grossest need
of nature, so far as subsistence is concerned, and rediscover the
infinite pleasures of life in the open air.

If the roadside, the sky, the distant town, the soft buffeting of the
winds of heaven, are a joy to the aesthetic part of man, the freedom
from all responsibility and accountability is Nirvana to his moral
nature. A man who has once tasted these two joys together, the joy of
being in the open air and the joy of being disreputable and unashamed,
has touched an experience which the most close-knit and determined
nature might well dread. Life has no terrors for such a man. Society has
no hold on him. The trifling inconveniences of the mode of life are as
nothing compared with its satisfactions. The worm that never dies is
dead in him. The great mystery of consciousness and of effort is quietly
dissolved into the vacant happiness of sensation,--not base sensation,
but the sensation of the dawn and the sunset, of the mart and the
theatre, and the stars, the panorama of the universe.

To the moral man, to the philosopher or the business man, to any one who
is a cog in the wheel of some republic, all these things exist for the
sake of something else. He must explain or make use of them, or define
his relation to them. He spends the whole agony of his existence in an
endeavor to docket them and deal with them. Hampered as he is by all
that has been said and done before, he yet feels himself driven on to
summarize, and wreak himself upon the impossible task of grasping this
cosmos with his mind, of holding it in his hand, of subordinating it to
his purpose.

The tramp is freed from all this. By an act as simple as death, he has
put off effort and lives in peace.

It is no wonder that every country in Europe shows myriads of these men,
as it shows myriads of suicides annually. It is no wonder, though the
sociologists have been late in noting it, that specimens of the type are
strikingly identical in feature in every country of the globe.

The habits, the physique, the tone of mind, even the sign-language and
some of the catch-words, of tramps are the same everywhere. The men are
not natally outcasts. They have always tried civilized life. Their early
training, at least their early attitude of mind towards life, has
generally been respectable. That they should be criminally inclined
goes without saying, because their minds have been freed from the
sanctions which enforce law. But their general innocenc