Page 244 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

ing as physical hunger. The evil of poverty is not so much
that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and
spiritually. And there can be no doubt that sexual starva-
tion contributes to this rotting process. Cut off from the
whole race of women, a tramp feels himself degraded to the
rank of a cripple or a lunatic. No humiliation could do more
damage to a man’s self-respect.
The other great evil of a tramp’s life is enforced idleness.
By our vagrancy laws things are so arranged that when he
is not walking the road he is sitting in a cell; or, in the in-
tervals, lying on the ground waiting for the casual ward to
open. It is obvious that this is a dismal, demoralizing way of
life, especially for an uneducated man.
Besides these one could enumerate scores of minor
evils—to name only one, discomfort, which is insepa-
rable from life on the road; it is worth remembering that
the average tramp has no clothes but what he stands up in,
wears boots that are ill-fitting, and does not sit in a chair for
months together. But the important point is that a tramp’s
sufferings are entirely useless. He lives a fantastically dis-
agreeable life, and lives it to no purpose whatever. One
could not, in fact, invent a more futile routine than walk-
ing from prison to prison, spending perhaps eighteen hours
a day in the cell and on the road. There must be at the least
several tens of thousands of tramps in England. Each day
they expend innumerable foot-pounds of energy—enough
to plough thousands of acres, build miles of road, put up
dozens of houses—in mere, useless walking. Each day they
waste between them possibly ten years of time in staring at