APPLICATION OF THE CONTINENTAL SYSTEM OF LABOUR COLONIES TO AMERICA
VAGABONDAGE in the United States differs from vagabondage in Europe in one important point: a large per cent. of our tramps are boys; and they are not driven to tramping by unemployment or mental disorder, but seduced into it by the facility with which they can get free rides on trains and food and lodging from police and municipal lodging houses, wayfarers' lodges, Salvation Army institutions, relief societies, and Church missions. In other words, it is the very machinery created by charity to relieve distress that becomes an instrument for promoting it.
The habit of "train flipping"--that is to say, stealing a ride for a few blocks and dropping off, as boys steal rides on the back of a waggon, for pure fun, is the beginning of it. Once on a train the ride lengthens until the boy conceives the idea of seeing something of the world; he
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