“The greatest city is that which has the greatest men and women. If it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the world.”—Walt Whitman.

As I put aside my pen in this my appeal for the Wandering Citizen, I see on my study table many letters, filled with questions. The following are the most frequently asked:

“Is not drink the principal cause of destitution?”

“Is the American police system brutal toward the homeless out-of-work man?”

“What of the impostor at the Municipal Emergency Home?”

Drink is not the primal cause of poverty. The first and all-important cause is industrial conditions. But the traffic in alcohol is the most powerful ally of our plutocratic industrial system—in perpetuating poverty.

Despondent men drink for relief from self-consciousness, starving men for stimulation, while circumstances, fate, or the vicissitudes of life prompt many to resort to drink.

The man who works ten hours a day on a meager midday lunch of bread and cheese, must drink to beat out the day, and when the day is done, do you wonder that he seeks a stimulant? The comfortable, well-to-do, honest middle class drink but little, and if at all, very moderately. The world’s main consumers of alcohol are—the very poor for forgetfulness, the idle rich for pleasure. Broken hearts are found both in the palace and hovel.

The saloon, that dissolvent of self-respect, character and chastity, mocking the intelligence of every community, leaving its trace and putting a brand of shame upon this our boasted enlightened era, we may not believe in as an institution. And yet, this same saloon is a refuge meaning as much to the wandering, homeless wage-earner, as did, in the old days, the shelter of the good monks to the storm-lost wanderer of the Alps, and until each city is honorable enough to give to the homeless poor man something in place of the saloon, it certainly ought not to be mean enough to take from him that agent of life-saving sustenance. One of the most brilliant newspaper writers that I met in my crusade told me that while down-and-out in Portland, Oregon, he lived for one week on what he snatched from the free lunch counter. In many places they have forced from the saloon the free lunch, the rest chairs, the tables and papers. They demand that they close at midnight or earlier, and all day Sunday. Take notice, where they are doing this, they are not opening their churches very fast as a substitute, and even if they did, there is very little to sustain life in a plaster-of-paris image or a stained-glass window.

The saloon, with its shelter, its warmth, and its free lunch, saving the life of the half-clad perishing man, holds a very strong argument for its existence. If the mayor of a city has not the power to create and provide clean, wholesome, public benefits for the wage-earner in time of need (who has a civic right), we should certainly demand that the saloon keeper be forced to serve free lunch, and keep his door open three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, and twenty-four hours every day, for it is a degree more respectable to sleep in a saloon than in a jail. The first saloon keeper to throw a man out, should be the first to be thrown out of business. Keep the saloons until every city is honorable and humane enough in its strife for civic beauty to create public privileges, adequate Municipal Emergency Homes, public drinking fountains and comfort stations. Then, with a clear conscience, we may legislate the enormous profit off of the impure concoctions, and when this is done, the dragon will have been given at least one effectual blow.

“Is the American police system brutal toward the out-of-work man?”

The declaration of the radical Agnostic street speaker, that there was only one miracle he believed in, and that was “that St. Patrick drove all the snakes and toads out of Ireland, and that they came to America, got into politics and on to the police force,” is an unjust dogma, for in my observation every nationality represented on the police force is of the same character in administering the official duty and in taking advantage of the trust put in them where they are made a political adjunct to a municipality.

The policeman is the same as other men. He is a workingman, and like all men, he loves, he hates, he has his home, his social and business interests. He is of the community and should stand for the welfare of that community, and should never be allowed to divorce himself from the trust placed upon him by the common rights of all the people.

What greater examples of the virtues of character can we find anywhere than in the police? Their courage is noticeable. They will not hesitate to rush into danger, into fire, riot, water, to save lives and property. And over this character of courage is ever present the element of kindness toward the little child, the old and infirm, and often of the proffered dime to the homeless man. And yet he is an Ishmaelite—“his hand is against every man, and every man’s hand is against him,” which is a destructive condition.

The Police System taken as a whole throughout our country is extremely brutal toward the out-of-work, homeless man. There are but few exceptions. This is largely because when a man is chosen for that position, for political reasons, he pledges himself, not so much to keep the peace and the law of the community, as to enforce the law of the political machine and vice trust of that city. And if the helpless, homeless man, defenseless because of poverty, is not shot or clubbed to death (which makes a perquisite for the coroner), he is often railroaded, by the testimony of one policeman, into the county jail where it costs five cents a day to keep him, while the sheriff and chief of police will receive of the tax-payers’ money thirty cents a day for his care. The capacity of these jails is from one to two hundred souls. So it can be plainly seen that it is much to the interests of these officeholders to keep them filled. The remedy? Simply divorce at once the police departments from politics, and under civil service examination, put intelligent, qualified men on the force. This is not only to serve honestly the community but your fellow citizen, the policeman, as well. It is not serving vicious private interests, which grant to the police a license to be dishonest, to shoot down or club to death homeless men on the street—which not infrequently results in the finding of policemen shot to death in vicious retaliation, supposedly always by a criminal. Then abuse will cease. As an example, I know of no better policed city than Boston. Study these men closely. Their spirit is kindliness. Though they may be armed as a protection from the drink-crazed, there is no evidence of gun or club. They are not seen drinking in the saloons. They do not meet you with rum-befouled breaths as in most cities, but with a welcoming face and a clear eye. Here the unfortunate is given kindly consideration. In return, the Boston public seems to co-operate in helping the police. The secret of this valued quality of the police of Boston lies in the fact that the police are indirectly appointed by the Governor of the State,—that is, the Governor appoints the Police Commissioner, and he in turn chooses his officers, after they have passed a satisfactory civil service examination at the State House. Such police officials should not receive the sobriquet of “bull” or “cop,” but that of “officer” and “gentleman.”

The American citizen who chances to be a police officer is not brutal by choice, but by command of the system which forces him to be brutal. In municipalities where police brutality is their shame, the change can only come through the elector and the tax-payer. A well regulated city is one founded on the human rights of all the people, and a well regulated police is the strong right arm of a good city government.

“What of the impostor at the Municipal Emergency Home?”

Study teaches us that the out-of-work men who are so from choice, those that are mentally and physically normal, among the migratory workers, are exceedingly rare. If we hesitate at a Municipal Emergency Home and let ninety worthy men suffer or perish because ten out of the hundred are unworthy, why not close our public libraries, our hospitals, our parks, in fact, every public benevolence, lest some unworthy ones creep in?

We strive to weed out the impostor in many communities by throwing all idle men in prison, and when they cannot be used as a graft, and become an expense, or the awakened humane spirit of the city demands that they shall no longer commit this outrage, they are often run out of town. Or, after they have been humiliated by arrest, they are hauled in the police wagons to the outskirts of the city with a prison threat not to return, and turned destitute onto the next community. But this clearance test will not stand the light of constitutional liberty. Though our missions and churches are filled with many grand good people, the crucial treatment of the wage-earner is the underlying reason for the crumbling of our Christian faith. The Carpenter of Nazareth never questioned the man in need who came to learn of Him. To heal him, that was the predominant thought of His mind.

Are we, all of us, quite sure that we have not, during some period of our lives, appeared true and genuine when false? Let us not forget that the highest conception of a citizen of a Christian city is not what a man was yesterday, but what he is to-day, and what he is going to be to-morrow, and what we are going to help him to be.

There is an eternal law that what is good and true for us individually is good and true for us collectively. Let us be self-reliant. To take the attitude that history does and must repeat itself is the attitude of cowards.

“The reason of idleness and crime is the deferring of our hopes; whilst we are waiting we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating and with crime.” This was Rome under the rule of its monarchical aristocracy of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Centuries. Under this aristocracy, greed for position, fame, and avarice for great wealth, was unparalleled.

To satisfy this greed, they built great monuments. They drew upon the entire country for labor to achieve their selfish aim and end. They not only lured the country’s populace by pomp and glittering gayety, but big business controlled the land for speculation and selfish pleasure, forcing the people into urban centers. Even the smaller cities built amphitheaters and “civic centers” larger than the population. Then the gluttons of big business discovered that basilicas, monuments for supposedly great men, triumphal arches, marvelous fountains and temples of myth were a poor relief for the oppressed wageearner. When too late, they reluctantly offered their watered charity in free baths, free coffee and free soup, but the decadence of the grandeur of the eternal city had already begun. The working wage slave of the ancient Romans, so marvelously clever in his many crafts, was looked upon as being but little better than the animal which hauled the stone. There was no recognition of equality between the classes, nor consequently equal sharing of profits of production, or the creation of any public government institutions as a privilege of labor by the right of toil, to care for the bodily needs of the normal and healthy man who might need such an institution. The monarchical aristocracy of the Roman Empire did not believe in those things. But our political and industrial interests in this country are awakening to the fact that the foundation of all business is food, shelter and clothing, and that the honest demands of the people for the essentials of life shall be met and honestly distributed. They are recognizing that a reserve of unemployed labor is necessary to the progress of our industries and the promotion of our civilization, and the necessity of conserving that unemployed force.

We recognize that we are builders and that we are going to have a great name—not of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Century, but of this, the Twentieth Century, our century,—that we have already conquered sea and sky, and have put the “girdle ’round the earth in forty minutes.”

But every marvelous achievement, every boasted cry of liberty to make us free, will never make us great, until we learn that our ruling power must be God’s law of right and love.