“A Brooklyn lawyer, suspended from practice, who disappeared seven years ago and was thought to have committed suicide, reappears as the leader of the minority in the Michigan Senate. The Chief of Police at Danville, Va., is recognized after many years as an escaped convict under sentence in Georgia.
“During the recent political campaign a candidate for governor in a western state was identified as one who in youth had participated in a crime of violence on the Texas border. The governor-elect of a southern state proves in infancy to have been a foundling.
“It is pleasing to note that in every one of these cases identity was admitted and that the honorable record of after-life was generally accepted as atoning for early misdeeds or obscure origin. Exposure, therefore, while painful in some instances, has not operated to discourage those who in many other places are seeking honestly and industriously to overcome the disadvantages of a bad start.
“Experiences such as these give heart to optimists, furnish prison-reformers with ever-increasing zeal and prove the genuineness of a democracy which does not dwell unduly upon the past of anybody or anything.”
Tramps, Stop Tramping!—The following article is making the rounds of the local newspapers in Pennsylvania, evidently “accelerated” by the tramp nuisance:
“The damage done by tramps to the railroad property every year is estimated at $25,000,000. The damage to private property which the tramps reach by railroad is probably far greater. If it were not for ‘ride stealing’—this is the assertion of men who have spent years studying the vagrancy problem—the ‘hobo’ could be practically put out of business. Free transportation is an absolute necessity of the profession.
“The ‘hobo’ may seem highly amusing to the readers of comic papers; and he is a valuable source of income to joke-smiths and the artists who draw fantastic pictures of the ‘Weary Willie’ begging a piece of pie. But he is no joke to railroad men. For he is continually breaking into cars, assaulting employes, or tampering with equipment in a way to endanger the lives of passengers.
“The Lehigh Valley has been one of the most active among railroads attempting to end the abuse, but the leniency of local magistrates has operated in the tramps’ favor. To put a tramp in jail is expensive for a small community; the authorities usually content themselves by telling the offenders to ‘move on.’ Thus he is merely dumped upon some other community. The practice works as an endless chain—each town passing on its tramps and in turn receiving the tramps that have been passed on by other towns.
“Some charity organizations have interested themselves in the problem, and seek to co-operate with the railroads in bringing trespassers to justice. Compulsory labor of some kind it is thought would be the most powerful deterrent, but that remedy meets the opposition of the labor unions; they say it would be putting ‘convict labor’ into competition with honest workingmen. A helpful move would be for the state to relieve local governments from the expense of punishing offenders, as the cost of keeping a tramp supplies the most powerful motive for the magistrate to let him go.”