You will hardly ever find a foreigner in the first five or ten years
of his American life among tramps and hobos. "He may be near tramp,
he may be apparently 'down and out,' but he is not a genuine hobo,"
said one of the men. "You will find plenty of foreigners in the
lodging houses, plenty of them who starve and suffer, but they are not
hobos. They have had hard luck, and now in their old age they live by
doing two or three and some even one day's work a week. But they work
more or less. They have not the parasitic philosophy of one who is a
full-fledged hobo. They fall more in the class of European vagabonds,
such as one finds in Germany or Russia. They work now and then; they
have some trade, or know a smattering about a number of trades."
The American hobo falls in an entirely different category from these.
Work with him is said to be a disgrace. Neither does he relish crime
much if he can get along without it. He will beg from door to door and
will commit a crime only as a last resort. The hobo primarily has no
will power, or rather, he destroys it.
The majority of hobos became such because of their false conception
of freedom and of wrong inter-relations between parents and children.
Their parents have been held in many cases in semi-savage conditions
by their landlords in the old world. When they come to America
they naturally appreciate their freedom. They speak of it to their
children. They are lax with them, and this spoils them.