Notes of an Itinerant Policeman by Josiah Flynt

Author:Josiah Flynt [Flynt, Josiah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Historical, General
ISBN: 9783752326789
Google: 2DHyDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Published: 2020-07-20T02:38:53+00:00

"If I get a good one in the fall I generally keep it till spring, but the year round I guess I change places ev'ry two or three months."

"How much of a loaf do you have between jobs?"

"It depends. Last year I was nearly four months on the hog once,—couldn't get anything. As a general thing, though, I don't have to wait over six weeks if I look hard."

"Are you going to look hard out West?"

"Well, I'm goin' to size up the country, 'n' if I like it, why, I guess I'll take a job for awhile. I got enough money to keep me in tobacco 'n' booze for a few weeks, 'n' it don't cost me anything to ride or eat."

"How do you manage?"

"I hustle for my grub the way hoboes do,—it's easy enough."

"I should think a workingman like yourself would hate to do that."

"I used to a little, but I got over it. You got to help yourself in this world, 'n' I'm learnin' how to do it, too."

The nationality of the "gay-cats" is mainly American. A large number have parents who were born in Europe, but they themselves were born in this country, and there are thousands whose families have been settled here for several generations.

What I have said in regard to the unemployed young men applies also, in a measure, to the old men; the latter, in many cases, are as much the victims of Wanderlust as are their youthful companions: but there are certain special facts which go to explain their vagabondage. The older men are more frequently confirmed drunkards than are the younger men. Occasionally during the past year I have met an aged out-of-work who was a "total abstainer," but nine-tenths of all the mature men were by their own confession hard drinkers. Whether their loose habits are also answerable for their love of carping and criticising, and their notion that they alone know how the world should be run, it is impossible for me to say; but certain it is that their continual grumbling and scolding against those who have been more persevering than they is another of the causes which have brought them to their present unfortunate state. Men who are unceasingly finding fault with their lot, and yet make no serious attempt to better it, cannot "get on" very far in this country, or in any other.

This type of out-of-work exists everywhere, in Germany, Russia, England, and France as well as in the United States, but I am not sure that our particular civilisation, or rather our form of government, has not a tendency to develop it here a little more rapidly than in any other country which I have explored.

It is a popular notion in the United States that every American has the right to say what he thinks, and my finding is that the love of speaking one's mind is exceedingly strong among the uneducated people of the country. Agitators, who go among them, are partly to blame

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