The hobos, themselves, do not think of Madison Street as the Rialto; they call it “The Main Stem,” a term borrowed from tramp jargon, and meaning the main street of the town. “The Main Stem” is a more fitting term, perhaps, than the Rialto, but still inadequate. West Madison Street is more than a mere Rialto, more than the principal hobo thoroughfare of Chicago. It is the Pennsylvania Avenue, the Wilhelmstrasse of the anarchy of Hobohemia.--From an unpublished paper on the hobo, by Harry M. Beardsley, of the _Chicago Daily News_, March 20, 1917. A survey of the lodging-house and hotel population, supplemented by the census reports of the areas in which they live, indicates that the number of homeless men in Chicago ranges from 30,000 in good times to 75,000 in hard times. We may say that approximately one-third of these are permanent residents of the city. The other two-thirds are here today and gone tomorrow. When work is plentiful they seldom linger in the city more than a week at a time. In winter when jobs are scarce, and it takes courage to face the inclement weather, the visits to town lengthen to three weeks and a month. From 300,000 to 500,000 of these migratory men pass through the city during the course of a normal year. A still larger number are wanderers who have spent their days and their strength on the “long, gray road” and have fled to this haven for succor. They are Chicago’s portion of the down-and-outs. An investigation of 1,000 dependent, homeless men made in Chicago in 1911 indicated that 254, or more than one-fourth of the 1,000 examined, were either temporarily crippled or maimed. Some 89 of this 1,000, or 9 per cent, were manifestly either insane, feeble-minded, or epileptic. This did not include those large numbers of border-line cases in which vice or an overwhelming desire to wander had assumed the character of a mania. Homeless men are largely single men. Something like 75 per cent of the cases examined were single, while only 9 per cent admitted they were married. “MAIN STEMS” Every large city has its district into which these homeless types gravitate. In the parlance of the “road” such a section is known as the “stem” or the “main drag.” To the homeless man it is home, for there, no matter how sorry his lot, he can find those who will understand. The veteran of the road finds other veterans; the old man finds the aged; the chronic grouch finds fellowship; the radical, the optimist, the crook, the inebriate, all find others here to tune in with them. The wanderer finds friends here or enemies, but, and that is at once a characteristic and pathetic feature of Hobohemia, they are friends or enemies only for the day. They meet and pass on.