barbers, tinkers,
teamsters, tailors, waiters, laborers, longshoremen, painters,
paper-hangers, and scissors-grinders. One man put "banker" opposite
his name. This led to an extra inquiry.

"Of course," he said, "I am for the time being down and out; but
banking is my business."

Their trades were of the past--their vitality had oozed out, their
grip on life was relaxed; if it ever tightened again, the first result
of it would be another grade of surroundings.

In order to find out how they got a living, I followed some of these
men through the maelstrom of city life. I found some distributing
circulars. Others sold pencils, matches, laces. They lounged around
saloons, sticking their dirty fists into the free-lunch dishes. They
played lame, sick, halt, blind; they panhandled on the streets and
alleys--especially the alleys, where they fared best. A dozen or more
attended the ferries, waiting for a chance to carry baggage. They were
unfit for hard work--they would not die.

Twelve cents a day kept most of them. When they didn't manage seven
cents for a bunk, they "carried the banner"--walked the streets or
stood in a "dead-house" saloon, where there are no seats and where a
man must stand. Many of them, when worsted completely, would "hit the
bread-line," after midnight, not so much for the bread as for a place
to stand where they would be immune from the policeman's club.

Despite some plain lessons to the contrary, I believed most of them
to be victims of laziness; but in a single year twelve of them dropped
on the floor dead: to these I gave the benefit of the doubt.

"_The Hardest Work Is No Work at All_"

One Sunday night I told a hundred men in the Bismarck that the reason
they had no work was, that they were loafers and didn't want work.
This was in accordance with my theory--the prevailing theory--that
poverty is the child of sin, that lack of work is the fruit of
shiftlessness. I offered to change clothes with any man in the house,
and to go out in the world and show him how to get a job. The
challenge was accepted instantly--by an Irishman.

I wisely changed the article of agreement regarding clothes; I got up
my own outfit! Next morning, at half-past five, I met Tim, the man who
had accepted the challenge, and we proceeded to the labor-market.

From the "want" columns of the morning papers we selected a few bits
of labor bait. We ran them down, failed to find anything, and turned
to the shops and