Truancy is augmented, too,
just in proportion as legitimate and interesting physical exercise is
denied.
The vagrant, itinerant, vagabond, gadabout, hobo, and tramp, that Riis
has made so interesting, is an arrested, degenerate, or perverted
being who abhors work; feels that the world owes him a living; and
generally has his first real nomad experience in the teens or earlier.
It is a chronic illusion of youth that gives "elsewhere" a special
charm. In the immediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and
perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be a change
of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but locomotor; and the
moment his life becomes migratory all the restraints and
responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and
pass on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again. The vagabond
escapes the control of public sentiment, which normally is an external
conscience, and having none of his own within him thus lapses to a
feral state. The constraint of city, home, and school is especially
irksome, and if to this repulsion is added the attraction of a love of
nature and of perpetual change, we have the diathesis of the roadsman
already developed.
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