the most fertile source, of poverty is this bad housing. The bulk of it is due to the bad sanitary conditions in cities. The houses in bad sanitary condition are of course a menace to the neighborhood. Then, again, when we look to the housing problem, we think we have the key to the solution of many things. For instance, we are able on this basis to make a differentiation of the needy population. We can block them out, so to speak. We can say the artisan, the higher wage-earning class, can be provided for by model homes. As they can be made to pay, there would seem to be in the future of things no reasonable excuse why every workingman earning fair wage should not have a good home. Then the second element in this differentiation is the class who are slovenly and careless, and not of very strong moral stamina, persons who get drunk occasionally. These I think we can take care of on the line of Miss Octavia Hill's work.

Lastly, I think we reach the lowest of all elements which now find shelter in the slums of cities. That is, I think with the enforcement of sanitary law becoming stricter and stricter, it makes it to the detriment of the owner to maintain slum property, for the reason that he is continually nagged by the health authorities to keep it in repair; for the further reason that the only class of people who go to live there are nomadic in their characteristics, and irregular, and his rent varies, so that he cannot make much out of them.

With the enforcement of the sanitary law, and with this exappropriation as a weapon hanging over slum proprietors, the result will be that, instead of being a premium, as there now often is, for the maintenance of slum property, it will be positively to the detriment of the owner to have it; and that will result in liberating this great class of people from their present shelters. I think we should meet that by the provision of model lodging-houses, which either by private effort or municipal can be made to pay. I am not in favor of municipal control except merely as an example. One word in conclusion. I think we ought to tion, of course, as an ethical question at bottom. that the house is the body, that the family is its soul. We all know that corrupt usage of the flesh brings blight upon the soul in physical existence, and so any environment which tends to drag persons down must operate to recruit the classes of defective and dependent and delinquent who are chronic subjects.

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MARRIED VAGABONDS.

BY MISS MARY E. RICHMOND.

I have ventured to give this title to my paper, because I am anxious to bring the man of the neglected family out of that retirement behind wife and children into which he has so discreetly withdrawn. A great deal has been written about the single vagabond. His nomadic habits have been described by specialists; and some have even ventured to turn tramp and take the road, in order to secure data at first hand for their studies. No specialist, however, has been able to study the married vagabond in the same way. He is well protected from scientific scrutiny, too well protected. It has been my fortune to know individually a considerable number of both the single and the married fraternity, and I confess to a preference for the former. It is true that the tramp is a barbarian, openly at war with society; but, then, he is not so prompt to claim from society the privileges and protection which she so willingly extends to the head of a family. In short, he is not such a cowardly, unenterprising creature.

Granting, then, that the married vagabond is a bad fellow, what will you do with him? For my instruction on this question I sent circular letters of inquiry to a number of charity workers in this country concerning (1) the legal treatment of idle and intemperate heads of families, (2) the charitable treatment of the same, (3) the sentiment of the community on this subject, and have received 74 answers from 34 different States.

These letters show that laws to compel a man to support his wife, or children, or both, exist in 20 of the 34 States reporting, though the law is not enforced or is seldom enforced in all of the 20, and in 7 of the others it is only partially enforced. If I may venture to make any deductions from my incomplete returns, it would appear that there are better laws and a better enforcement of them in the North Atlantic States. So far as I can discover, no laws exist in the South Atlantic and South Central States, though, judging by my own State, this absence of remedies does not argue an absence of the disease. The North Central States have some good enactments; and the Western States show plenty of law, but little or no enforcement,- an illustration of the uselessness of legislation which precedes the education of public opinion. In nearly half the States having a non-support law the inability to secure judgment without the wife's testimony has rendered the law of no effect.

Perhaps the provisions of the Massachusetts statute will serve as a fair example of good non-support legislation. This law provides that "whoever unreasonably neglects to provide for the support of

his wife or minor child may be fined not over $20, or imprisoned not exceeding six months; and the fine may be paid in whole or in part to the town, city, corporation, society, or person supporting the wife or child at the time of the complaint. At the trial, if convicted, the man is often placed on probation, agreeing to pay a certain sum each week for the support of his children." Boston is constantly enforcing this law; but from the Associated Charities in one of the smaller towns of Massachusetts comes the statement: "Neither the police nor our society can secure enforcement any further than by making the man's life a burden to him, as long as he stays here, if he does not obey it. In every case of which I have definite knowledge the man has, in the course of a few weeks, simply disappeared."

A Rhode Island judge, writing of the imperfect operation of the law in his own State, adds: "Such an enforcement is, perhaps, all that can be looked for, and all that is reasonable. For law, while capable of pretty strict enforcement as a penal instrument, is not a very efficient means of securing the discharge of social duties." He might have added that it is a very inefficient means indeed, when by its enactments we would relieve ourselves of all charitable responsibilities toward the man we seek to punish or the family we seek to protect. I think I am prepared to acknowledge that a good non-support law is better than no law at all; but I would only admit so much where the citizens of a State are fully determined to enforce it, and then re-enforce it by every other possible remedy.

One of the simplest and most effective of these other remedies is to habitually regard the man as the head of the family. As stated, this sounds like a truism; but, as a matter of fact, charitable societies, churches, benevolent individuals, and even public officials have drifted into the habit of receiving and filling applications for relief, made by the mothers and children of needy families. Charitable people learn to know the women in mothers' missions. They know the children in free kindergartens and Sunday-schools and clubs. The men do not attend these things. They are rather shy of appearing at all, unless in dull times they take the trouble to pose as industrious artisans out of work. The rule is certainly a safe one for individuals and for institutions that, where relief is concerned, the man of the family, if able to walk, shall not only do all the asking, but shall show good cause why he should receive. This would at once break up the pernicious practice of sending children to charity offices.

So far, I have taken it for granted that there is but one type of married vagabond,- a very bad type indeed. a very bad type indeed. Such an hypothesis breaks down utterly in any attempt to make specific recommendations about treatment. If the letters I have received show anything, they show this: that, where there has been any attempt to deal individually and continuously with idle husbands and neglected fami

lies, there has been, at least, some measure of success, and that wherever there has been no such attempt, neither giving nor withholding, neither law nor the absence of it, has been of any effect. I do not pretend to claim that the friendly visitor is a solution of this many-sided and difficult problem, but I do not see how it is to be solved without her. (The friendly visitor is usually a woman, though the men engaged in this work certainly deserve minority representa tion.) Speaking from our Baltimore experience, we would rather have one hundred good visitors, patient, intelligent, and resourceful, to deal with the married vagabonds of our city, than the best law ever framed, if, in order to get such a law, we must lose the visitors. The visitor's tools are moral suasion, the cutting off of supplies from every available source, the frequently renewed offer of work, and, last of all, the law. A paid agent may apply these also, so may a clergyman or public official; but the advantage peculiar to the visitor is that, confining her work, as she does, to a very few families, she has better opportunities of becoming well acquainted. These tools are only effective when applied with a full knowledge of the circumstances. Sometimes no one of them is needed. of one case where the man was given a fresh start in life by persuading him to remove his family to a new neighborhood, away from old associations. In another family the visitor's influence was needed on both man and wife. The wife was something of a scold; and, when that was remedied, and the man's old employer had been persuaded to give him one more trial, the visitor went with the man before a magistrate, where he took the pledge. This remedy, useless and worse than useless, as we all know, in many cases, just happened to be the right thing here. From being an attractive ne'er-do-weel, this man has become a fairly steady, hard-working citizen.

I knew

I would not, in my enthusiasm for the work of friendly visiting, lose sight of the old adage that it is hard to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The best we can do is a sorry patchwork often; but, then, civilization itself is just that, and only in the glowing pages of the modern socialist do we find everything made new all at once. Where a man is really anxious to fight his appetite for drink, an arrangement to pay his wages to his wife or to the visitor is often the best that can be done. The United Workers of Norwich have been peculiarly successful in this direction.

In many cases the more heroic treatment of cutting off supplies must be resorted to. So long as charitable people insist that they must forestall the possibility of "letting the innocent suffer" by aiding every neglected family generously, just so long the lazy man has society by the throat. When we find that we are dealing with such a man, it becomes necessary to prove that we have more strength of character to resist temptation to help than he has strength of character to resist temptation to work. I regret to say that he stands the test better than we do, and frequently wins the day. Where a

woman refuses to leave a good-for-nothing husband, she will sometimes change her mind when she finds that the charitable people are in earnest. Where the man finds that the threats of the charitable are not, as they too often are, entirely empty, he will sometimes, when pushed to the wall, take work. I know of a soddenly selfish fellow who did nothing for his family, and whose wife could not be persuaded to leave him. At last the Charity Organization Society convinced the benevolent individuals of the neighborhood that they must withhold help, and agreed to be responsible for the consequences. A neighbor who could be trusted was paid to feed the wife and children without the husband's knowledge and in the strictest privacy. When he inquired why such a church hadn't helped, and where the basket was from Mrs. So-and-so, and the money from the Circle of King's Daughters, and the accustomed help from half a dozen other sources, the wife replied that one and all had said they would rather let her starve than continue to help the family of a man who wouldn't work. He held out for two days, and then came for the labor-yard work order, which he had previously refused, working steadily for some weeks, and until the work closed.

Sometimes the removal of wife and children will bring a man to his senses. One wife, for whom work was found in an institution, where she could keep her two children with her, has agreed to go back to her husband on condition that he will first work steadily for a year, and save his earnings.

It will appear from what I have said that a visitor must have patience, must not look for very brilliant or immediate results; but it is possible, on the other hand, for her to have too much patience, or, rather, to think that she is patient when, in reality, she is cowardly. I have seen a family going steadily down hill for years, the underfed, overworked mother taking finally to drink, the younger children beginning life with under-vitalized, diseased bodies, and, finally, the violent death of the second boy a month ago coming as the least tragic happening in the family history. All this preventable misery had gradually accumulated because the visitors and others charitably interested lacked courage five years ago. When charitable people delay and temporize in such cases, I wish they could have a good, wholesome, terrifying vision of the future they are helping to manufacture. The fact is, the supply of capable visitors is altogether inadequate; and it is the most important function of a charity organization society to increase this supply.

I have given a very imperfect review of legal and charitable practice in cases of non-support. The last division of my subject brings me to another function of a charity organization society; namely, the influencing of public opinion. One of the questions sent to my correspondents was, "Is charitable sentiment inclined to make it easy or difficult for a man with an interesting family to live without work?" Of the thirty-four States heard from, thirty acknowledged