Act III - Page 2

he could feed, clothe and house himself without great exertion.
When a man who is born a poet refuses a stool in a stockbroker's office,
and starves in a garret, spunging on a poor landlady or on his friends
and relatives rather than work against his grain; or when a lady,
because she is a lady, will face any extremity of parasitic dependence
rather than take a situation as cook or parlormaid, we make large
allowances for them. To such allowances the ablebodied pauper and his
nomadic variant the tramp are equally entitled.

Further, the imaginative man, if his life is to be tolerable to him,
must have leisure to tell himself stories, and a position which lends
itself to imaginative decoration. The ranks of unskilled labor offer no
such positions. We misuse our laborers horribly; and when a man refuses
to be misused, we have no right to say that he is refusing honest work.
Let us be frank in this matter before we go on with our play; so that we
may enjoy it without hypocrisy. If we were reasoning, farsighted people,
four fifths of us would go straight to the Guardians for relief,
and knock the whole social system to pieces with most beneficial
reconstructive results. The reason we do got do this is because we work
like bees or ants, by instinct or habit, not reasoning about the matter
at all. Therefore when a man comes along who can and does reason, and
who, applying the Kantian test to his conduct, can truly say to us, If
everybody did as I do, the world would be compelled to reform itself
industrially, and abolish slavery and squalor, which exist only because
everybody does as you do, let us honor that man and seriously
consider the advisability of following his example. Such a man is the
able-bodied, able-minded pauper. Were he a gentleman doing his best to
get a pension or a sinecure instead of sweeping a crossing, nobody would
blame him; for deciding that so long as the alternative lies between
living mainly at the expense of the community and allowing the community
to live mainly at his, it would be folly to accept what is to him
personally the greater of the two evils.

We may therefore contemplate the tramps of the Sierra without prejudice,
admitting cheerfully that our objects--briefly, to be gentlemen of
fortune--are much the same as theirs, and the difference in our position
and methods merely accidental. One or two of them, perhaps, it would be
wiser to kill without malice in a friendly and frank manner; for there
are bipeds, just as there are quadrupeds, who are too dangerous to be
left unchained and unmuzzled; and these cannot fairly expect to have
other men's lives wasted in the work of watching them. But as society
has not the courage to kill them, and, when it catches them, simply
wreaks