Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/455

Rh It should be understood that in speaking of criminals the modern classification of criminals is recognized, and only the instinctive or congenital criminals are here considered. In this presentation, however, we must include the vast army of tramps who move with the snow-line back and forth across the country; a horde continually increasing because, as with the criminal, the vagabond strain is continually being bred. This startling truth of inheritance must be emphasized again and again, till the public mind—slow to understand—shall finally realize the fact and take the same stern measures for suppression that it would in the case of polluted water-supply and contagious disease. When these matters were fully understood health boards came into existence, and with such arbitrary powers are they now endowed that a family can be imprisoned in its own house; the house may be destroyed; the dead, if necessary, denied the ordinary funeral observances. The public fully acquiesce in these heroic measures, for the death-rate figures, year after year, become too significant to be neglected.

Vagabonds, like criminals, spring largely from a degenerating stock. The persistence of the vagabond strain, the hopelessness of reform among those blasted with the taint, is strikingly portrayed by the lamented Rev. Oscar C. McCulloch, in an address read before the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (1888), entitled The Tribe of Ishmael, a Study in Social Degradation. Traces of this tribe have been found as far back as 1790, but from 1840 the record is quite made out for some twigs of this baleful stock. Mr. McCulloch says: "The individuals already traced are over five thousand, interwoven by descent and marriage. They underrun society like devil-grass. Pick up one, and the whole five thousand would be drawn up. Over seven thousand pages of history are now on file in the Charity Organization Society "(Indianapolis), and he asks: "Do any of these get out of the festering mass? Of this whole number, I know of but one who has escaped, and is to-day an honorable man. I have tried again and again to lift them, but they sink back. They are a decaying stock; they can not longer live self-dependent. The children reappear with the old basket. The girl begins the life of prostitution, and is soon seen with her own illegitimate child."

The tramp horde is a nidus from which apparently a vast number of criminals spring. The appalling character of the fruits of this nidus may be faintly realized by reference to Dr. Seaman's paper on the Social Waste of a Great City (Science, vol. viii, p. 283). Referring to New York, he says: "It seizes upon and subsidizes the fairest string of islands that grace a metropolis the world over. Where there might have been, under a shrewder, better providence, parks, groves, museums,