When a criminal returns from penitentiary or prison he is shunned by society; he is under the eternal vigilance of our police force--he is walked upon and pushed down. Finally, tired with trying to earn an honest living, he again resorts to crime. Probably had he been paroled he might have turned out a deserving citizen and the father of a happy family. VAGRANTS; WHO AND WHY. WHAT WILL WE DO WITH THE VAGRANT AND TRAMP? [Illustration: Raggles--"Why did yer refuse what she offered yer?" Weary--"Cause I never heard of it before and de name was too much for me. Why when she said 'chop suey' cold chills run down me back, 'cause dat word chop reminds me too much of de time when I had ter chop three cords of wood looking into de face of two shotguns."] The vagrant is the most elusive man among us. He is always with us, yet we can never locate him. No one wants him, yet we always send him to someone else. We make laws to get rid of him, but succeed only in keeping him a little longer in custody at our own expense. Most of us laugh at him and some of us cry over him by turns. We draw funny pictures of him in our newspapers and in our billboard advertisements, but we are really afraid of him. We blame the police for not keeping him off the streets, or at least out of sight, and yet we feed him at our own doors. We fear to meet him after dark, and nevertheless we give him a nickel or a dime to keep him in town over night. He is an object of charity, or a criminal, just as we happen to feel. He is sometimes the hero of our melodrama at the theater, who gets our tearful applause. At the same time he stands for all that we brand as mean and vile. We spend money lavishly to support him without work by charity, or imprison him in idleness by law. The problem is to understand vagrancy so well that we can deal with it on a large enough scale both to restore the vagrant to the working world or to keep him in custody, and to prevent the accidental or occasional vagrant from becoming a habitual mendicant. The English and European governments have dealt with their problems of vagrancy more effectively than we have. This is due to the fact that they have investigated the causes and conditions of vagrancy more widely than we, and dealt with it on a larger scale by uniform legislation and by more persistently following up the measures in which the public and private resources combine to treat the evil. TRAMP A RAILROAD PROBLEM.