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the way “charity assisted labor in the combat to keep up wages.” Not only were beggars (aided by soft-hearted benefactors) nullifying the law of supply and demand by refusing to sell their labor at whatever price employers were willing to pay, but the police were abetting them in their malingering. Under existing statutes, officers of the law could, at their own discretion, summarily arrest vagrants and lock up them up pending trial in police court, usually without benefit of jury, with suspects presumed guilty unless they could give “a good account of themselves.” Those found guilty, in deliberations that seldom lasted more than a minute, were taken to the workhouse and set to hauling coal, breaking stone, laying pipes, and making bricks—a procedure workingmen protested as a throwback to fugitive slave laws. Reformers found the process satisfactory in theory but claimed that the police were insufficiently zealous and that judges too often acquitted the poor; and indeed, although vagrancy arrests in New York City soared in the depressed 1870s, not all those arraigned were convicted.

Reformers were ever more exercised by “tramps,” a new and pejorative word for the homeless unemployed (one of its earliest uses occurred in the New York Times in February 1875). The term referred to those who boarded in the cheapest lodging houses in the winter or bedded down in doorways, docks, empty warehouses, or Central Park, or along the Battery, on tolerable nights. When the weather turned bitter, many resorted to the verminous police basements. Touring one of them, a Herald reporter noted that his flickering gas lamp sent “feeble rays through the laden air and every ray touches a pile of rags which in the morning will hatch out a tramp.” The stations gave lodging on a one- or two-night basis, forcing users to move repeatedly to a new precinct (hence their label of “revolvers”). In 1874 and 1875 thirty thousand were said to be so circulating.

In the summer many of the unemployed roamed the surrounding countryside, looking for handouts or doing chores for farmers’ wives in return for food and shelter. Those few who bullied or stole what they wanted had their crimes splashed across the front pages, and out of these stories was conjured up the “tramp evil.” The press routinely treated the homeless not as victims but menaces. Some papers defined “tramp” in racial terms—as an urban Indian—or, in the words of one professional, “a lazy, incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage.” The Times suggested that readers worried about tramps “procure a large dog who understands how to insert his teeth where it will do the most good.”

Finally, the scientific reformers were dismayed, as they had been for decades, by New Yorkers’ stubborn penchant for undisciplined benevolence. Mayor Havemeyer had felt free to suspend outdoor relief in part because he was convinced that the needs of the poor were being “adequately met by private donations and the various Christian and charitable institutions.” Many churches indeed struggled to help during the depression. Thirty-four free soup kitchens fed five to seven thousand daily, and missions provided refugees from the freezing streets with shelter (and sermons). The St. Vincent de Paul Society declared: “Let all strangers be received and welcomed as Christ himself.”

Such efforts infuriated the AICP. Appalled at the “outgush of morbid sympathy,” the organization applauded the end of public outdoor relief and urged an end to scattershot beneficence as well. “Charity,” agreed the World, “rages like an epidemic,” and to what end? It only encouraged “idleness and dependence in the lower classes” and gave “impetus to worthlessness and vagrancy” by making “begging more profitable than labor.” Cutting off charity, on the other hand, would ensure that “the large class drawn hither by the possibility of living without work should be compelled to return to the country, where their hands are needed, by the stern necessity to work or starve.” E. L. Godkin declared in the Nation, “Free soup must be prohibited,” and “all