[Illustration: Raggles--"Why did yer refuse what she offered yer?"
Weary--"Cause I never heard of it before and de name was too much for
me. Why when she said 'chop suey' cold chills run down me back, 'cause
dat word chop reminds me too much of de time when I had ter chop three
cords of wood looking into de face of two shotguns."]
The vagrant is the most elusive man among us. He is always with us,
yet we can never locate him. No one wants him, yet we always send him
to someone else. We make laws to get rid of him, but succeed only in
keeping him a little longer in custody at our own expense. Most of
us laugh at him and some of us cry over him by turns. We draw funny
pictures of him in our newspapers and in our billboard advertisements,
but we are really afraid of him. We blame the police for not keeping
him off the streets, or at least out of sight, and yet we feed him
at our own doors. We fear to meet him after dark, and nevertheless
we give him a nickel or a dime to keep him in town over night. He is
an object of charity, or a criminal, just as we happen to feel. He
is sometimes the hero of our melodrama at the theater, who gets our
tearful applause. At the same time he stands for all that we brand as
mean and vile. We spend money lavishly to support him without work by
charity, or imprison him in idleness by law.
The problem is to understand vagrancy so well that we can deal with
it on a large enough scale both to restore the vagrant to the working
world or to keep him in custody, and to prevent the accidental or
occasional vagrant from becoming a habitual mendicant. The English
and European governments have dealt with their problems of vagrancy
more effectively than we have. This is due to the fact that they have
investigated the causes and conditions of vagrancy more widely than
we, and dealt with it on a larger scale by uniform legislation and by
more persistently following up the measures in which the public and
private resources combine to treat the evil.