Public ledger. [volume] (Memphis, Tenn.) 1865-1893, 1877-11-14
AMERICAN TRAMPS.
An English View of Our Great So.
ctAl Question.

NA~A AuCutAOms
London spsctatOr.l
A bill has been introduced into
the legislature of New York by the
charitable aid societies under which
all justices of the peace shall be
bound to commit all vagrants for a
term not less than three months, or
exceeding six months, to a work
house prison, instead of a county
jail, where they are left in idleness;
and there set them to good hard
work, usually, we imagine from
some clauses in the act, work in
the field. They are to be paid
wages and to be taught, but they
are to be compelled to work hard
and to pay the cost Of their own
keep; and if after release they do
not use their knowledge, the dura-
ton Of their sentences is to be
doubled.
The idea is that a proportion of
the ''vagrants" will in this manner
be accustomed to severe work for
wages, will be drilled, as it were,
into the ordinary discipline of life;
aud that another section, finding
this mode of imprisonment intol-
erably irksome, will quit the State
in which it is enforced forever.
Both ideas are probably accurate,
more especially if the work taught
is labor on the land, for which in
the United States there is always
room, and if the act passes the
nuisance win probably be speedily
abated.
The interest of the proposal for
Englishmen does not consist, how
ever, in its success, so much as in
the fact that so severe a law should
be necessary in a State where labor
on the land is in such demand,
and in the rural townships, where
men are not thrown into distress,
as they are in cities, by the sudden
failure of the means of obtaining
work, in places where population is
not too thick, and where we have
been accustomed to think that COM
petence is within reach of every
mans hand. Such a revelation
seems to indicate that the legisla-
tors of the future may have to con-
tend with tendencies as difficult to
defeat as economic forces, which
prescribe that whenever a commu-
nifty becomes at once large and
prosperous there should be devel-
oped in it class which, though not
absolutely criminal, will not submit
to the preliminary requirement of
civilization, steady industry; and
which, under certain circumstances,
will require as steady and severe
restraint as the criminal class itself.
There is work on the land to be
had for the asking, but there is also
a proportion Of men who will not
do it, except under the strong COM
pulsion Of hunger. Whether they
will do it when the habit has been
once impressed upon them by exter-
nal force remains to be seen. The
American idea apparently is that
they will, but that is not the result
of experience in this country, where,
after the most determined attempts
to repress "tramping" by capital
sentences, by hard labor and by en-
forced production, we have fallen
back, we fear, finally upon the en-
ployment of rural police to mitigate
the evil. Tramping III its danger
Gus form scarcely survives a good
rural police, but the Americans are
unwilling to establish one, and are
right before they do so to try their
very curious experiment OF sending
adult but idle men and women to
severely governed industrial schools.