ally force them to
become loafers for at least a third of the year. And it is from this
class that the tramps are largely recruited. I recall a certain winter
when it seemed to me that a large portion of the inhabitants of Chicago
belonged to this army of unfortunates. I was stationed at a police
station not far from where an ice harvest was ready for the cutters. The
ice company advertised for helpers, and the very night this call appeared
in the newspapers our station was packed with homeless men, who asked
shelter in order to be at hand for the morning's work. Every foot of
floor space was given over to these lodgers and scores were still
unaccommodated."

And again: "And it must be confessed that the man who is willing to do
honest labor for food and shelter is a rare specimen in this vast army of
shabby and tattered wanderers who seek the warmth of the city with the
coming of the first snow." Taking into consideration the crowd of honest
laborers that swamped Mr. O'Neil's station-house on the way to the
ice-cutting, it is patent, if all tramps were looking for honest labor
instead of a small minority, that the honest laborers would have a far
harder task finding something honest to do for food and shelter. If the
opinion of the honest laborers who swamped Mr. O'Neil's station-house
were asked, one could rest confident that each and every man would
express a preference for fewer honest laborers on the morrow when he
asked the ice foreman for a job.

And, finally, Mr. O'Neil says: "The humane and generous treatment which
this city has accorded the great army of homeless unfortunates has made
it the victim of wholesale imposition, and this well-intended policy of
kindness has resulted in making Chicago the winter Mecca of a vast and
undesirable floating population." That is to say, because of her
kindness, Chicago had more than her fair share of tramps; because she was
humane and generous she suffered whole-sale imposition. From this we
must conclude that it does not do to be _humane_ and _generous_ to our
fellow-men--when they are tramps. Mr. O'Neil is right, and that this is
no sophism it is the intention of this article, among other things, to
show.

In a general way we may draw the following inferences from the remarks of
Mr. O'Neil: (1) The tramp is stronger than organized society and cannot
be put down; (2) The tramp is "shabby," "tattered," "homeless,"
"unfortunate"; (3) There is a "vast" number of