MAKES PLEA FOR TRAMPS.
Miss Addams Says "Help Them to Help Themselves."
"Help men to help themselves; give them your sympathy as the means to be self-supporting," said Jane Addams yesterday. "The tramp, the vagrant, the man who cannot work is not always lazy; more often he is the victim of overwork in childhood, that wrecked his physical system before he was thirty.
"He should not be condemned to the bridewell nor made to suffer a jail term because of this vagrancy.
"Such men should be given work; work that they can do; work that is congenial.
"They should be given sympathy and encouragement rather than money, for sympathy does more toward making him a worthy citizen than incarceration in a public institution.
"To indiscriminately give money to beggars is as harmful as it would be to prescribe medicine for a sick man instead of sending him to a physician.
"It is the purpose of Mayor Harrison to establish a force of vagrancy police in Chicago, as soon as it seems feasible, to watch vagrants, follow them to their haunts, and work in [cooperation] with the organized charities in aiding them to become self-supporting."
The cruelty practiced unthinkingly in the homes for aged persons was next discussed by Miss Addams. The misery of separating aged husbands from their wives in poor houses so that they are seldom even allowed to see each other, unless they meet by chance in the corridors or on the grounds, was discussed by her.
"There is too much unnecessary discomfort suffered," said Miss Addams. "I have seen old women who were compelled to stand on their feet all day because if they were to lie down it would disarrange the couches."
The subject of Miss Addams' talk was "New Methods in Philanthropy," and it was given before the Catholic Women's league. Miss Addams closed her address by urging that all philanthropy be [cooperative].
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