Year: 1875







The Scientific American furnishes the fol
lowing sensible plan for Kidding ourselves of
these pests:


When Count Rumford became the friend
of the King and virtual ruler of Bavaria,
he found the country swarming with beg
gars. In the large towns, beggary was an
organized imposture, insolent, clamorous,
persistent. The rural districts were over
run with tramps of all ages and every
nationality, who levied contributions, rob
bed, and tyrannized everywhere; and not
only their impudence and clamorous i'm
portunity were boundless, to use the Counts
own words, but 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 unavaling
The people were disheartened. Industry
was well nigh paralyzed by the parasitic
multitude, and the honest peasantry had
become 50 corrupted by bad example as to
leave their work in the fields to beg of
travellers on the highway. Beggary had be-
come SO common and customary that it no
longer seemed shameful or infamous.


Yet the whole system fell in a day when
attacked by the Counts rcsolute will and
sterling sense. His remedy was work,
fairly rewarded, so presented as to make
industry as attractive as possible, but
vigorously insisted on. His plans for hous-
ing, feeding and employing the beggar class
were quietly perfected; then, on the first
day Of January, 1890, every beggar was
arrested and set to work.


The law was: No idleness, no beggary
no dirt or debauchery; but work for all
good food, kind treatment, and instruction
in the way of honest living. In one day
the plague of beggary was stopped. AND
it was not long before the majority learned
to prefer the comfort, decency and rcspec


liability of honest industry to their former
squalor, idleness, debauchery and crime
And the experiment paid financially
. Count Rumfords report of the expert
t ment, written after it had been five year
2 in operation, shows that it had not onl,
banished beggary and effected and entir
l changed in the manners, habits and ap
> pearance of the class which had been 81


abandoned and degraded, but that it ha'
= made them self-supporting. The savin
y effected in cutting off great source 0
S crime was beyond estimation.


S In every part of the Eastern and Middl
i States, especially within walking distanc


of our chief cities, an order of things
u growing up the precise counterpart of tina
" which the Count found in Bavaria. TIL
e tramp is everywhcre-male, female, linn
d lazy, insolent. Every country road swarm
y with them, and the country people begi
u to look upon them as an inevitable intli
d ton, less dangerous when fed and sheltcre
y than when hungry and at large. Refus
+. them food and your hen roost pays I'll
n penalty. Deny them a bed in the barr
d and they set it on fire. They travel
20 gangs and disperse to forage, levying COZ
N tributions right and left. Their vagrai
ot life suits them; and miserable as tho
a seem to be, no proffer of honest wages ft


honest work will induce them to leave Il
lr road. Every season their number increase
IS. and competition only increases their aud
It city. Unless the evil is differently dea
xe with, it will soon become as intolerable
in it was in Bavaria.


No method of treatment involving lar
er preliminary outlay for workshops, conce
N, of action, or central authority can
ch looked for here; we need not one but t,
.er apply its own remedies nevertheless
Id would not be hard to devise plan by viii
SIX the whole system of tramping could be
n. quickly broken up as it was in Bavaria, al


that without taking the tramps from
in road they love so dearly.


Any town can inaugurate the plan
be enacting and enforcing a regulation to Il
in effect Fix the PENALTY for begging-tl
APP is, professional begging-at ten days lal
'ou on the highways for each offense there


no danger Of falling demand for that $
eet, of labor for the next fifty years. Give
g q every citizen the power to make arrests


cases of vagrancy; and for every ten ola
lire labor by the party so arrested, credit


person making the arrest with five d
ray toward the working out of his road
to For his labor, giving the tramp decent bo


and lodging, and from ten to fifty cent
The days as wages, according to his efficier
will Let such law be vigorously executed, {


in little while we should have be-


roads and fewer tramps. The hor
you seekers of work would suffer less un


such a system than they do now, w


they are apt to be confounded with
her fessional beggars, who are always in sea
1t as of job--somewhere else. If seriousl