from India, but whether they are the Tshandalas referred to in the laws of Menou, or kinsmen of the Bazeegars of Calcutta, or are descended from the robbers of the Indus, or are identical with the Nuts and Djatts of Northern India, has not been ascertained with any degree of certainty. The Gyptologists are not yet agreed upon the ancestry of this ancient but obscure race, and possibly they never will be. We know, however, that the Gipsies have wandered up and down Europe since the eleventh century, if not from a still earlier period, and that they have preserved their Bohemian characteristics, their language—which is a sort of daughter of the old Sanscrit—their traditions, and the mysteries of their religion during a long career of restless movement and frequent persecution. And they have kept, too, their indolent, and not too creditable habits. Early in the twelfth century an Austrian monk described them as ‘Ishmaelites and braziers, who go peddling through the wide world, having neither house, nor home, cheating the people with their tricks, and deceiving mankind, but not openly.’ That description would hold good at the present day. The Gipsies are still a lazy, thieving set of rogues, who get their living by robbing hen-roosts, telling fortunes, and ‘snapping up unconsidered trifles’ like Autolycus of old. Pilfering, varied with a rude sort of magic, and the swindling arts of divination and chiromancy for the special behoof of credulous servant-girls, are the stock-in-trade of the modern Zingaris. Without education, and without industry, they transmit their vagrant habits to generation after generation, and perpetuate all the vices of a lawless and nomadic life.
“It is very easy to give a romantic and even a sentimental colouring to the wandering Romany. The ‘greenwood home,’ with its freedom from all the restraints of a conventional state of society, is not without its attractive side—in books and in ballads. Minor poets have told us that ‘the Gipsy’s life is a joyous life,’ and plays and operas have been
written to illustrate the superiority of vagabondage over civilisation. But the pretty Gitana of the stage is altogether a different sort of being from the brown-faced, elf-locked, and tawdrily dressed female who haunts back entries with the ostensible object of selling clothes-pegs, but with the real motive of picking up whatever may be lying in her way. There is but small chance of Bohemian Girls finding themselves in drawing-rooms nowadays. The last experiment of the kind was made by the writer of a charming book on the Gipsies, who was so fascinated by one of their number that he married her; but the wild, restless spirit was untameable, and the divorce court proved that the supposed precept of fidelity, which is said to guide the conduct of Gipsy wives, is not without its exceptions. The Gipsies have nothing in common with our conventional ways and habits, and whether it is possible ever to remove the barrier that separates them from civilisation is a question which only experiment can satisfactorily answer. Mr. Smith’s scheme is not the first, by many, that has been made to improve the conditions of Gipsy life. Nearly half a century ago the Rev. Mr. Crabb, of Southampton, formed a society with the object of amalgamating the Gipsies with the general population, but the scheme was comparatively futile. Still, past failure is no reason why a new attempt should not be made. Mr. Smith says there cannot be less than 4,000 Gipsy men and women, and from 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsy children moving about the country, outside the educational laws and the pale of civilisation, and not five per cent. of them can either read or write. Their mode of life is such as ‘would shock the modesty of South African savages,’ for men, women, and grown-up sons and daughters lie huddled together, and in many cases they ‘live like pigs and die like dogs.’ There is certainly room enough here for education, and education is the only thing that is likely to have any practical results.
“It is proposed that the principles of the Canal Boats
Act shall be applied to all movable habitations; that is, that all tents, shows, caravans, auctioneers’ vans, and like places used as dwellings, shall be registered and numbered, and put under proper sanitary supervision. Mr. Smith points out that when once a tent or van had been registered and numbered, it could be furnished with a book similar to a half-time book, in which the names of the children having first been entered, the attendances at school could be endorsed by the schoolmaster—for which extra trouble he should be compensated—as the children travelled about from place to place. By this means something tangible would be done to prevent the roadside waifs from growing up in the ignorance which is the parent of idleness. Why should these ten or fifteen thousand little nomads be allowed to remain in the neglected condition which has characterised their strange race for centuries? It is time that the spell was broken. There are no traditions of Gipsy life worth perpetuating; there is no sentimental halo around its history which it would be cruel to dispel. In past ages the Gipsies have been subjected to harsh laws and barbarous edicts; it remains for our more enlightened times to deal with them on a humaner plan. It is only by the expanding influence of education that the little minds of their children can gain a necessary experience of the utility and dignity of honest labour. When they have received some measure of instruction they will be fitter to emerge from the aimless and vagabond life of their forefathers, and break away from the squalor and precarious existence which has held so many generations of them in thrall. Mr. Smith’s idea is worthy the attention of legislators. It does not look so grand on paper, we admit, but it is a nobler thing to educate the young barbarian at home than to make war upon the unoffending barbarian abroad. The instincts and habits which have been transmitted from father to son for hundreds of years are not, of course, to be eradicated in a day, or even in a generation; but the time will, perhaps, eventually
come when the Gipsies will cease to exist as a separate and distinct people, and become absorbed into the general population of the country. Whether that absorption takes place sooner or later, nothing can be lost by conferring on the young ‘Arabs’ of the tents the rudiments of an education which will hereafter be helpful to them if they are desirous of abandoning their squalor and indolence, and of earning an industrious livelihood. Their dread of fixed and continuous occupation may die out in time, and closer intimacy with the conditions of industrial life may teach them that civilisation has some compensations to offer for the sacrifice of their roaming propensities, and for taking away from them their ‘free mountains, their plains and woods, the sun, the stars, and the winds’ which are the companions of their free and unfettered, but wasted and purposeless lives.”
The Weekly Dispatch, in a leading article, October 13th, says:—“Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, has an eye for the nomads of the country. His name must already be unfavourably known throughout most of the canal barges of the United Kingdom. If he is not the Croquemitaine of every floating nursery journeying inland from the metropolis he ought to be, for it was mainly he who thrust a half-time book into the hands of the bargee and compelled him, by the Canal Boats Act of 1877, to soap his infants’ faces and put primers in their way. With Smith of Coalville, therefore, it may be expected that each juvenile of the wharves and locks now associates his most unhappy moments. The half-time book of the act comes between him and the blessed state of his previous ignorance. Registered and numbered, supervised and inspected, he has been put on the road to know things that must necessarily disillusionise him of the black enchantments of life on the water highway. It is allowable to hope, however, that having recovered from the first discomforts of civilising soap and primers, he will yet live to appreciate Mr. Smith’s name as one associated
with kindly intent and generous aspirations in his behalf. A generation of bargemen who had a less uncompromising vocabulary of oaths, who could beguile some of the tedium of their voyaging with reading, and who in other important respects showed the influences of half-time, would be a smiling reward of philanthropy and an important addition to our civilisation. That Mr. Smith anticipates some such reward is evident from the eagerness with which he has been pushing the principle in another quarter. At the Social Science Congress he has just propounded a scheme of educational annexation for Gipsy children similar in every respect to that applied to the occupants of the canal-boats. That is, he would have every tent and van numbered and furnished with a half-time book, and he would ordain it as the duty of School Board visitors to see that the Gipsies render their children amenable to the terms of the act to the extent of their wandering ability, under threat of the usual penalties. The prospect which he foresees from such treatment is that a body of wanderers numbering not much below 20,000 will be rescued from a position which, he says, would at present shock South African savages, and will thus be brought in to honest industry and ‘qualified to fill the places of our best artisans, who are leaving the country to seek their fortunes abroad.’ It is impossible not to wish Mr. Smith’s scheme well, especially as he contends that the Gipsies themselves are not averse to having their children educated; but it is equally impossible to be sanguine as to results. The true Gipsy, who is not to be confounded with the desultory hawker of English origin, has many arteries of untameable blood within him. He has never as yet shown the slightest concern about the English phases of civilisation which Mr. Smith would like to press upon his notice. Such ideas as those of God, immortality, and marriage are as unknown to him as the commonest distinction between mine and thine. He is a well-looking artistic vagabond, to whom a half-time book and a penalty will in all probability
be no better than a standing joke to be cracked with impunity at the expense of the rural School Boards.”
