The 600 boys and 170 girls are represented on the chart by cloth-headed tacks of different colors: red for bad boys, blue for bad girls, and white for children who are only truants or neglected. Each tack bears a bit of cardboard with a number which refers one to a filing cabinet where may be found the entire record of the boy or girl. Little groups of dots on the chart show where the gangs are, and indicate that bad boys are more gregarious than bad girls, who usually go alone or in couples. The chart also shows more plainly than any magazine article the evil results of congestion. The probation officers are not using this chart as an interesting sort of game, but as a valuable aid in their work for good citizenship.
London’s Beggar Army.—Walter Weyl, a well-known writer on social and economic subjects, has the following to say in the “National Post” on London’s army of the unemployed. It is of special significance to Americans who are facing the impending problems of vagrancy and mendicancy in urban centers.
“As I started to call a cab,” writes Walter Weyl, “suddenly there arose out of the darkness, as though evoked by some Aladdins lamp, four tattered, pale-faced men of the underworld. The four sprang forward to render me this slight service. One, quicker than his fellows, tore open the cab door and received his penny. Then the men vanished, slinking into the gray mist.
“Whence come these men? What manner of city was this that wasted able-bodied men on so paltry a task?
“Later that evening, when in the crossing currents of the streets, my cab came to a halt, I caught another fleeting glance at London misery. A naked, dirt-caked arm, thrust from a sleeveless coat, touched my shoulder; a haggard face peered into the cab window, and a voice harsh with anxiety asked, ‘Can I ’ave the luggage, sir?’ As the cab wound through the mazes of the London traffic, I saw this tattered man doggedly running behind us. Not once did he lose sight of the cab. At the hotel he was waiting, breathless.
“‘It’s mine, sir,’ he panted. ‘You promised me the luggage, sir.’
“For the chance of earning a shilling at work which did not need him, this wretched man had followed me through tortuous miles of London streets. What a city it was!
“I did not wish to see deeper into this abyss,” writes Mr. Weyl. “I had not come to England to view bottomless misery. But what is everywhere cannot be hid. On the following days I saw in street after street workless, homeless miserable men with broken shoes and dropping rags of clothes. I saw abject women, with trailing, bedraggled skirts, and with a flat sterile vacancy of expression, more tragic than despair. There were drunken men, too, and sodden women, and files of men—or of what had once been men—waiting outside bakers’ and butchers’ shops for crusts and refuse. The halt, the blind, the unemployed, the shifty beggars, and the wretches too timid to beg, passed in an unending procession. Long before sunset the lines had been formed for admission to the casual wards of the almshouses.
“‘It’s deplorable,’ commented my English friend (he was a doctor with a fashionable practice and aristocratic pro-possessions), ‘still every country has its poverty. Even in the States——’