tramps; (4) Very few
tramps are willing to do honest work; (5) Those tramps who are willing to
do honest work have to hunt very hard to find it; (6) The tramp is
undesirable.

To this last let the contention be appended that the tramp is only
_personally_ undesirable; that he is _negatively_ desirable; that the
function he performs in society is a negative function; and that he is
the by-product of economic necessity.

It is very easy to demonstrate that there are more men than there is work
for men to do. For instance, what would happen tomorrow if one hundred
thousand tramps should become suddenly inspired with an overmastering
desire for work? It is a fair question. "Go to work" is preached to the
tramp every day of his life. The judge on the bench, the pedestrian in
the street, the housewife at the kitchen door, all unite in advising him
to go to work. So what would happen tomorrow if one hundred thousand
tramps acted upon this advice and strenuously and indomitably sought
work? Why, by the end of the week one hundred thousand workers, their
places taken by the tramps, would receive their time and be "hitting the
road" for a job.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox unwittingly and uncomfortably demonstrated the
disparity between men and work. {1} She made a casual reference, in a
newspaper column she conducts, to the difficulty two business men found
in obtaining good employees. The first morning mail brought her
seventy-five applications for the position, and at the end of two weeks
over two hundred people had applied.

Still more strikingly was the same proposition recently demonstrated in
San Francisco. A sympathetic strike called out a whole federation of
trades' unions. Thousands of men, in many branches of trade, quit
work,--draymen, sand teamsters, porters and packers, longshoremen,
stevedores, warehousemen, stationary engineers, sailors, marine firemen,
stewards, sea-cooks, and so forth,--an interminable list. It was a
strike of large proportions. Every Pacific coast shipping city was
involved, and the entire coasting service, from San Diego to Puget Sound,
was virtually tied up. The time was considered auspicious. The
Philippines and Alaska had drained the Pacific coast of surplus labor.
It was summer-time, when the agricultural demand for laborers was at its
height, and when the cities were bare of their floating populations. And
yet there remained a body of surplus labor sufficient to take the places