above, and sometimes a very great bit above. A
confessed failure, he yet refuses to accept the punishment, and swerves
aside from the slum to vagabondage. The average beast in the social pit
is either too much of a beast, or too much of a slave to the bourgeois
ethics and ideals of his masters, to manifest this flicker of rebellion.
But the social pit, out of its discouragement and viciousness, breeds
criminals, men who prefer being beasts of prey to being beasts of work.
And the mediocre criminal, in turn, the unfit and inefficient criminal,
is discouraged by the strong arm of the law and goes over to trampdom.

These men, the discouraged worker and the discouraged criminal,
voluntarily withdraw themselves from the struggle for work. Industry
does not need them. There are no factories shut down through lack of
labor, no projected railroads unbuilt for want of pick-and-shovel men.
Women are still glad to toil for a dollar a week, and men and boys to
clamor and fight for work at the factory gates. No one misses these
discouraged men, and in going away they have made it somewhat easier for
those that remain.

* * * * *

So the case stands thus: There being more men than there is work for men
to do, a surplus labor army inevitably results. The surplus labor army
is an economic necessity; without it, present society would fall to
pieces. Into the surplus labor army are herded the mediocre, the
inefficient, the unfit, and those incapable of satisfying the industrial
needs of the system. The struggle for work between the members of the
surplus labor army is sordid and savage, and at the bottom of the social
pit the struggle is vicious and beastly. This struggle tends to
discouragement, and the victims of this discouragement are the criminal
and the tramp. The tramp is not an economic necessity such as the
surplus labor army, but he is the by-product of an economic necessity.

The "road" is one of the safety-valves through which the waste of the
social organism is given off. And _being given off_ constitutes the
negative function of the tramp. Society, as at present organized, makes
much waste of human life. This waste must be eliminated. Chloroform or
electrocution would be a simple, merciful solution of this problem of
elimination; but the ruling ethics, while permitting the human waste,
will not permit a humane elimination of that waste. This paradox
demonstrates the irrecon