, the ditch-diggers, the men of pick and shovel,
the helpers, lumpers, roustabouts. If trade is slack on a seacoast of
two thousand miles, or the harvests are light in a great interior valley,
myriads of these laborers lie idle, or make life miserable for their
fellows in kindred unskilled employments.

A constant filtration goes on in the working world, and good material is
continually drawn from the surplus labor army. Strikes and industrial
dislocations shake up the workers, bring good men to the surface and sink
men as good or not so good. The hope of the skilled striker is in that
the scabs are less skilled, or less capable of becoming skilled; yet each
strike attests to the efficiency that lurks beneath. After the Pullman
strike, a few thousand railroad men were chagrined to find the work they
had flung down taken up by men as good as themselves.

But one thing must be considered here. Under the present system, if the
weakest and least fit were as strong and fit as the best, and the best
were correspondingly stronger and fitter, the same condition would
obtain. There would be the same army of employed labor, the same army of
surplus labor. The whole thing is relative. There is no absolute
standard of efficiency.

* * * * *

Comes now the tramp. And all conclusions may be anticipated by saying at
once that he is a tramp because some one has to be a tramp. If he left
the "road" and became a _very_ efficient common laborer, some _ordinarily
efficient_ common laborer would have to take to the "road." The nooks
and crannies are crowded by the surplus laborers; and when the first snow
flies, and the tramps are driven into the cities, things become
overcrowded and stringent police regulations are necessary.

The tramp is one of two kinds of men: he is either a discouraged worker
or a discouraged criminal. Now a discouraged criminal, on investigation,
proves to be a discouraged worker, or the descendant of discouraged
workers; so that, in the last analysis, the tramp is a discouraged
worker. Since there is not work for all, discouragement for some is
unavoidable. How, then, does this process of discouragement operate?

The lower the employment in the industrial scale, the harder the
conditions. The finer, the more delicate, the more skilled the trade,
the higher is it lifted above the struggle. There is less pressure, less
sordidness, less savagery. There are fewer gla