"STURDY BEGGARS" IN THE UNITED STATES. A MERICAN institutions have many
merits—the greatest of all, perhaps, being that they are almost worshipped by the people submitted to their influence—but they have not the special merits which their admirers a quarter of a century ago used to claim for them. They have not prevented war, or war on the largest scale ; they have not prevented taxation, and taxation of a singularly severe kind ; and they have not prevented the growth of a disagreeable or even dangerous amount of pauperism. The appearance of all these evils was to be expected, no political institution altering the nature of man much, but we confess to a certain surprise at the form which the last one has apparently assumed. We should have anticipated that in the great cities of the Union suffering from want of means—pauperism, as we call it here—might appear in very aggravated forms. There will always in every closely- packed community be a proportion of persons who, from mis- fortune, natural incompetence, or vice, fail to earn their bread ; and in cities without a Poor Law, and inhabited by a people inordinately proud, one would have anticipated cases of ex- cessive distress, ending in actual starvation, The occurrence of many such cases was reported, we remember, in the Tribune about a quarter of a century ago, in a series of letters written by a clergyman with a singular mastery of pathos, and was treated by Mr. Greeley as a discovery which cast discredit rather upon society than upon the sufferers. Since then, pauperism of the quieter kind has become an institution in most, if not all of the great cities of the Union. We should not have expected, however, that pauperism would become a serious evil in the villages of New England and New York, and that its form should be the one so well known in this country during the Tudor period,—the apparition of the sturdy beggar who can scarcely be distinguished by quiet people from &brigand. It is cer- tain, however, that this is the case. The American papers have been full ever since the war of complaints of "tramps," bold beggars who, in small groups or large parties, appear in the villages of the sea-board States, demand food and money, and after committing outrages, sometimes trifling, but occasionally serious, march on to the next town, to recommence their re- quisitions. Two years ago we noticed case after case in which villages had been plundered, and others in which the inhabitants had risen, formed vigilance committees, and given the tramps the option of moving on, or of being shot down there and then if they resisted arrest. Since then the evil has not been abolished, and though it has not been greatly extended—at least, we have found no evidence of the fact—it has excited even more bitterness among the majority of the community. This is due apparently to the increased lawlessness of the tramps, which may arise either from impunity or from a consciousness of popular hatred ; and from the occurrence of some outrages upon women, which the New Englanders have a double reason for resenting. Not only are they as peremptory as all other peoples in putting down offences of the kind, but they are more inconvenienced than any other race by dread of their occurrence. Their whole social system goes to pieces if their women cannot move about safely, cannot stray to isolated farmhouses at pleasure, cannot ride or walk from village to village without the fear of insult or the necessity of escort.
The feeling, therefore, against the tramps has grown more and more bitter in the rural districts, until a tramp begins to be regarded in the villages of Massachusetts and Western New York—the cities do not fear him—as a burglar is else- where, and measures are proposed for his suppression,—not, indeed, quite BO severe as those of Queen Elizabeth, but still as severe as those which we employ against ordinary crime, Professor F. Wayland, who has been delivering a lecture at Yale in favour of a new law for the regulation of tramping, certainly does not mince matters in his description of the class :— "And as we utter the word Tramp, there arises straightway before us the spectacle of a lazy, shiftless, sauntering or swaggering, ill-con- ditioned, irreclaimable, incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage. Ho fears not God, neither regards man, Indeed, he seems to have wholly lost all the better instincts and attributes of manhood. He will outrage an unprotected female, or rob a defenceless child, or burn an isolated barn, or girdle fruit trees, or wreck a railway train, or set fire to a railway bridge, or murder a cripple, or pilfer an umbrella, with equal indifference, if reasonably sure of equal impunity. Having no moral sense, he knows no gradation; in crime. He dreads detection and punishment, and he dreads nothing oleo. Whether a refusal to comply with his demands will be followed by murder or a muttered curse depends solely on his chance of a safe retreat. Practically, he has come to consider himself at war with society and all social institu- tions. He acknowledges no allegiance, he asks no protection, ho feels no gratitude. He has only one aim—to be supported in idleness. Ho has only one fear—to be deprived of his liberty. Therefore, the offences which he commits are almost invariably those which require no labour in preparation and call for no skill in execution. They are inspired by no motive except a momentary impulse of gain, or lust, or revenge. The sight of a watch .dog or the suspicion of a revolver will at any time turn him from his cowardly purpose and send him on a safer errand of villainy. The strength and sacredness of family ties, the love of mother, or wife, or child, have often restrained and sometimes reclaimed a hardened criminal, to whom the idea of home was still a present reality. But this possible refuge of respectability is wanting to the tramp. He has no home, no family ties. He has out himself off from all influences which can minister to his improvement or elevation. His only associates are men and women of his own stamp. His only occu- pation is a lazy, loitering pursuit—if pursuit is not too strong a word— of food and lodging by bogging or stealing. His only amusement is an occasional debauch. Insolent and aggressive when he dares, fawning and obsequious when he thinks it more prudent to conciliate, but false, treacherous, ungrateful and malignant always, he wanders aimlessly from city to city, from town to town, from hamlet to hamlet, wherever he goes, a positive nuisance and a possible criminal. If in the cities he is sometimes and somewhat restrained by wholesome awe of a vigilant and adequate police, in the country he has become the daily and nightly dread of all well-disposed persons. Indeed his frequent presence in our village communities has again and again transformed their quiet, peaceful life into a reign of terror. Murder, outrage worse than murder, arson, highway robbery, felonies of all kinds and potty offences without number, have marked the passage of this unclean boast. The innocent little maiden on her way to school, the farmer's wife busied about her household cares, the aged couple living remote from the habi- tations of their fellow-men, are alike the victims of his homicidal or licentious violence. Neither pity for helpless and trusting childhood nor respect for gray hairs stays for one moment his brutal hands."
The evil must have assumed great proportions in the States before a quiet Yale Professor, who in the remainder of his lecture is moderate enough, could employ language like this, with a belief that it would increase the readiness of his hearers to receive his argument. It would have met the decided approval of Lord Burleigh, but would be considered exaggerated in modern England. It is, however, not con- sidered exaggerated in Massachusetts, where the State detec- tive force, after recent investigations, have come to the con-
clusion that "the great body of tramps are professional thieves ; moreover, these officials have reason to believe that such vagrants arc formed into organised gangs, under the direction of skilful leaders, with general head-quarters in the western part of the State, where their plunder is deposited and divided ;" and where it is believed that most of the outrages committed during the late strike, and especially the many wanton mur- ders noticed in Pittsburgh, were due to the tramps, with whom the American Birmingham has become a sort of head-quarters, and where there exists always a latent notion—strongly ex- pressed during the long search after Charlie Ross—that if crime ever reared its head in the States, it would, from the thin population of the country, the frequent wildernesses, and the great distances, take the form of brigandage. The mass of electors, too, are poor, though independent, and extremely hard-working, and men in that position resent the exactions and the prosperity of "sturdy beggars" more even than the rich. A Bill has accordingly been introduced into the Legisla- ture of New York by the Charitable Aid Societies, and is strongly supported by Professor Wayland, under which all Justices of the Peace shall be bound to commit all vagrants for a term not less than three months, or exceeding six months, to a workhouse prison, instead of the county jail, where they are left in idleness ; and there set them to good hard work, usually, we imagine, from some clauses in the Act, work in the field. They are to be paid wages, and to be taught, but they are to be compelled to work hard and to pay the cost of their own keep ; and if after release they do not use their knowledge, the duration of their sentences is to be doubled. The idea is that a proportion of the " vagrants " will in this manner be accustomed to severe work for wages, will be drilled, as it were, into the ordinary discipline of life ; and that another section, finding this mode of imprisonment in- tolerably irksome, will quit the State in which it is enforced for ever. Both ideas are probably accurate, more especially if the work taught is labour on the land, for which in the the United States there is always room, and if the Act passes the nuisance will probably be speedily abated, The interest of the proposal for Englishmen does not consist, however, in its success, so much as in the fact that so severe a law should be necessary in a State where labour on the land is in suck demand, and in the rural townships, where men are not thrown into distress, as they are in cities, by the sudden failure of the means of obtaining work, in places where population is not too thick, and where we have been accustomed to think that com- petence is within reach of every man's hand. Such a revolas tion seems to indicate that the legislators of the future may have to contend with tendencies as difficult to defeat as econo- mic forces, which prescribe that whenever a community becomes at once large and prosperous, there should be developed in it a class which, though not absolutely criminal, will not submit to the preliminary requirement of civilisation, steady industry; and which, under certain circumstances, will require as steady and severe restraint as the criminal class itself. There is work on the land to be had for the asking, but there is also a propor- tion of men who will not do it, except under the strong com- pulsion of hunger. Whether they will do it when the habit has once been impressed upon them by external force remains to be seen. The American idea apparently is that they will, but that is not the result of experience in this country, where, after the most determined attempts to repress " tramping " by capital sentences, by hard labour, and by enforced production, we have fallen back, we fear, finally upon the employment of rural police to mitigate the evil. Tramping in its dangerous form scarcely survives a good rural police, but the Americans are unwilling to establish one, and are right before they do so to try their very curious experiment of sending adult but idle men and women to severely-governed industrial schools.
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