"Broke," The Man Without the Dime

During my social study I was asked by the president of a Charity Board to become an employee of the city Board of Charity and Corrections in a Western city. The Board consisted...

Shortly after my arrival in Louisville, Kentucky, true to the promise I made myself in Cleveland, I sent the Navigation Company the cash due them for my passage. I felt exceedin...

The midnight bell was striking. The great city of Cleveland was going to rest as I rode to my hotel. I, too, was soon resting,--but not sleeping. I was forming a resolution to b...

On a bitter winter night, when the very air seemed congealed into piercing needles, as I was hurrying down Seventeenth Street in the City of Denver--the City Beautiful, the City...

"Dell me, vhere I find me a lawyer?" In broken accents, these words came to me from a German laborer who stepped up to me out of five hundred unemployed men who thronged Second...

When my investigations on the Pacific coast were over I felt that the strenuous part of my work,--that is the work of coming down to the personal level of destitute men,--was ov...

The porter had given me a pillow, and while we were sliding smoothly down that great tongue of land between the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, where in 1754 stood an old Fren...

On a stormy night in February, 1909, I arrived at the Auditorium Annex in Chicago. Donning my worker's outfit and covering my entire person with a large, long coat, unnoticed I...

Having received many letters from the Pacific Coast inviting me to come that way, and having heard what a Mecca for the itinerate worker it was, I felt impelled to investigate t...

"_See to it only that thyself is here,-- and art and nature, hope and dread, friends, angels and the Supreme Being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest._"--EM...

"_There is no contending with necessity, and we should be very tender how we censure those who submit to it. It is one thing to be at liberty to do what we will and another thin...

Leaving the Rectory I found myself on the highway, seeking a fortune as a berry picker. I heard rumors that men had actually made a stake at the work,--that is, enough money (by...

Just before the opening of the great harvests of Kansas, I reached Kansas City. Ten thousand men had congregated there in anticipation of work. The season was late and the harve...

Pickle picking had not proved profitable. Continuing my search I found that factory work was out of the question. At all the factories where I had applied the reply had been, in...

"_What is strange, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude, to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the state on the principle of right...

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:

On my arrival in Memphis I was greeted by a severe storm. Although chilled and almost starving my first desire was to secure my baggage, which I had sent on from Cleveland, and...

I had read that Philadelphia's hospitality was her great virtue, and that it was characteristic of her people to bestow upon the stranger and the homeless--who are and who come...

AS Elizabeth Barrett Browning sang of Florence, so one may sing of Salt Lake City. "Like a water lily resting on the bosom of a lake," so rests the lovely Zion, reposing in a va...

I carried away in memory from San Antonio two pictures,--one of a beautiful, quaint old city, rich in historical lore; a city of winter sunshine, palms and flowers which make it...

On one of Los Angeles' perfect winter Sabbath mornings, I was idly strolling down the street, when a breezy, pleasant faced woman appeared, looked at me closely and then asked i...

I shall never forget my first visit to Seattle several years ago. I came from Tacoma by boat. As we rounded the point in the bay the magic city burst into view. It seemed like t...

The weather was bright and cold when I reached Texas. As I walked the streets of Houston I noticed that the police glanced at me suspiciously. Several of them, by their looks, s...

In New York I repeated my Chicago plan. I left the Waldorf-Astoria at ten o'clock, dressed in my blue jeans and with my cloak covering my outfit until I could reach unobserved a...

In the Antelope State, on the Big Muddy River, on a plateau rising from the west bank of the river is built the city of Omaha, the metropolis of the State, with a population of...

"He passed the prison. At the door hung an iron chain attached to a bell. He rang. The door opened. 'Turnkey,' he said, politely removing his cap, 'will you have the kindness to...

Following Christmas day, December 26, 1911, just at the beginning of the most bitterly cold winter weather our country had known for a great many years, I went to Milwaukee. The...

In Pueblo, Colorado, I discovered they were finding men dead in an ash-dump of a railroad company. Pueblo, called "The Little Pittsburg of the West," is distinctly an industrial...

Between the hours of ten P. M. and midnight the next evening, I found myself (with another down-and-out worker) sitting in the smoking-room of the Albany depot. My momentary acq...

It was in the Winter of 1908-9 that a voice in the night prompted me to take the initiative for the relief of a great social wrong--to start on what to me was a great constructi...

The morning of April 19, 1910, found me in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, resting on the green moss below the "laughing waters" of Minnehaha Falls. This wonderful spot of nature t...

In the midst of the desperate winter of 1911 and '12 I passed a week among the homeless of Detroit. During my brief stay, there appeared in one of the daily papers the following...

I stood one day on the curbing of the principal street in Tacoma watching the construction of a sky-scraper. Near me stood a man of thirty-five, also watching. In reply to a que...

A one hundred thousand dollar Newsboys' Building. (How essential is the conservation of the Newsboy! When he is no longer small enough to be a newsboy and must do the work of an...