The yellow newspapers, with the true
instinct that made them ever recognize in Roosevelt the implacable
enemy of all they stood for, printed cartoons of homeless men
shivering at a barred door "closed by order of T. Roosevelt"; but
they did not, after all, understand the man they were attacking.
That the thing was right was enough for him. Their shafts went wide
of the mark, or fell harmless. The tramps for whom New York had been
a paradise betook themselves to other towns not so discerning--went
to Chicago, where the same wicked system was in operation until
last spring, is yet for all I know--and the honestly homeless got
a chance. A few tender-hearted and soft-headed citizens, of the
kind who ever obstruct progress by getting some very excellent
but vagrant impulses mixed up with a lack of common sense, wasted
their sympathy upon the departing hobo, but soon tired of it. I
remember the case of one tramp whose beat was in the block in
Thirty-fifth Street in which Dr. Parkhurst lives. He was arrested
for insolence to a housekeeper who refused him food.
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