"We all feel more or less privileged to laugh at the tramp, for some mysterious reason," said Miss Jane Addams recently, addressing the members of the Chicago Business Woman's club on "The Business Woman's Opportunity for Philanthropy," "although why we should feel so authorized to laugh at this particular brother man I am at a loss to understand. Certain it is, we should not laugh so readily did we realize that the tramp has frequently been made such by conditions largely beyond his control.
"Child labor, undertaken too early or performed to excess, is responsible for a large number of the tramps and ambitionless wayfarers of America. The boy or girl who works too early is surfeited with labor, bankrupt of ambition, long before the time when work should properly begin at all.
"At Hull House we have been observing these facts, collecting this data, for six or seven years, ever since the last wave of interest in child conditions and child labor. It takes nearly ten years to secure any reliable or valuable data of this kind. And we notice that the child workers who were bright and eager and ambitious when commencing work some six or seven years ago are different nowadays. Nearly all of them are dull and lifeless, lacking energy, and without ambition: many are actual tramps.
"I have in mind particularly a remarkable little lad of 10 or 11 who performed wonders at the beginning of his working days, some seven years ago. He supported an aged grandmother then, in large measure, and helped take care of some younger children; he walked to and from the city daily in order to save every possible penny. Well, that boy had a severe attack of typhoid fever later and he made but a poor recovery. 'No constitution,' said the physician who visited him. The boy had been worked out simply and neither his strength nor ambition ever returned to him. He slipped gradually into the tramp condition. I tried my best to keep track of him for years, but it finally became impossible. Here was a clear case--but by no means extreme or unusual--of the bright boy ruined for life by beginning work too soon.
"Everybody knows the bad effect of a surfeit of any good thing. Few of us but can remember some bit of childish overindulgence which forever spoiled our enjoyment of that particular effort or article. I myself cannot think, even now, of a particular kind of molasses candy without a feeling of nauseating disgust; I ate too much of it at one time. The boy or girl who begins work too early finds him or herself in presicely that condition when the interest, excitement, and variety of the first two or three years of work have evaporated. In [time?] and terrible fatigue, both physical and moral, inevitably overtakes such children, the boys in especial, and they frequently beome tramps."
"The chance of money quickly earned during the holiday season has caused many children to forsake school, and, after having worked during the time before the holidays, they often remain out of school althogether," was her statement of these conditions. "In the region around Hull House we find any number of boys and girls about 18 or 19 years old who are suffering from what we term moral fatigue. They will not work and will not try to get work. These boys and girls, we think, have lost their energy and power through overwork, cause by tremendous physical effort when they were too young to bear the burden."
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