_Tramps in the Making._--“The laboratory method in philanthropic work has never had more signal demonstration than in Alice Willard Solenberger’s “One Thousand Homeless Men,” (New York: Charities Publication Committee, $1.25) a study of original methods in the true scientific manner and spirit. The author was for four years in charge of a district of the Chicago Bureau of Charities and during that time compiled, in the regular course of her work, the statistics whose analysis and discussion make up this work. She endeavored also to trace the later histories of her subjects and, whenever this was possible, she had included it in her data. Mrs. Solenberger’s untimely death, before she had written the final chapter in which she has purposed to sum up the conclusions to which she had been led by her long study and intimate knowledge of the homeless-man problem, lessens somewhat the interest of her book for the general reader. But her analysis of her tables of statistics and her discussions of the inferences to be drawn from them are so lucid and so practical that philanthropic workers will find the volume valuable alike for its facts and for its suggestions.” “Perhaps the most striking of the phases of the vagrancy problem brought out by Mrs. Solenberger’s figures is the extent to which it is a native problem. Of the group of confirmed tramps, more than a fifth of the whole number of cases studied, 76 per cent. are native born. Of the vagrant runaway boys, nearly all were born on American soil and of American parents. The chapter devoted to these boys is particularly notable for its sympathetic but level-headed treatment of the causes which lead to boyish vagrancy, of its results, and of the methods by which it might be combined. Among these methods she thinks the most important would be the satisfying of adolescent “wanderlust” by normal, wholesome means and the closing of the railways to vagrants. “Indeed the whole tramp problem she believes could be well-nigh solved if vagrants of all ages could be kept off railway trains. It has been estimated by several authorities, working independently, that there are in the United States at least half a million tramps. In her book Mrs. Solenberger studies the genesis, character, and previous environment of 220, and comes to the conclusion that in the huge army of which these are typical examples the variations of character and of inducing causes are so great that they call for much variety in methods of treatment. But the basic characteristic of all of them is the abnormal propensity for incessant wandering. “‘It is the mere accessibility of the railroads, more than anything else,’ she writes, ‘that is manufacturing tramps today. * * * When we succeed in absolutely closing these highways to any but persons having a legitimate right to be on them, we shall check at its source the largest single contributary cause of vagrancy, and the problem of the tramps, as such, will practically be solved.’