Depending on one’s point of view, the homeless man, owing to the serious industrial depression during the winter of 1921-1922 had remarkable success in begging or panhandling. The spirit of the public during the depression was to help the unemployed man and advantage of this situation was not lost sight of by the hobo who worked on the sympathy of the public. With the approach of summer and improved industrial conditions, the hobo continued to make a living in other ways than by working for it. There seems to be an understanding among this class of men not to work for less than 50c an hour, and they are loath to accept steady employment at 35c to 37½c hour when they can do temporary work, and work at a different job every day, or any day one pleases, at 45c to 50c an hour. The hobo is reluctant to work in foundries or steel mills. He likes the open and when winter is past, the hobo, with few exceptions, refuses inside work. The hobos of today are made up of young men, ranging in ages from 18 to 35 years. They form in groups of six or seven, camp in the “brush” and send a different one of their group out each day to panhandle in the town or village near which they may be camping. Then too, these men have very decided views on the Volstead law, before the enactment of which the hobo felt he had some inducement to work, for he liked his beer, if it was only 1½ per cent, and he did not know it. But since prohibition, his attitude seems to be “Why should I work any more than I really have to?” or in other words, more than to get enough for food and a place to sleep.[40] The hobo is not unfamiliar with strike jobs. Corporations, when forced to the wall in a labor crisis, often come to the “stem” for their strike-breakers. By offering alluring wages and the assurance of security, they are able to attract from ranks of even the casual workers enough men to keep the plants running. Labor agencies of this kind are not popular on the “stem”; neither are the men who hire out as strike-breakers. But in spite of this stigma they survive as during the railroad strike in the summer of 1922. These railroad agencies crowded even to the heart of the Madison Street mart and eventually forced the private agencies to deal in strike jobs. Strike-breakers or “scabs” are of four varieties: (1) men who are innocently attracted to the job (it is generally charged that this was the case in the Herrin affair); (2) men who are “too proud to beg and too honest to steal”; (3) men who have a grudge against some striking union, or against organized labor in general; and (4) men who hire out as bona fide workers but really “bore from within” and in the language of the radical “work sabotage.” A NATIONAL PROBLEM