Kentucky.
Beautiful blonde Southern girl, educated and refined; age 21, height 5 ft. 2 in., weight 115 lbs.; American, and worth $10,000; wants nice-looking husband.
Pretty little girl, age 19 years, height 5 ft. 3 in., weight 112 lbs.; American; worth $10,000. Says she is very anxious to marry.
Boston, Mass.
Fine-looking lady, age 37 years, height 5 ft. 3 in., weight 140 lbs.; American, Protestant, and worth $20,000.
Young lady, blonde, age 25 years, weight 128 lbs., height 5 ft.; American, Methodist; income $720 a year; worth $25,000.
Chicago, Ill.
Maiden, age 26 years, height 5 ft. 4 in., weight 140 lbs.; Scotch, Protestant, Methodist; income $1,200 per year; worth $75,000.
Monroe Co., Pa.
Young lady, age 23 years, very pretty, height 5 ft. 5 in., weight 150 lbs.; German, Methodist; worth $12,000.
Dover, N. H.
Stylish, brown-eyed lady, age 24 years, height 5 ft. 6 in., weight 135 pounds; American, Methodist; worth $50,000.
New York City.
Young widow, age 32 years, height 5 ft. 5 in., weight 140 lbs.; Irish Catholic; worth $40,000.
Utah.
Maiden lady, age not mentioned, height 5 ft., weight 120 lbs.; worth $35,000.
And all this, ridiculous, murderous and otherwise, is all outside the pale of the law. The matrimonial agency is a crime per se. It is a criminal institution. It has been pronounced to be such by the best and foremost judges of the United States, Germany and Great Britain.
Judge Klerbach, sitting in the case of a marriage broker at Goettingen, Germany, in 1903, declared that the marriage broker was a criminal in intent, from the very nature of his business.
In the celebrated case of Alan Murray vs. Jeanie McDonald at Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1898, Justice Grahame pronounced from the judicial seat one of the most scathing arraignments of the marriage bureau ever delivered. "Leeches upon the body social, blood-suckers, destroyers of womanhood, abominations of the bottomless pit," were some of the phrases used by Justice Grahame in denouncing Murray.
In the petty sessions at Tinahely, Ireland, Justice O'Gorman in May, 1905, is reported in the Wicklow People, a newspaper which has a wide circulation in the South of Ireland, as fiercely denouncing the marriage broker business. The Justice declared that the marriage broker was a wolf, "preying upon the weaknesses of humanity, a pander to the lowest instincts"; that he had no right to demand the interference of the law in his behalf, but rather that the law should always be exercised for the suppression of his nefarious traffic.
Same Thing Nearer Home.
To get nearer home. In the Chicago American, February 12, 1903, Judge Neely, in the case of the State vs. Hattie Howard, declared from the bench that to "sell men and women in marriage is the height of crime." Judge Neely further said:
"Men and women who engage in this business of promoting matrimony for money are guilty of crime. It is opposed to the fundamental principles of society. Such a practice should under no circumstances be tolerated. This practice should be stopped. The trade should be killed. The courts should make it their business to discourage this thing in a way that may be easily understood."
Judge Kohlsaat, of Chicago, has inveighed against the practice in equally vehement terms. Judge Kohlsaat declares that "the Police Department of Chicago is entitled to great credit for what it has done in discouraging this business. I hope it will continue its vigilance until every promoter of marriages of this character has been compelled to leave the city. They should make such criminals give the city a wide berth."
There, then, is the law. The business is a crime in its very nature. It leads to bigamy and wholesale murder. It is made the instrument of the thief, the swindler and the murderer. How much longer will the American people look with calmness upon these practices, upon these abominations, which make a stench of the very air of the great and free country in which we live? The answer is up to you.
THE GREAT MISTAKE.
OUR PENAL SYSTEM IS A RELIC OF EARLY SAVAGERY.
Our whole penal system needs changing. It is a relic of barbarism, and stands a monument to the early savagery of the human race.
How is it possible for a man or woman to lead an upright, useful life after they once come under the ban of the law? Society combines to hound them down. They are forbidden to place themselves on an equality with others by narrow, human prejudice—the "holier than thou" attitude of that portion of the public which has not yet been "found guilty."
We are Pharisees, all, and sit in judgment on our fellowman, because we do not yet realize the mixture of evil and good that is in every man—none are exempt—only some are caught and punished.
Men have come to us, desperate, despairing men, crying: "For God's sake, what are we to do? If we get a job someone will tell our employers we have 'done time,' and we are fired. If they find us on the street, we're arrested. Where can we go and what can we do?"
A man may commit murder and not be a criminal, and yet a sneakthief is always a criminal and every burglar a potential murderer.
Social conditions produce criminals. As well expect a rose to bloom in a swamp as human nature to flower in the slums.
All our prisons are hotbeds of tuberculosis and most prison physicians hold their positions through political pull.
In our opinion a greater distinction should be made between the penitentiary and house of correction. Petty misdemeanants should not be branded with the prison stigma. We also favor suspended sentence for first offenders.
The crime and its punishment should be separated. At present the personal equation does not enter into the case when a judge imposes sentence. The man's environment, what leads him to break the law, and how best to help this particular man, all are questions that should be carefully considered before sentence is pronounced.
Intelligence in Punishing Crime.
A student of prison affairs once said that the prison population consists of two classes—people who never ought to have been sent to prison and people who never ought to be allowed to leave it. It is unfortunate that students interested in either one of these classes are too often apt to forget the importance of the other.
There are many habitual criminals, weak persons readily giving way to temptation, who should not be classified as professionals. The professionals are only those who deliberately set about supporting themselves by crime. These are the ones who are among all criminals most unlikely to change their ways, and it was for their control that Detective Wooldridge suggested some years ago that after several convictions such criminals should be given a special trial to decide whether they were true professionals or not, and if they were, they should be imprisoned for life.
If more attention were given to professional crime and if harsher methods were used in protecting society from it, the result would be merciful in the end—merciful both to the citizens protected from such crime and to the men who, as conditions now are, graduate every year into such careers.
The "Silent System" is a Crime Against Criminals.
The penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, in 1907, was the only prison in America conducted on what is known as the "silent system."
In this grim edifice a man sentenced to twenty years imprisonment might pass all of that time buried from sight in his cell, seeing only his keeper, the chaplain, the doctor and the schoolmaster, and for twenty minutes in every six weeks he would be allowed to talk with a near relative.
This man loses his identity the moment he enters the prison gates. A black cap is drawn over his head and he is led to a cell in one of the many corridors that radiate from the central tower like spokes from the hub of a wheel. He is known thereafter by a number.
The cell in which he eats and sleeps and works is a little larger than the average prison cell, and more completely furnished—as it must hold his bed, his lavatory, his dishes and a place for eating, his work, his every possession, and such books as he may secure from the prison library.
His front door opens on a corridor and is kept ajar on a heavy chain so the prison guards may watch him.
His back door opens on a plot of ground about 8×10 feet. It is surrounded and cut off from all communication from every living human being by a brick wall. Only the watchman in the central tower and the birds that wing their way over the prison can see him in his little yard. Robinson Crusoe on his deserted island could not be more utterly lonely.
In this tiny yard is a circular path worn smooth and pressed deep into the soil by the feet of despairing men—his predecessors.
The prisoner is forbidden even the negative pleasure of going out into this God-forsaken walled plot of bare ground except for one hour a day.
In his gloomy cell the prisoner drags out the "task" given him to escape insanity. He fears to be idle without the sound of a human voice in his ear or the sight of a human face to relieve his awful loneliness.
To lengthen these "tasks" the State of Pennsylvania has provided primitive hand-looms, some 100 years old, and other discarded makeshifts of man's industrial infancy.
Not for him has the world progressed beyond the caveman's day. Perhaps he is a skilled mechanic, a man accustomed to the swift play of machinery, the grip of tool on material. He is condemned to manufacture by primitive methods the clothes he wears to keep him from quite going mad.
Extreme Methods Faulty.
As between the abominable "contract" and "lease" systems and this reversion to blind seclusion, is there no human method to be found of apportioning the convict's labor?
Yet No. 99, locked away in his solitary cell in the Philadelphia prison, must toil laboriously, denying his brain and hand their cunning, with a pretense at occupation. He is not sharing in the world's work. He knows this child's play of making something that no one needs on an instrument left over from the twelfth century is futile and foolish.
How shall he meet and battle with the great world of commerce and labor after twenty years of this? In what way is this make-believe fitting him for liberty?
Some few in the Philadelphia prison escape the fate mapped out for them. There are 800 cells, and there are at present about 1,100 prisoners. Naturally, some must "double up." And then the regular domestic work of the institution must be done, tasks at which it would be impossible to keep prisoners separated or wholly silent.
And so the "silent system" is not entirely silent. But, we protest, that is not the fault of the prison management, nor is it that of the good citizens who seventy-eight years ago devised and built this prison, the only one of its kind in America.
Men are unfitted for after-life under the "silent system." They come out of prison at the end of their terms with shuffling gait and incoherent speech and unskilled hands.
Cut off from all obligation to family or friends, the prisoner's whole spiritual nature is bound to deteriorate. Will he be a better citizen, a more loving father or husband or son, when he is released?
The prison at Philadelphia is a model of cleanliness, management, discipline and sanitation. The warden, Charles C. Church, is humane and intelligent; the guards above the average in character.
And yet Pennsylvania's crime against her criminal population is appalling. All she does for her unfortunate offender is to guard him securely, shelter him in cleanliness, feed and clothe him—and hold him against the day of his release.
These are necessary things, but it is more necessary that the state turn back the criminal at least no worse than she found him when committed to her care.
She could turn him out a better man morally, better equipped to gain a livelihood, in fair physical health, and certainly without mental taint or bias due to his imprisonment.
Jails Make 50,000 Criminals a Year.
If the jails and lockups in our country—4,000 or 5,000 in number—are in truth, as they have been often aptly termed, in most cases compulsory schools of crime, maintained at the public expense, we shall have from this quarter alone an accession to the criminal classes in each decade of perhaps 50,000 trained experts in crime. Surely, almost any change in dealing with the young, with the beginners in lawbreaking, would be an improvement on the prevailing system. Jails and prisons, so constructed and managed as to keep separate their inmates, would afford an adequate remedy for the evil. Until this can be done it would be far better to cut down largely the number of arrests and committals of the young.
"It is absurd to argue that life in the penitentiary is conducive to moral betterment, for all the conditions are against this cheerful theory. In jail a man meets criminals. The whole system makes for greater criminality on the release of the prisoner. He has time to plan fresh onslaughts on society. His incarceration further embitters him against the world. He looks with malicious envy on those who have escaped the punishment which he has had to suffer. When he is turned out of prison he is ready for further felonies—only now he has learned more caution, and for this reason he is more dangerous than he was when he entered the institution."
When a man has served two prison sentences without being convinced of the futility of the attempt to live without honest work, it is evident that he has abandoned all idea of being a good citizen and has made up his mind to prey upon society.
"Then," says Mr. Wooldridge, "moderate sentences having produced no good effect upon him, either to deter or reform, why should he not be taken permanently out of society and put where he cannot harm others or wrong himself by committing crime? No objection," he concluded, "can be found to this method."
Crime Based on Suggestion.
The man who has declared war upon the world, as every man has done who is not reformed by two successive prison sentences, should be seized and permanently imprisoned. Modern thought does not sanction the literal translation of this idea, but that does not interfere with the possibility of carrying it out for the benefit of society.
The world spends millions of dollars every year in the business of protecting itself against the criminal and in caring for him. But that is because no serious attempt has ever been made to solve the problem of crime.
Crime is largely a matter of suggestion and therefore if all the habitual criminals in the country were segregated where their influence would no longer be able to exert itself, crime would not propagate itself so fast. The young men would not have presented to them so often or so forcibly the example which causes most of them to take the crooked path. Thus the expense of prevention would be enormously diminished at once.
Suggests Great Prison Farm.
With segregated criminals supporting themselves, as they might be made to do under our plan, the enormous cost of penitentiaries would at one step be done away with. A penal colony such as Mr. Wooldridge proposed would be placed in such a situation that the convicts could be compelled to raise every bit of food they put into their mouths and every bit of clothing they put upon their backs. Out in one of the western states or territories a reservation might be made of several thousand acres of land, around the rim of which the convicts could be made to build a great wall shutting themselves away from the rest of the world. On its surface would be built in the same way habitations for them, and they would live there, tilling the soil and manufacturing their necessities, until death.
The time will come when this plan will be carried out. The law-abiding citizens of the United States will not continue forever to be taxed enormously for the support of a class of persons who are enemies of public order and decency.
Improving the Public Health.
Can a nation be said to be civilized that spends billions of dollars every year in the detection and punishment of crime, and not one cent for the prevention and cure of disease, which kills thousands of persons who might otherwise have retained their health and strength?
Suppose only a billion dollars a year, that now goes to the support of criminals in jails and penitentiaries, were to be saved by the establishment of a national penal colony where criminals would be made to support themselves; and suppose the billion dollars thus saved were to be spent on free hospitals and medical treatment, would the country not be much better off?
Such a use of the money would result in cutting down the death rate in the United States at least one-half. The death rate in England, through the exercise of care and the assistance of the government, has been reduced from one-half to two-thirds in many diseases, and ten to twelve years have been added to the expectation of life between the ages of one year and forty-five years. A similar state of affairs should exist in this country, where the waste of life and health through preventable diseases is incalculable.
Our enormous expense on account of criminals, most of which might be avoided if brains were really brought to bear upon the problem, will not always be endured. The future will force the criminal to support himself, and the money now expended on him will be devoted to the preservation of health and life among honest men, for the time will certainly come when free hospitals and medical service will be provided by the government for every citizen who needs them.
Road Work for Convicts.
Criminology, on its humanitarian side, seeks new methods of employment for criminals. It seeks to regenerate convicted criminals morally, as well as care for their physical well-being.
Indoor prison trades have a deadly monotony. In most cases they are carried on without sunlight, and with too little fresh air. Confinement within walls is alone a heavy punishment, but when allied with conditions that breed disease and possibly death, society exacts more than just retribution.
Modern criminology leans toward both moral and physical care in allotting the daily tasks of criminals. It assumes that the state has no right to make the criminal a worse or a weaker member of society than when he entered the prison walls.
This explains why most experts in criminology are strongly in favor of putting criminals to work at road-making. Here is employment in God's sunlight and air, where criminals can do useful work, and still be under watchful guard. They will be giving the state better highways, and at the same time escape the deadly indoor prison grind.
Criminologists are studying a hundred speculative methods of benefiting the criminal. They all agree on one point—namely, that useful work in the open air is beneficial to the average criminal, morally and physically.
If there can be a large benefit to the state, at the same time that the state is benefiting the criminal, there is a double advance along the lines of rational, humane treatment of criminals.
The sordid idea that criminals should pay the cost of their own incarceration is secondary. And yet, in applying convict labor to the solution of the good roads problem in the United States, the public would get back at least a portion of the enormous drain on public revenues for the support of criminals.
Solves "Good Roads" Problem.
This is the only complete solution of the good roads problem. It is one that all farmers or other rural residents should insist upon. It is the one practical way of gridironing the states, old and new, with good roads. It is especially vital in the newer states, where the absence of good roads is the heaviest tax on industry that individual communities must suffer.
It is far better for the criminals themselves that they should be employed in this useful outdoor labor. The greatest clog on the science of criminology is the aversion to breaking away from traditions. The housing of criminals in penitentiaries, where expensive idleness alternates with desultory forms of industry, has ceased to be a method abreast of the times. There is enormous waste in the orthodox prison systems.
Get all able-bodied convicts into road-making for a single generation, and what would result? The productiveness of agricultural states would be vastly increased. Markets, for the average farmer, would be easier of access. Instead of virtual isolation for three or four months of the year, agricultural life would be more evenly balanced.
The actual financial benefits to farmers would aggregate a vast total.
In European countries, it took several generations to solve the good-roads problem. But they have solved it. The rural roads in the average European state or principality are a national blessing. They are not only a joy to transient travelers, but form the bulwark of agricultural industries. European governments have wisely considered no cost too great for good roads.
As distances are immeasurably greater in America than in thickly settled European states, the good roads problem takes on a different aspect here. American roads are, on the average, worse than in any other civilized country. Therefore, they must be built up, slowly and patiently, perhaps, but with increasing energy as population grows denser.
With European methods it would take a hundred years to give the western states good roads. With the convict labor, the problem would be solved in twenty years or less. This would suffice, at least, for a great national system of highways.
Extend the Parole System.
The fear is expressed that an extension of the parole system as regards adults would open a velvet path for criminals to continue preying upon society. There was a loud hue and cry raised against the idea as administered recently by one of our Municipal Court Judges. Still, there is no denying that there is a great deal of good resultant from this plan. It is a safe, sane and conservative one, especially so when in the hands of judges who can feel for the man who has committed his first offense.
Chicago has some peculiar problems to contend with. It is the stopping off place for all traveling from south to north, and from north to south, and from west to east. Many of these transient visitors live a hand-to-mouth life. Oftentimes they are driven to crime by sheer force of necessity. Again, the father or son may be out of work, and chance may place in his way the opportunity to commit some petty theft, tempting him on to his first crime. If such offenders show signs of desiring to do better and are susceptible of reformation, they ought to be given another chance. On the other hand, those who are unmistakably guilty and evidence no signs of repentance should be punished without any undue delay.
Many families have been driven to disgrace and ruin when their heads were sent to prison. Surely among these there were some who had manifested repentance and shown indications of a desire to be given another opportunity to start anew; surely had they but been shown lenience they might have proved good citizens and worthy of the confidence reposed in them.
Of course, there are a lot of drawbacks to the parole system as it applies to juveniles in Chicago. But free from politics and in the hands of fair-minded, square-leading men it would prove a splendid scheme worthy of the highest praise. In its infancy it might look like a failure, but as time passed it would be perfected, so that in the long run it would prove a godsend to humanity.
When a criminal returns from penitentiary or prison he is shunned by society; he is under the eternal vigilance of our police force—he is walked upon and pushed down. Finally, tired with trying to earn an honest living, he again resorts to crime. Probably had he been paroled he might have turned out a deserving citizen and the father of a happy family.
VAGRANTS; WHO AND WHY.
WHAT WILL WE DO WITH THE VAGRANT AND TRAMP?
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.
Tramp a Railroad Problem.
Thus the tramp cuts no figure as a railroad problem, much less menace, abroad. But with us it is the fact that railroads representing more than half the total mileage operated in the United States and Canada testify almost without exception to depredation, thieving, injuries, deaths, accidents to passengers or rolling stock, enormous aggregate costs to railroads or society, caused by the habitual illegal use of the railroads by vagrants. The number of "trespassers," from one-half to three-quarters of whom were vagrants, who are killed annually on American railroads exceeds the combined total of passengers and trainmen killed annually. Within four years 23,964 trespassers were killed and 25,236 injured, thus furnishing the enormous total of 49,200 casualties, with all the cost they involve.
Only by the co-operation of the railroads with one another and of towns and cities with the railroads can this waste of life and property and this increasing peril to the safety of the traveling public be prevented. Much more stringent laws will have to be both enacted and enforced to prevent the trespassing, which puts a premium on vagrancy.
One of the best effects of the strict prevention of free riding on railroads would be to keep boys from going "on the road" and becoming tramps. It is simply amazing to find little fellows of from 12 to 17 years of age, who have never been farther away from home than to some outlying freight yards, disappearing for several weeks and returning from Kansas City, or Cleveland, Omaha or New York, having all alone, or with a companion or two, beaten their way and lived by their wits while traveling half way across the continent. Once the excitement of the adventure is enjoyed, the hardship it costs does not seem so hard to them as the monotony of home or shop. The discipline of the United States navy has been the only regulation of this wandering habit which the writer has known to be successful. But the habit is more easily prevented than regulated. Massachusetts has taken the most advanced legislative action of all the states to this end. The Wabash and the New York Central railways suggest fine and imprisonment for trespassing upon railway tracks or rolling stock.
Better Lodgings for Homeless Men.
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.
Tramps Like Jail.
Mr. Towne also brought out the fact that tramps like to go to jail in winter. Instead of considering a jail sentence for that part of the year as a form of punishment, they welcome it as a chance to keep warm and loaf at the public expense. Forty-three per cent of the commitment of tramps occurs between November 1 and February 1. In short, the jail or the penitentiary becomes a sort of winter vacation resort for tramps. Many chiefs of police with whom Mr. Towne communicated said that tramps in winter would ask to be sent to jail, and that if this were not done they would sometimes commit offenses for the express purpose of being arrested and sent there.
It is declared to be significant that in the tramp's slang the word "dump" is applied to both lodging houses and jails.
With a cold winter the number of vagrants in penitentiaries and jails increases. In 1906 there were more than 10,000 tramps and vagrants in penitentiaries and jails, while in 1904, which was a very cold winter, there were more than 14,000. On the average, about one-third of the prisoners are tramps and vagrants. This means that the public is annually paying several hundred thousand dollars for the avowed purpose of punishing men for vagrancy, but in reality it amounts only to furnishing a free place of winter rest. Most of the chiefs of police believe that jails and penitentiaries do little good, if any, in their treatment of tramps. Another fact is that the sentences for this class of offenders are too short to accomplish any results. About 85 per cent of the sentences are from only one to sixty days.
Hobos Classified by Races.
In a vague way the veteran hobos, classified by the various nationalities, are fairly representative of the make-up of the whole American nation, in accordance with the number of hobos each nationality turns out. After taking into consideration the fact that certain parts of the United States are dominated by people of one nationality, and the bulk of tramps in that part of the country would necessarily come from that nationality, the following classification was given as doing justice to all:
The Irish and British elements lead in the number of hobos. They are closely followed, however, by the German element. The nations of Eastern Europe, Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians and others, are next in line. Then follow, in smaller numbers, Scandinavians, French, Italians and Jews. The French come mostly from Canada, the Scandinavians from the northwest and the Italians from the largest cities in the country, like New York and Chicago, and also from the southern states. Here and there one finds a stray Servian or Bulgarian who drifted into trampdom and has never been able or has never cared to drift out of it again.
Greeks are seldom found among tramps because they have not yet a "second generation" of Greeks to any extent in the United States. Chinese and Japanese likewise are not found in the hobo class. Of the negro race, many would not be averse to becoming professional tramps were it not for the risk which a negro tramp generally runs. A "stray negro," according to the hobos interviewed, is regarded with apprehension and is apt to be shot on mere suspicion.
New Foreigner Not a Hobo.
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.
Jew Recruit in Trampdom.
Polish tramps and tramps from other nations of Eastern and Southern Europe were declared to be more apt to turn to petty crimes when pressed to it by want. They are, however, according to statements of tramps, easily found out. They somehow are hasty in their actions, and just as they brandish their knives and pistols thoughtlessly they fall into the hands of the police simply and easily.
The Jewish tramp was a rarity until recently. However, the large number of Jews which poured into this country from oppressed countries in Europe since 1881 have also furnished a "first generation," many of whose members have found their way to the barrel houses and slums of all large cities. The Jewish tramp, however, was declared to be entirely of the class of the petty criminal. Out of the penitentiary for some petty crime committed, or having been a go-between for thieves and the person who buys the goods stolen, the Jewish youth for the time being takes to trampdom.
His commercial instinct, however, together with the wide system of charity which the Jews maintain in every city where they are found, soon enables him to get out of the hobo class. He becomes a trader of some sort and soon leaves the barrel house and his hobo companions behind him.
Talks of the Tramp—Why Dilapidated Gentleman Does Not Give Up Wandering and Settle Down—Likes the Care-Free Life—Mingles Among the People and Gets to Know Them Well—Changes in Community.
"Why don't I give it up and settle down in city or village and become a respectable member of the community?" echoed the dilapidated gentleman as he pocketed his usual fee. "I have been asked that question a thousand times, it seems to me, and my answer has always been the same. I tramp as a profession, and I stand at the head of it. I like it. There's a good living in it. I come in contact with human nature at every turn. I am respectable as it is. The cities and villages are overcrowded, and the man who butts in has little chance of success. I have less to worry about and sleep more soundly than any business man in America. You newspaper fellers think you know it all, but you'd take a drop to yourselves if you were on the tramp for a month. You'd see more human nature with the bark on in that time than you can find on the East Side in New York in five years.
"Say, now," continued the man, "can you name me one single newspaper in the state of New York that felt sure of Roosevelt's election as governor? No, you can't. I hit his majority within 2,000. Why? Because I was among the people and knew how they talked. Plenty of politicians and newspapers said he'd be elected as president when he ran, but no man or no newspaper came within a thousand miles of the popular majority. I don't say that I hit it, but I could have given pointers to a hundred editors.
Roaming Rowley—"I've just gotter break inter that nice, warm jail fer de winter. Here goes dat old shell I found on de battlefield."
(Bang! Flash! Boom!)
"Yes, Mr. Sheriff, it wus me did it! I'm a desprit dynamiter and jail bird."
Sheriff—"Git out of this township, quick! I won't have you blowin' up my nice, clean jail! Gwan, git!"
Get Out Among the People.
"Before the next national convention of either party meets I'll have tramped over three or four states, and I'll be ready to wager my life ag'in a nickel that I can name the victorious candidate. I'll wager that I can predict it far closer than any newspaper in the land. If you want to know what this country is thinking about, my boy, don't box yourself up in a sanctum and read a few exchanges. Get out and rub elbows with the people. It isn't the few big cities that settle the great political questions. It's the farmer and the villager, and they come pretty near being dead right every time. When I had tramped across seven counties of New York state I shouted for Hughes. A politician in Syracuse who heard me had me thrown out of a meeting and wanted the police to arrest me. I heard that he had a bet of $5,000 on another candidate and was predicting Hughes' defeat by 50,000. But enough of this. I' ll switch off and tell you something that has hurt me for the last three or four years.