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."