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Show OUR ARMY OF TRAMPS. The Xew York Tribune and one of our own daily papers referred last week to the great army of tramps which is becoming a serious menace to ihe peace and safety of many sections of the Uni'td States. Civilized communities have had. from the. beginning, to deal with this human pest. In the life of Count Runford. who was the friend of the king and virtual ruler of Bavaria, we are told in a most interesting chapter that, in his time, the country was swarming with beggars and tramps, and ot the methods he employed to suppress them. In the large towns beggary was an organized imposture, insolent, clamorous, persistent. The rural districts were overrun with tramps of all ages and every nationality, who levied contributions, contribu-tions, robbed, and tyrannized everywhere; and not only their impudence and clamorous importunity were boundless, but to use the count's own words, they had recourse to the most diabolical arts and the most horrible crimes in the prosecution of their infamous trade. All the regular machinery for the repression of vagrancy was unavailing. The people peo-ple were disheartened. Industry was well nigh paralyzed par-alyzed by the parasitic multitude, and the honest peasantry had become so corrupted by bad example that they would leave their work in the fields to beg of travelers on the highway. Beggary had become r rnmmon anrl pustnmnrv that it no lnncer seemed shameful or infamous. Yet the whole system fell in a day when' attacked at-tacked by the count's resolute will and sterling sense. His remedy was work, fairly rewarded. s presented as to make industry as attractive as possible, pos-sible, but rigorously insisted on. His plan for housing, feeding, and employing the beggar class were quietly perfected; then, on the first day of January, 1790, every beggar was arrested and set to ,work. The law was: no idleness, no begging, no dirt-or dirt-or debauchery; but work for all, goed food, kind treatment, and instructions in the ways of honest living. In one day the plague of beggary wa? stopped. And it was not long before the majority learned to prefer the comfort, decency and re spectability of honest industry to their former squalor, idleness, debauchery and crime. And the experiment paid financially. Count Rumford's report of the experiment, written after it had been five years in operation, shows that it had not only banished beggary and effected an entire change in the manners, habits, and appearance of the class which had been so abandoned and degraded, but that it had made then? self-supporting. The saving effected in cutting off a great source of crime was beyond estimate. In every part of the western and intermountair states, especially in railroad towns and within walking distance of our chief cities, an order of things is growing up the precise counterpart of that which the count found in Bavaria. The tramp is everywhere, and the country people begin to look upon him as an inevitable infliction, less dangerous danger-ous when fed and sheltered than when hungry and at large. Refuse them food and your hen roost payr the penalty. Deny them a bed in the barn, and they set it on fire. They travel in gangs and disperse to forage, levying contributions right and left. Their vagrant life suits them; and miserable as they seem to be, no proffer of honest wages for honest work will induce them to leave the road. Every season their number increases, and comnctition nnlv in creases their audacity. Unless the evil is boldly dealt with, .it will soon become as intolerable a3 it w:as in Bavaria. Xo method of treatment involving large preliminary prelim-inary outlay for workshops, concert of action, or central authority can be looked for here; we need not one, but ten thousand Rumfords. Every town must apply its own remedies; nevertheless, it would not be hard to devise a plan by which the whole system of tramping -could be as quickly broken up as it was in Bavaria, and that without taking the tramps from the roads they love so dearly. Any town can inaugurate the plau by enacting and enforcing a regulation to this effect: Fix the penalty for begging that is. professional begging at ten days' labor on the highways for each offense; of-fense; there is no danger of a failing demand for that sort of labor for the next fifty years. Give every citizen the power to make arrests for vagrancy; va-grancy; and, for every ten days' labor by the party so arrested, credit the person making the arrest with five days toward the working out his road-tax. road-tax. For his labor, give the tramp decent board and lodging, and from 10 to 50 cents a day as wages, according to his efficiency. Let such a law be rig-I rig-I orously executed and in a little while we will have better roads and ewer tramps. The honest seekers for work would suffer less under such a System than they do now, when they are apt to be confounded with professional beggars, who are always in search of a job somewhere else. If seriously in need of work and money, the temporary tramp would simply sim-ply apply to the road master, who would never be without employment to give and fifty cents a day to pay for it.. The work hunter would not be long in acquiring enough to pay his way further or to support himself until he found work in the neigh- i borhood. Farmers and . r I r- j!( 1 would soon learn to resort to tx. ,..,. '' I-';, their men, the volunteers b-ii:o- ; ,rt" P"4 selves at any time; those mi. I, - , , ''n " : ' wlit-ii .i ten days were up. Ihe prot'i ';r quickly learn to prefer free Li ,., ... , , '' V enforced work on the rojnU ,-ir , . meantime an enormous "wat- ).. ' 1,1 utilized, and the highwavs imp-. . ,; .. "J' ' s. to the residents. It is sate to p , ,; . t ''' m unity adopting such a plan v , ,: . , ' t ' " 11 h;l7f. ; i tcr roads and fewer beggar j .. ' !?'- I |
