Josiah Flynt

“ I can now solemnly declare here that the real roaming habits of former days, roaming habits in the sense that I was willing at any time when Die Ferne called, to put on my hat and chase after her—received a complete chill during the European vagabond life. That it will pay one who desires to know Europe in the underground way, to make tramp trips such as I did, and to get acquainted before they leave home, with those millions of emigrants who come to us from Europe, I firmly believe. ”

“ There was a time in her life, I have heard her say, when the mere distant whistle of a railroad train would set her go-instincts tingling, and only a sense of duty and fine control of self held her back. This call of Die Ferne, as the Germans name it, this almost unexplainable sympathy with the slightest appeal or temptation to project myself into the Beyond—the world outside of my narrow village world—was my trouble from almost babyhood until comparatively a few years ago. ”

“ During the first month of my wanderings I was bedless, and frequently roofless. Indeed, when I finally did rest or try to, in a bed, the experience was so strange that I slept very little. A box-car, a hay-stack, a railway tie drawn close to a fire—these were my principal lodging places during the entire eight months. It may have been a hard outing, but it toughened and inured me to unpleasantness which would certainly seem very undesirable now. In a way, they were undesirable then. I always laugh when a tramp tells me that he is happier in a box-car than in a bed. ”

“ If there are slums in our cities, there are no greater slums anywhere in the world, barring no crime, passion, or idiosyncracy, than were found on the "Dope" and the Fort Wayne roads in my tramp days.
I looked over the general manager's property. Dressed as a tramp, acting as a tramp, living and sleeping as a tramp, I surrounded his lines until I knew what the tramp world had to say about his railroad police idea. I found wherever I went, in Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Wheeling, or Pittsburg, that tramps said: "There are easier roads to beat than the Fort Wayne." ”

“ It seems to me that this man, who had seen so much of humanity, who had seen humanity so closely, where it has least temptation to be anything but itself, really achieved culture, almost perfect of its kind, though the kind were of his own invention. He was not an artist, who can create; he was not a thinker or a dreamer, or a man of action; he was a student of men and women, and of the outcasts among men and women, just those people who are least accessible, least cared for, least understood, and therefore, to one like my friend, most alluring. ”

“ Man, not nature, attracted him, and it was always man in the meshes of civilization.
He was a victim to morbid self-consciousness, and this was one reason for his avoiding people of the class in which he was born. Give him a part in a play—he was gifted as an actor—the disguise of a vagabond, or whisky with which to fortify himself, and the man's spirit sprang out of its prison of flesh, like an uncaged bird.
This effect which whisky had upon him, led Flynt to give it as a reason for the "perpetual thirst" of some. ”

“ Die Ferne, everything in fact that I had ever really cared for, seemed irretrievably lost. Yet no tears came to my eyes, and I walked into the miserable "hall" of the jail, said "Hello!" to the other prisoners, as if such a place and companions were what I had always been accustomed to. This ability, if I may call it such, to get along with almost everybody, and for a reasonable amount of time to put up with practically any kind of accommodations has been of great service to me. I notice, however, that in later years "home comforts" are becoming more and more a necessity. ”

“ I wanted to put my feet on land again, even in Turkey if necessary. Coal-passing, bunker life, hot fires, and clanging ash buckets had cured me for the time being at least of all sea-going propensities in a professional capacity. A flattering offer to command a great liner would hardly have tempted me just then. Indeed, tramp life, with all its drawbacks, seemed a summer pastime compared with bunker life.
The twelfth day out, I think it was, we "made" Bremerhaven, where the good ship was to have a rest, and the men who had shipped in Hoboken were to be paid off. ”

“ In late years I have become convinced that that daily newspaper which will keep a careful record of criminal goings on in this country—not locally, but taking in all of the country that it can cover—doing this day after day conscientiously, presenting to the public the criminal facts about ourselves as we make them—will be doing a work which will make its police reporting invaluable and will earn for it the grateful thanks of all students of crime. ”

“ The essential factor, however, must be that inexorable display of our criminality as a people. There is no gainsaying the fact that we are all ready, or are soon going to be, if jail and court records tell the truth, the most criminally minded nation on earth. This is not a pleasant fact or prospect. The function of the police reporter, as I understand it, should be to keep this forlorn state of affairs ever present in our minds until we wake up and say that this can no longer be. Such a man, if he does his work well, is deserving of as high a salary as his managing editor. ”

“ New York, he said suddenly: "Do you know, I wonder what it is like to chase a man? I know what it is like to be chased, but to chase a man would be a new sensation." The other man laughed, and thought no more about it. A week later Flynt came to him with an official document; he had been appointed a private detective. He was set on the track of a famous criminal (whom, as it happened, he had known as a tramp) ; he made his plans, worked them out successfully, and the criminal was caught. ”

“ To frustrate people who might try to do any injury to a President of the United States while in transit over his road strikes me as being a highly creditable proceeding on the part of any general manager. ”

“ Our editors, as a rule, want American "stuff." Only in very recent years have they given much attention even to the foreign news service, leaving the gathering, sifting, and distribution of the day's facts to newsmongers who have often been as unscrupulous as they were incapable.
Americans flock to Europe in thousands, going feverishly from place to place as if their very lives depended on seeing such trifles as the old snuff-boxes of ancient celebrities. Nothing must escape them. They want their money's worth at every turn. ”

“ Die Ferne has seldom had her wild calls more carefully listened to by me than they were at this time. There was no home that I dared go to, the world was literally my oyster, and all I had to do, or knew how to do, for the time being, was wander. Roadsters, who railroaded as persistently as I did, seldom stopping for more than a day or so, at the most a week end in any one place, are called victims of the "railroad fever." ”

“ At the end he shut himself away in his room at the hotel in Chicago, as Dowson shut himself away in his lodgings in Featherstone Buildings, and Lionel Johnson in his rooms in Gray's Inn; as a sick animal goes off into a lonely corner in the woods to die in. ”

“ My own sense of the fitness of things told me that it was high time for me to be up and doing, if I was going to be of any use to myself and the family. Yet, for the life of me, I could think of nothing more remunerative and honorable as a calling, than a woodchopper's life in the Black Forest. One of the coal trimmers on the Elbe, a "bankrupp" whose acquaintance I had made in the Hoboken cellar, had told me about this work in South Germany, and I had made up my mind to go there in case Berlin proved inhospitable. ”

“ In a way I have in mind for a daily record of the nation's crime, the presentation of our annual crime as found in the Chicago Tribune when it makes up our debit and credit account along these lines. It seems to me perfectly feasible for a newspaper to gather the daily news in the criminal world, so far as it should be given to the public, in as interesting and as useful a way as that [Pg 294] of the Tribune and certain other newspapers. I firmly believe that it would do good for us to see ourselves just as we are in the criminal looking-glass every morning of the year, not excepting Sundays. ”

“ To-day, I make no doubt that the Road is tramped over by a hundred different species of vagrants, each having its own particular name, and, perhaps, even territory. The world has its shifts and changes among the outcast's as well as in the aristocrat's domain, and I hear now of strange clans of rovers that had not yet been organized when I began tramping. ”