To boys the tramp is not a problem, but a human being, and an interesting one at that. He has no cares nor burdens to hold him down. All he is concerned with is to live and seek adventure, and in this he personifies the heroes in the stories the boys have read. Tramp life is an invitation to a career of varied experiences and adventures. All this is a promise and a challenge. A promise that all the wishes that disturb him shall be fulfilled and a challenge to leave the work-a-day world that he is bound to. THE MULTIPLE EXPLANATION No single cause can be found to explain how a man may be reduced to the status of a homeless, migratory, and casual laborer. In any given case all of the factors analyzed above may have entered into the process of economic and social degradation. Indeed, the conjunction of several of these causes is necessary to explain the extent and the nature of the casualization and mobility of labor in this country. Unemployment and seasonal work disorganize the routine of life of the individual worker and destroy regular habits of work but at the same time thousands of boys and men moved by wanderlust are eager to escape the monotony of stable and settled existence. No matter how perfect a social and economic order may yet be devised there will always remain certain “misfits,” the industrially inadequate, the unstable and egocentric, who will ever tend to conflict with constituted authority in industry, society, and government. The description, however, of these causes of vagabondage--(_a_) unemployment and seasonal work, (_b_) industrial inadequacy, (_c_) defects of personality, (_d_) crises in the life of the person, (_e_) racial or national discrimination, (_f_) wanderlust--is a necessary condition to any solution of the problem of the homeless man. A program is remedial and not preventive that does not grapple with the fundamental causes here revealed. These causes have roots at the very core of our American life, in our industrial system, in education, cultural and vocational, in family relations, in the problems of racial and immigrant adjustment, and in the opportunity offered or denied by society for the expression of the wishes of the person. FOOTNOTES: [13] _Final Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations_ (1915), pp. 163-64. [14] B. Seebohm Rountree, _Unemployment; A Social Study_. London, 1911. See especially chap. vii, “Detailed Descriptions of Selected Families,” where the demoralizing effects of unemployment upon the laborer are clearly indicated. [15] _Final Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations_ (1915), p. 157. [16] See Bibliography, p. 287. [17] _The Individual Delinquent_, pp. 776-79. [18] _One Thousand Homeless Men_, pp. 88-89. [19] L. M. Terman, _The Measurement of Intelligence_, p. 18. [20] Rudolph Pintner and H. A. Toops, “Mental Tests of Unemployed Men,” _Journal of Applied Psychology_, I (1917), 325-41; II (1918), 15-25.