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