Vags Are Plentiful

1916

The city authorities should insist that vagrants cease their begging from house to house. Housewives should refuse to feed men at this time of the year who refuse to do small jobs about the home. There is plenty of garden spading, rug cleaning and general cleaning up work about the house that would give the man who really wants work sufficient work for a meal.

The facts are, however, that the average beggar will not work when asked to do so. Two such shiftless fellows appeared one after another the other Monday at a home where the housewife was hard at work. They were told they would be fed if they beat a rug. One of them said he would and disappeared after looking at the rug. He said he only wanted a few potatoes anyway and he didn't feel like working until he saw his partner. He never came back. His partner appeared a few minutes later and said he didn't want to work. It made him tired. — Murphysboro Independent, Illinois, March or April 1916.

As Straight Men See Him

1909

The Dead-Beat is Probably the Most Despised Creature That Walks the Earth

No man is wholly free from sin, but so many lesser evils are tolerated that a man should hesitate long before becoming a dead-beat.

Criminals are despised and abhorred, but to the dead-beat all that is coming, as well as the contempt of his fellow men. There is something at once so mean and so little in taking advantage of the confidence which comes with friendship that the hand of every man is turned against a dead-beat as soon as his reputation is well established.

The dead-beat may fondly imagine he is living easy and making money without work, and, of course, he takes no account of the confidence he violates and the hardships he inflicts on others. But, that aside, he really has a harder time than the man who is honest and fair. He is compelled to move a good deal, and peace of mind he knows not. Like other types of crooks, he doesn't prosper, and his finish is more unpleasant than the beginning. — Atchison Globe.


1900

Deadly Blunderbusses of Guatemala

Down in Guatemala the favorite weapon of the native bandits and desperadoes is a sawed-off muzzle-loading shotgun of the blunderbuss pattern, and when they run short of buckshot they sally out to the railroad and steal a few dozen seals, which are simply disks of soft lead about the size of quarters. Pounded into rough balls, they make projectiles by the side of which a Dumdum is an angel of mercy, and when one of their blunderbusses goes off it generally kills everything in sight except the man directly behind it.