Perhaps if all the votes of those ultra-intelligent electors had been
polled as to which one man in all the town had done most to insure its
position in the van of American progress; as to who best represented
the community in the matter of liberal intelligence and ripe culture; as
to who was most to be honored for steadfast rectitude and immaculate
purity of life; as to who was its highest type of enlightened
Christianity--an overwhelming if not unanimous vote would have been cast
for Colonel Edward Singelsby.
He was born of one of the oldest and best New England families; he had
graduated with the highest honors from Harvard, and finished his
education at Göttingen. At the outbreak of the rebellion he had left a
lucrative law practice and a probable judgeship to fight at the head of
a volunteer regiment throughout the whole war, which he did with signal
credit to himself, the community, and the nation at large. He was a
broad and profound speculative thinker, and the papers which he
occasionally wrote, and which appeared now and then in the more
prominent magazines, never failed to attract general and wide-spread
attention. His intelligence, clear-cut and vividly operating, instead of
leading him into the quicksands of scepticism, had never left the hard
rock of earnest religious belief inherited from ten generations of
Puritan ancestors. Nevertheless, though his feet never strayed from that
rock, his was too active and living a soul to rest content with the
arid face of a by-gone orthodoxy; God's rain of truth had fallen upon
him and it, and he had hewn and delved until the face of his rock
blossomed a very Eden of exalted Christianity. To sum up briefly and in
full, he was a Christian gentleman of the highest and most perfect type.
Besides his close and profound studies in municipal government, from
which largely had sprung such a flawless and perfect type as that of
East Haven, he was also interested in public charities, and the
existence of many of the beneficial organizations throughout the State
had been largely due to his persistent and untiring efforts. The
municipal reforms, as has been suggested, worked beautifully, perfectly,
without the grating of a wheel or the creaking of a joint; but the
public charities--somehow they did not work so well; they never did just
what was intended, or achieved just what was expected; their mechanism
appeared to be perfect, but, as is so universally the case with public
charities, they somehow lacked a soul.
It was in connection with the matter of public charities that the tramp
question arose. Colonel Singelsby grappled with it, as he had grappled
with so many matters of the kind. The solution was the crowning work of
his life, and the result was in a way as successful as it was
paradoxical and unexpected.
Connected with the East Haven Public Library was the lecture-room, where
an association, calling itself the East Haven Lyceum, and comprising in
its number some of the most advanced thinkers of the town, met on
Thursdays from November to May to discuss and digest matters social and
intellectual. More than one good thing that had afterward taken definite
shape had originated in the discussions of the Lyceum, and one winter,
under Colonel Singelsby's lead, the tramp question was taken up and
dissected.
He had, Colonel Singelsby said, studied that complex question very
earnestly and for some time, and to his mind it had resolved itself to
this: not how to suppress vagrancy, but how to make of the vagrant an
honest and useful citizen. Repressive laws were easily passed, but it
appeared to him that the only result achieved by them was to drive the
tramp into other sections where no such laws existed, and which sections
they only infested to a greater degree and in larger numbers. Nor in
these days of light was it, in his opinion, a sufficient answer to that
objection that it was the fault of those other communities that they did
not also pass repressive laws. The fact remained that they had not
passed them, and that the tramps did infest their precincts, and such
being the case, it was as clear as day (for that which injures some,
injures all) that the wrong of vagrancy was not corrected by merely
driving tramps over the limits of one town into those of another.
Moreover, there was a deeper and more interior reason against the
passage of such repressive laws; to his thinking it behooved society, if
it would root out this evil, to seek first the radix from which it drew
existence; it behooved them first to very thoroughly diagnose the
disease before attempting a hasty cure. "So let us now," said he, "set
about searching for this radix, and then so drive the spade of reform as
to remove it forever."
The discussion that followed opened a wide field for investigation, and
the conclusion finally reached during the winter was not unlike that so
logically deduced by Mr. Henry George at a later date. The East Haven
Lyceum, however, either did not think of or did not care to advocate
such a radical remedy as Mr. George proposed. They saw clearly enough
that, apart from the unequal distribution of wealth, which may perhaps
have been the prime cause of the trouble, idleness and thriftlessness
are acquired habits, just as industry and thrift are acquired habits,
and it seemed to them better to cure the ill habit rather than to upset
society and then to rebuild it again for the sake of benefiting the
ill-conditioned few.
So the result of the winter's talk was the founding of the East Haven
Refuge, of which much has since been written and said.
Those interested in such matters may perhaps remember the article upon
the Refuge published in one of the prominent magazines. A full
description of it was given in that paper. The building stood upon Bay
Street overlooking the harbor; it was one of the most beautiful
situations in the town; without, the building was architecturally plain,
but in perfect taste; within, it was furnished with every comfort and
convenience--a dormitory immaculately clean; a dining-room, large and
airy, where plain substantial food, cooked in the best possible manner,
was served to the inmates. There were three bath-rooms supplied with hot
and cold water, and there was a reading and a smoking-room provided not
only with all the current periodicals, but with chess, checkers, and
backgammon-boards.
At the same time that the Refuge was being founded and built, certain
municipal laws were enacted, according to which a tramp appearing within
the town limits was conveyed (with as little appearance of constraint as
possible) to the Refuge. There for four weeks he was well fed, well
clothed, well cared for. In return he was expected to work for eight
hours every day upon some piece of public improvement: the repaving of
Main Street with asphaltum blocks was selected by the authorities as the
initial work. At the end of four weeks the tramp was dismissed from the
Refuge clad in a neat, substantial, well-made suit of clothes, and with
money in his pocket to convey him to some place where he might, if he
chose, procure permanent work.
The Refuge was finished by the last of March, and Colonel Singelsby was
unanimously chosen by the board as superintendent, a position he
accepted very reluctantly. He felt that in so accepting he shouldered
the whole responsibility of the experiment that was being undertaken,
yet he could not but acknowledge that it was right for him to shoulder
that burden, who had been foremost both in formulating and advocating
the scheme, as well as most instrumental in carrying it to a practical
conclusion. So, as was said, he accepted, though very reluctantly.
The world at large was much disposed to laugh at and to ridicule all the
preparation that Dives of East Haven made to entertain his Lazarus.
Nevertheless, there were a few who believed very sincerely in the
efficacy of the scheme. But both those who believed and those who
scoffed agreed in general upon one point--that it was altogether
probable that East Haven would soon be overrun with such a wilderness of
tramps that fifty Refuges would not be able to supply them with refuge.
But who shall undertake to solve that inscrutable paradox, human
life--its loves, its hates?
The Refuge was opened upon the 1st of April; by the 29th there were
thirty-two tramps lodged in its sheltering arms, all working their eight
hours a day upon the repaving of Main Street. That same day--the
29th--five were dismissed from within its walls. Colonel Singelsby, as
superintendent, had a little office on the ground-floor of the main
building, opening out upon the street. At one o'clock, and just after
the Refuge dinner had been served, he stood beside his table with five
sealed envelopes spread out side by side upon it. Presently the five
outgoing guests slouched one by one into the room. Each was shaven and
shorn; each wore clean linen; each was clad in a neat, plain, gray suit
of tweed; each bore stamped upon his face a dogged, obstinate, stolid,
low-browed shame. The colonel gave each the money enclosed in the
envelope, thanked each for his service, inquired with pleasant
friendliness as to his future movements and plans, invited each to come
again to the Refuge if he chanced to be in those parts, shook each by a
heavy, reluctant hand, and bade each a good-by. Then the five slouched
out and away, leaving the town by back streets and byways; each with his
hat pulled down over his brows; each ten thousand times more humiliated,
ten thousand times more debased in his cleanliness, in his good clothes,
and with money in his pocket, than he had been in his dirt, his tatters,
his poverty.
They never came back to East Haven again.
The capacity of the Refuge was 50. In May there were 47 inmates, and
Colonel Singelsby began to apprehend the predicted overflow. The
overflow never came. In June there were 45 inmates; in July there were
27; in August there were 28; in September, 10; in October, 2; in
November, 1; in December there were none. The fall was very cold and
wet, and maybe that had something to do with the sudden falling off of
guests, for the tramp is not fond of cold weather. But even granting
that bad weather had something to do with the matter, the Refuge was
nevertheless a phenomenal, an extraordinary success--but upon very
different lines than Colonel Singelsby had anticipated; for even in this
the first season of the institution the tramps began to shun East Haven
even more sedulously than they had before cultivated its hospitality.
Even West Hampstead, where vagrancy was punished only less severely than
petty larceny, was not so shunned as East Haven with the horrid comforts
of its Refuge.