Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 June 1878 — Setting Tramps to Work. [ARTICLE]

Setting Tramps to Work.

Boston did something last winter toward settling the tramp question. In the winter of 1877, a spectator might have seen, on pretty much any morning, a crowd of 150 or more of vagrants waiting around the Chardon-street Home for a gratuitous breakfast. These folks had spent the night in the beds of the various police-stations, and they were living regularly in this manner. At length the Overseers provided a pile of wood and some saws, and then required every applicant to do two hours’ work previous to receiving a meal. Some of the regular visitors thereupon marched off and were seen no more, saying that they hadn’t fallen so low as to work for a meal. The number of vagrants soon fell off to about fifteen. When this last winter set in, the Overseers procured some 300 cords of wood from the city, and, for two days’ wdrk upon it, they gave the worker an order for two dollars’ worth of and groceries at wholesale prices. Then, finding that even at that rate the dealers were making a profit on the poor of some 60 per cent, the city opened a store of its own at the Popie, ancWeliverod the articles bought.

In this wav, the articles, with all expenses added, did not cost two-thirds as much as under the old system at wholesale prices. The Overseers have succeeded admirably in relieving the really destitute, and at a cost of $20,000 less than the year before. It is intended to keep up the wood-yard and the supply-store as permanent institutions.— Lovatll (Matt.) Courier.