rowdyism is about the only thing they can take part in, their

associations become pugilistic clubs.

How these originated is an open question even among the rowdies

themselves. My own explanation of their origin is this: Every community,

if it is at all complex and varied, has different sets of outcasts and

ne'er-do-wells, just as it has varieties of respectable people. In time

these different sets appropriate, often quite accidentally, territories

of their own. One set, for example, will live mainly on the east side of

a city, and another set on the west side. After some residence in their

distinct quarters, local prejudices and habits are formed, and, what is

more to the point, a local patriotism grows. The east-sider thinks his

hang-outs and dives are the best, and the west-sider thinks the same of

his. Out of this conceit there comes invariably a class hatred, which

grows, and finally develops into the "scrappin' gangs," the purpose of

which is to defend the pride of each separate district. In New York I

know of over half a dozen of these pugnacious organizations, and they

fight for as many different territories. I have seen in one club young

and old of both sexes joined together to defend their "kentry," as they

called the street or series of streets in which they lived. The majority

of the real fighters, however, are powerful fellows between the ages of

eighteen and twenty-two. Sometimes they live at home, and a few pretend

to do some work, but most of them are loafers, who spend their time in

drinking, gambling, and petty thieving. They usually sleep in old

tenements and cheap lodging-houses, and in the daytime they are either

in the streets or at some dive supported mainly by their patronage.

I knew such a place in the city of New York, on the East Side, and not

far from the Brooklyn Bridge. It was kept by an Irishman, and he had no

customers other than those belonging to a "scrappin' gang" called the

"Rappers." There were two rooms--one fronting on the street, and used as

a bar-room; the other, in the rear, was the gambling-and

"practisin'"-room. Here they came every night, played cards, drank stale

beer, and exercised themselves in fisticuffing and "scrappin'." I

visited them one night, and saw some of their movements, as they called

the various triangles and circles which they formed as strategic guards

when attacking the hostile gangs of the West Side. One of them they

nicknamed the "V gag," and prided themselves on its efficiency. It was

simply a triangle which they formed to charge the better into the ranks

of their enemies, and it reminded me strongly of football tactics.

That same night they were to scuffle with a West-Side gang called the

"Ducks," as one of their members had been insulted by one of the Duck

gang. Battle was to be joined in a certain alley not far from Eighth

Avenue, and they started out, their pockets full of stones, in companies

of two and three, to meet later in the alley. I accompanied the leader,

a fellow called the "slugger," and reached the alley about eleven

o'clock. He wanted me to give my assistance, but I told him that I could

play war correspondent much better, and so was excused from action. And

it was action indeed. They had hardly reached the battle-ground before

the Ducks were upon them, and rocks flew and fists punched in a most

terrific manner. Noses bled, coats were torn, hats were lost, and black

eyes became the fashion. This went on for about fifteen minutes, and

the battle was over. The Rappers were defeated fairly and squarely,

but, as the slugger said, when we were all at the hang-out again, "we

mought 'a' licked 'em ef we'd 'a' had 'em over here."

Such is the "scrappin' gang." Every large city supports one or two, and

London has a score of them. They make some of its districts

uninhabitable for respectable persons, and woe to the man who tries to

interfere with them. As their members die or grow old, younger fellows

come forward, often enough out of the very boys' clubs I have described,

and take the place of the departed heroes. This is what rowdies call

life.

Like the famous _Studenten-Corps_ in Germany, they need some sort of

rough excitement, and the bloodier it is the happier they are. They have

so much heart in them that no ordinary exercise relieves it, and they

institute these foolish fighting clubs. It is possible that some

sweet-natured philanthropist might go among them and accomplish wonders.

In London the Salvation Army has done some splendid work with these same

rowdies, and I know personally several who are to-day respectable

working-men. But as for organizing polite clubs among them on any large

scale, I think it impossible.

V