I have been told lately by tramps that the boys are less numerous than they were a few years ago.  They say that it is now a risky business to be seen with a boy, and that it is more profitable, as far as begging is concerned, to go without them.  Whether this means that the passion is less fierce than it used to be, or that the men find sexual satisfaction among themselves, I cannot say definitely.  But from what I know of their disinclination to adopt the latter alternative, I am inclined to think that the passion may be dying out somewhat.  I am sure that women are not more numerous “on the road” than formerly, and that the change, if real, has not been caused by them.  So much for my finding in the United States.

In England, where I have also lived with tramps for some time, I have found very little contrary sexual feeling.  In Germany, also, excepting in prisons and work-houses, it seems very little known among vagabonds.  There are a few Jewish wanderers (sometimes peddlers) who are said to have boys in their company, and I am told that they use them as the hoboes in the United States use their boys, but I cannot prove this from personal observation.  In England I have met a number of male tramps who had no hesitation in declaring their preference for their own sex, and particularly for boys, but I am bound to say that I have seldom seen them with boys; as a rule, they were quite alone, and they seem to live chiefly by themselves.

It is a noteworthy fact that both in England and Germany there are a great many women “on the road,” or, at all events, so near it that intercourse with them is easy and cheap.  In Germany almost every town has its quarter of “Stadt-Schieze"[278]:  women who sell their bodies for a very small sum.  They seldom ask over thirty or forty pfennigs for a night, which is usually spent in the open air.  In England it is practically the same thing.  In all the large cities there are women who are glad to do business for three or four pence, and those “on the road” for even less.

The general impression made on me by the sexually perverted men I have met in vagabondage is that they are abnormally masculine.  In their intercourse with boys they always take the active part.  The boys have, in some cases, seemed to me uncommonly feminine, but not as a rule.  In the main, they are very much like other lads, and I am unable to say whether their liking for the inverted relationship is inborn or acquired.  That it is, however, a genuine liking, in altogether too many instances, I do not, in the least, doubt.  As such, and all the more because it is such, it deserves to be more thoroughly investigated and more reasonably treated.