Far better provision for lodging homeless men must be made by cities
in municipal lodging houses of their own, such as Chicago effectively
conducts, and by far stricter public regulation and supervision
of lodging houses maintained for profit or for charity. The
anti-tuberculosis crusade shows that this supervision and regulation
should be shared by the health authorities with the police. Within a
period of five years 679 consumptives were taken from only a portion
of Chicago's lodging house district to the Cook County Hospital, most
of them in the most dangerously infectious stages of the disease. An
investigator of Chicago's 165 cheap lodging houses and their 19,000
beds declares that "the unfortunate man forced to sojourn in them for
a while may enter sound and strong and come out condemned to death."
The New York City Charity Organization Society and the Association
for Improving the Condition of the Poor have rendered a country-wide
public service in furnishing the report on "Vagrancy in the United
States" by their joint agent, Orlando F. Lewis. It may well be the
basis for better public policy here and everywhere.
Startling figures and facts were presented at the State Conference
of Charities and Corrections at Albany by Arthur W. Towne, secretary
of the Illinois State Probation Commission, regarding the extent of
vagrancy and the habits of tramps in this state.
More than 31,000 persons, mainly vagrants, received free lodgings in
New York State, in town and city lockups, during 1906, and the number
in 1907 was larger. Seventy-five cities and towns thus provide for
their wandering visitors. Half of these towns and cities also feed the
wanderers free of charge.
A large number of places give lodgings also to boys, many of them as
young as 10 or 12 years, thus encouraging the wandering spirit that
makes the later tramp. With only one slight exception, not a single
town or city required any work at all from the lodgers in return for
the lodging or the food provided, thus giving absolutely no incentive
to the wanderer to work for his board or meals.
It is urged that the system of allowing the police authorities to give
these free lodgings, as well as the similar practice in some jails and
almshouses, be abolished as a most direct encouragement to vagrancy,
and that in their stead such free lodgings as are necessary should be
furnished by the overseer of the poor, but only when repaid by some
form of work, such as chopping wood or breaking stone.