ose them.

[Illustration: A "Scrub" and her Bed--the Plank.]

The city took lodgers on an old barge in the East River, that winter
(1896), and kept a register of them. We learned something from that. Of
nearly 10,000 lodgers, one-half were under thirty years old and in good
health--fat, in fact. The doctors reported them "well nourished." Among
100 whom I watched taking their compulsory bath, one night, only two
were skinny; the others were stout, well-fed men, abundantly able to do
a man's work. They all insisted that they were willing, too; but the
moment inquiries began with a view of setting such to work as really
wanted it, and sending the rest to the island as vagrants, their number
fell off most remarkably. From between 400 and 500 who had crowded the
barge and the pier sheds, the attendance fell on March 16, the day the
investigation began, to 330, on the second day to 294, and on the third
day to 171; by March 21 it had been cut down to 121. The problem of the
honestly homeless, who were without means to pay for a bed even in a
ten-cent lodging house, and who had a claim upon the city by virtue of
residence in it, had dwindled to surprisingly small proportions. Of 9386
lodgers, 3622 were shown to have been here less than sixty days, and 968
more not a year. The old mistake, that there is always a given amount of
absolutely homeless destitution in a city, and that it is to be measured
by the number of those who apply for free lodging, had been reduced to a
demonstration. The truth is that the opportunity furnished by the triple
alliance of stale beer, free lunch, and free lodging at the police
station was the open door to permanent and hopeless vagrancy. Men, a
good bishop said, will do what you pay them to do: if to work, they will
work; if you make it pay them to beg, they will beg; if to maim helpless
children makes begging pay better, they will do that too. See what it is
to encourage laziness in man whose salvation is work.

[Illustration: What a Search of the Lodgers brought forth.]

A city lodging house was established, with decent beds, baths, and
breakfast, and a system of investigation of the lodger's claim that is
yet to be developed to useful proportions. The link that is missing is a
farm school, for the training of young vagrants to habits of industry
and steady work, as the alternative of the workhouse. Efforts to forge
this link have failed so far, but in the good time that is coming, when
we