society can be maintained. All forms of association among human beings rest finally upon locality and local association. The extraordinary means of communication that characterize modern society—the newspaper, the radio, and the telephone—are merely devices for preserving this permanence of location and of function in the social group, in connection with the greatest possible mobility and freedom of its members. The hobo, who begins his career by breaking the local ties that bound him to his family and his neighborhood, has ended by breaking all other associations. He is not only a “homeless man,” but a man without a cause and without a country; and this emphasizes the significance, however, futile of the efforts of men like James Eads How to establish hobo colleges in different parts of the country, places where hobos can meet to exchange experiences, to discuss their problems, and all of the problems of society; places, also, where they can maintain some sort of corporate existence and meet and exchange views with the rest of the world on a basis of something like equality and with some hope of understanding. The same thing may be said of the Industrial Workers of the World, the only labor organization that has persistently sought and to some extent succeeded in organizing the unorganizable element among laboring men, namely, the seasonal and casual laborers. The tendency of their efforts to organize the hobo in his own interest has been, so far as they have been successful, to give him what he needed most, namely, a group-consciousness, a cause, and a recognized position in society. If they have failed, it is due in part to the fact that so large a part of modern industry is organized in a way which tends inevitably to the casualization of labor. It is due, in part, to the fact that the hobo, in so far as he is a congenital type, finds in casual and seasonal labor a kind of occupation congenial to his temperament, for the hobo is the bohemian in the ranks of common labor. He has the artistic temperament. Aside from the indispensable labor of his hands, the only important contribution which he has made to the permanent common fund of our experience which we call our culture has been his poetry. It is an interesting fact, however, that some of the best of this poetry has been produced in jail. During these periods of enforced quietude, when he could no longer move, the hobo has vented his habitual restlessness in songs, songs of protest, the hymns of the rebellious I.W.W., tragic little ballads describing some of the hardships and tragedies of life on the long, gray road. There have been many hobo poets. The most eminent of them, Walt Whitman, reflected the restlessness and rebelliousness and individualism of the hobo mind not only in the content but in the very formlessness of his verse. What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior?