no political party should in any manner whatsoever indorse any of the candidates until all the nominations were closed.

This code was introduced into the senate of the General Assembly of 1900. It passed, but word having been received from the larger cities that it must be smothered, it was recommitted to the proper committee on the very day of its passage, and was never again heard from during that session. A favorite argument against the bill was its length. One senator told me that he had devoted an entire evening to the measure and had not gotten through with it! A bill requiring such an outlay of time and cerebral energy must despair passing such a law-making body. The friends of the measure have spent the two intervening years in an earnest campaign of education. The State Bar Association appointed a committee of able lawyers to amend the commission's report, instructing the members to eliminate the non-partisan nomination plan, hoping thereby to remove the most persistent opposition. This committee reported to the Association meeting last summer, embodying several minor changes in their report, together with the amendment as instructed. This bill has now been introduced into the lower house of the present Assembly. There is not a particle of doubt as to how the better element among Ohio's citizens feel in regard to this matter; yet no sooner had the bill been placed on the calendar than opposition arose from the larger cities. They will be the storm-centre. It remains for the members of the legislature to rise above partisanship and prove themselves worthy of the trust reposed in them by voting for this progressive measure and enacting it into law, thus placing Ohio foremost among the States in the ranks of municipal betterment. S. P. ORTH.

THE REAL HOBO: WHAT HE IS AND HOW HE LIVES.

WE are indebted to the caricaturists for our conception of the hobo; and inasmuch as the art of caricature is the art of exaggeration, we shall be obliged, if we wish to discover what the real hobo is, to look beneath the surface of their work. That our population embraces in its numbers a large class of inhabitants called "hoboes" seems to be taken for granted. Yet, what is a "hobo," where does he exist, and under what conditions does he flourish?

In answer to the first question we are promptly met by a curious and conflicting mass of evidence. Some economists evidently believe that the hobo is one of the phenomena of a materialistic social system which strengthens and equips the higher and wealthier classes at the expense of the lower and weaker. Doctrinaires of another school assert that the hobo is simply a moral degenerate who, in the course of the operation of "the law of natural selection," as applied to social evolution, has sunk to-a degraded existence. Clergymen and philanthropists see in the hobo the victim of subtle vices which they believe are undermining our national vitality; while to the criminologists he furnishes an acceptable substratum from which, they declare, spring varied forms of stygian iniquity. Next come professional humorists- the newspaper paragraphers and cartoonists and the clever impersonators of the vaudeville stage. To them the hobo appears as a social revolutionist of the non-resistant type-a passive dissenter who regards the endeavors of life as foolish self-torture; who would avoid the competitive warfare of modern industrialism, with its friction and turbulence, and pass his few days in repose. In other words, to the humorists the hobo is a grotesque fungus growth upon human society, an insoluble element suspended in the stream of human activity, a non-conductor of human energy, a stockpiece for their jokes.

If not altogether inaccurate, these several aspects, being incomplete, are exact in a restricted sense only. The hobo's career is subject to almost countless vicissitudes, and he is viewed by his many observers under a variety of circumstances. It is only by combining these kalei

doscopic glimpses that a just idea of the actual can be attained. The professional humorists, however, have most influenced the popular conception of a hobo. Upon public fancy they have hopelessly rivetted the notion that the hobo is nothing more than a ragged fugitive from work, content to tramp aimlessly from place to place and subsist upon cold victuals solicited at kitchen doors. The dramatis persona of their little comedy are quite familiar the dusty pilgrim, the wary retiring female, the aggressive and emerging bulldog. This joke is almost prehistoric in its origin and seems imbued with eternal life. From it Death withholds his sickle. More than anything else it has confirmed and perpetuated the common belief that the strongest instinct of a hobo's nature is to eke out a living without rendering in compensation some measure of labor; that he reaps the profits of life without having sown; in other words, that first and last the hobo is voluntarily and premeditatedly a parasite, a sponging vagrant, the man of all men who never works.

To a great majority of persons, therefore, it will seem preposterous to associate the word hobo with the idea of work hard, wage-earning, day labor. If the man is a hobo their inference is that he does not work; if he works he is not a hobo. It is, however, possible to explain that the proposition is not a contradiction in terms; that a man may pursue a certain class of hard manual labor for wages, year in and year out, in the enjoyment of perfect freedom of contract, and still be called a hobo, and be properly regarded as such. And despite the fact that as a social unit the hobo has long been scourged with many whips, and worthily, he is, nevertheless, an industrial factor without whom many very large business enterprises could scarcely exist. It is with this aspect of the hobo that we shall here become acquainted.

Every country of the world, no matter what its standard of civilization, engenders a multitude of beings who remain unskilled, or illiterate, or both. If they acquire any education at all, it is only in the most rudimentary sense. This cosmic population divides itself into groups, according to its needs and abilities, somewhat as follows:

Group 1. An illiterate class which labors steadily and is domiciled. Group 2. An illiterate class which labors intermittingly and is not domiciled.

Group 3. An illiterate class which does not labor and is not domiciled, as the gypsies of Europe and the professional beggars. From this it will be seen that Groups 2 and 3 constitute the world's flotsam and jetsam. It is with Group 2, the migratory and undomiciled laboring class, as manifested in North America, that we have here

to deal. In the Old World individuals of this class are generically termed vagabonds. In the United States and Canada they are known as "hoboes." The name hobo is slang. It has no linguistic antecedents. But it represents an idea; it means something. It is not synonymous with vagabond, and the difference is this: A vagabond lives a life of chance; a hobo has an avowed occupation. Yet, to settle

in a few words what hobo labor is so precisely that the definition would always be adequate to its usage is a responsibility to be delegated to the lexicographers. It might be sufficient to say that as a body hobo labor is unskilled, usually illiterate, improvident, debauched, wandering, and desiring no domicile, but having an avowed preference for certain occupations. To the largest extent it is that class of labor which seeks the employment offered by pioneer railway construction camps.

It should be understood, however, that all hoboes are not railroad laborers. There is a class of hobo labor which works in the wheat harvests of the Dakotas, Western Canada, and the North Pacific States; another class frequents the lumber regions of Canada and the Northern States, working in logging camps and about travelling sawmills. Conversely, all railroad laborers are not hoboes. There is a small percentage of men who follow railroad work all their lives. Like the hobo they are unskilled and have no certain habitation; but they differ from the hobo in that they are temperate, frugal, and trustworthy. It is in the rôle of railroad laborer that the hobo shall be here considered, and for two reasons: First, it is more satisfactory to treat a subject in the concrete; second, the vast majority of hoboes are railroad laborers and swarm in pioneer construction camps.

The work to be performed at such camps is the clearing of the “right of way" and the grading of the roadbed upon whose surface the track is to be laid. Strictly speaking, the term "right of way" means the right of private passage over another's ground; but for purposes of railway construction the expression has come to designate the ground itself which has been acquired by a railroad company for the general course of its line. This right of way is usually 100 feet wide, and its central portion is occupied by the track. Both the clearing and the grading are done by unskilled labor, and engage for the time large numbers of men, more in fact than any other branch of the construction work.

The mutual obligations which are borne by the worker and the employer in the field of hobo railroad labor are also quite distinctive, and aside from the legal relationship of master and servant are usually somewhat as follows: The employer feeds his men, charging them a reasonable

rate, say $4.50 per week, and they in turn are required to board at the common mess-tent. Also, the employer maintains one or more bunktents wherein the men may place their own bedding free of charge. In some camps a pair of blankets is issued to any man desiring to rent bedding, for the use of which the customary charge is fifty cents per month or portion of a month. Each bunk-tent is usually equipped with a stove. In small camps the men, if they desire fire, must saw and split wood on their own time; they must also furnish their own lights and soap and carry water for washing and drinking. In very large camps some of these latter conditions are subject to variation inasmuch as a man called "the camp-dog" is in charge of the bunk-tents. His duties are to keep the bunk-tents clean and to maintain the supply of wood and water. In such cases each man is required to pay a small fee per week to defray the expense of the camp-dog. There is also at every camp a hospital fee deducted from the wages of each man, such fee usually being $1.00 or $1.50 per month; and this is a fee which he must pay in full whether he works one day or thirty. Should he fall sick or meet with a disabling accident, he is cared for at a general hospital until restored to health, receiving his bed and board, medicines and professional attention, without cost, for a year if necessary. It is a beneficent and indispensable provision; yet the deduction of the fee which insures this protection is considered by the beneficiaries as nothing more or less than robbery, and the arrangement is accordingly damned by every hobo on the pay-roll. In brief, then, the proposition which the hobo accepts is employment for such period as he wishes at a stipulated wage per day, say $2.00. From this wage are deducted his board bill $4.50 per week, his hospital fee $1.00 per month, and his bill for tobacco and clothing, should he draw such articles from the camp commissariat. The deductions on account of board and hospital are fixed and inevitable; but the debt for merchandise is voluntarily incurred by the employee, who is usually under no obligation whatever to purchase his incidentals from the camp commissariat.

Having considered the general phases of the alliance between the hobo and his employer, it may be interesting to learn how they transact their business with each other in detail. In every large city the different commercial interests are localized in different areas. The wholesale dry-goods houses, the jobbers of groceries, of hardware, etc., have their respective districts. These are mercantile territories given over to the use of busy men. But likewise there is in every city a precinct, sharply bounded, which is thronged with idle men. This is the district occu