The Defective Classes. 
179 
of convicts in state’s prison are under 25. The difference between 27 and 
25 is accounted for by the difference between an average and a majority. 
The direct opposite of this is the case with pauperism. The majority of 
paupers are over 50 years old. Criminals are mostly young men. Paupers 
are mostly old men and old women. Youth is the age of passion, and 
perverted passions lead to crime. The author of the Jukes Family, the 
best sociological study ever made, says that among the descendants of 
Margaret, the “mother of criminals,” it is very noticeable that in youth 
they were prostitutes and criminals, and in age, beggars and paupers. 
The same perverted instincts which led them to prey upon the community, 
took the direction of crime in the time of strength and of pauperism in the 
time of weakness. 
The question of tramps comes in here. A tramp is a person determined 
to live without work, and who therefore is compelled to wander from 
place to place in order to do so. No individual, or society, or institution, 
or communitv, will support an able-bodied loafer in idleness any length of 
time. But many will give a little money or bread out of mistaken sympathy 
to a stranger, or as the easiest way to get rid of an annoyance. I have seen 
some thousand tramps, and with very few exceptions they were young men, 
I have seen two or three men fifty or sixty years old, and I have seen 
two or three women tramps. But I have seen hundreds of young men 
under twenty-one, and thousands under thirty, healthy able-bodied men. 
Among them were a few who were ready for robbery, burglary or rape, 
if a good opportunity offered. And in the judgment of skilled officers, 
there are some murderers and other criminals hiding among the tramps. 
But the mass of the tramps prefer to prey on society by beggary, rather 
than by crime. If they were bolder they would be criminals. What be¬ 
comes of the old tramps? I do not believe that many of them live to be 
old. They are killed on the railroads or die of exposure. Many of them 
tire of tramping and get back to work again. Some drop into crime and 
get into prison, and are in some cases reformed by the steady discipline of 
prison life. One tramp told me that he got the opium habit through the 
toothache, and was broken of it by being sent to state prison for burglary. 
Other tramps break down and die in poor houses or insane asylums. We 
probably have a hundred tramps in our insane asylums in this state, and 
about as many in our poor houses. This is an enormous proportion to be 
furnished by from 500 to 1,000 tramps, the probable number who are in 
our state at any given time. 
The question of education is often stated as if education favored insanity 
and opposed crime and pauperism. As a fact, I do not think that educa¬ 
tion has so great an influence either way, as many seem to think. We 
were told half a century ago that it was cheaper to build school houses 
than jails and poorhouses. We have dotted the country over with school- 
houses, and we find that jails and poorhouses are just as necessary as ever. 
But some one may say that this is because there is no effective compulsory 
