TENDENCIES OF INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 687 



become the most dangerous sources of pauperism and crime, as do 

 not a few native families removing from country to city. 



The precariousness of livelihood and the enforced mobility of 

 labor are also a resistless undertow which undermines and sweeps 

 away the very foundation of family life. It is the occasion of much 

 of the desertion and divorce which so seriously menace the marriage 

 relation. 



Bad housing conditions are so seriously inimical to the very exist- 

 ence of a family worthy of the name that, in self-defense as well as 

 for humanity's sake, great municipalities, like those of Glasgow and 

 Liverpool, are amply justified in providing workingmen's dwellings 

 for lowest paid laborers, reserving whole blocks of them for widows 

 with their children, and erecting lodging-houses for widowers, with 

 special nursery and kindergarten provisions for their motherless 

 little ones. 



The way in which family unity is ruthlessly disrupted by secta- 

 rian rivalry, the order of home life disregarded by stated public 

 appointments, the separate recreations provided for men and 

 women, younger and older apart, while little or nothing is offered 

 the family group which all its members can enjoy together, these 

 and many other tendencies of the age denote the family to be the 

 greatest ignored factor of modern life. 



But most promptly and hopefully does it respond to the better 

 conditions for its maintenance and development as they supersede 

 the worst at all these points of resistance. 



The tendency thus affecting the groups already considered by 

 virtue of that fact have very direct bearings upon dependency and 

 delinquency. The type and ratio of both are modified and intensi- 

 fied by the conformity of increasing multitudes to these molds of 

 character and conditions of life. The legal and philanthropic 

 measures dealing with them are equally conditioned by the same 

 causes. 



While, for instance, the tramping of farmer families is noted by 

 Sir Thomas More, when sheep ranches first displaced agriculture 

 in England; while landless serfs followed in the wake of the Black 

 Death, yet the modern " tramp " is a distinct species and the exclu- 

 sive product of our industrial age. He is a terminal of a tendency* 

 which gradually evolved him, not indeed without a certain inclina- 

 tion of his own, but far more, in most cases, by reason of forces 

 for which society was more responsible than he, though almost as 

 powerless as he to control them. Intermittent work in shorter runs 

 and longer hours; intervening idleness and going afield for a job; 

 temporary employment on the Dakota wheat-fields or some remote 

 railway extension; discharge at a point too distant, measured by dol- 

 lars, to get back home without " taking to the road " or " beating his 



