The hardships the women have to undergo are most heartrending. The mother, in order to procure a morsel of food, takes her three months’ old child either in her arms or on her back, and wanders the streets or lanes in foul or fair weather—in heat or cold. Some of them have told me that they walk on an average over twelves miles a day. They are the bread-winners. I have seen them on their return to their wigwams, in the depth of winter, with six inches of snow on the ground, and scantily clad, and with six little children crying round them for bread. No fire in the tent, and her husband idling about in other tents. In cases of confinements, the men have to do something, or they would all starve. For a few days they wake up out of their idle dreams. I know of Gipsy women who have trudged along with their loads, and their children at their heels, to within the last five minutes of their confinement. The children were literally born under the hedge bottom, and without any tent or protection whatever. A Gipsy woman told me a week or two since that her mother had told her that she was born under the hedge bottom in Bagworth Lane, in Leicestershire. When I questioned her on the subject, she rather gloried in the fact that they had not time to stick the tent-sticks into the ground. This kind of disgraceful procedure is not far removed from that of animals. I should think that I am speaking within compass when I state that two-thirds of the Gipsies travelling about the country have been born under what they call the “hedge bottom,” i.e., in tents and like places. The Gipsy women use no cradles; the child, as a rule, sleeps on the ground. When a boy attains three years of age, so says Hoyland, the rags he was wrapped in are thrown on one side, and he is equally exposed with the parents to the severest weather. He is then put to trial to see how far his legs will carry him. Clayton told me that when he was a boy of about twelve, his father sent
him into the town and among the villages—with no other covering upon him only a piece of an old shirt—to bring either bread or money home, no matter how.
Among some of the State projects put forth in Hungary more than a century since to improve the condition of the Gipsies, the following may be mentioned: (1) They were prohibited from dwelling in huts and tents, from wandering up and down the country, from dealing in horses, from eating animals which died of themselves and carrion. (2) They were to be called New Boors instead of Gipsies, and they were not to converse in any other language but that of any of the countries in which they chose to reside. (3) After some months from the passing of the Act, they were to quit their Gipsy manner of life and settle, like the other inhabitants, in cities or villages, and to provide themselves with suitable and proper clothing. (4) No Gipsy was allowed to marry who could not prove himself in a condition to provide for and maintain a wife and children. (5) That from such Gipsies who were married and had families, the children should be taken away by force, removed from their parents, relations, or intercourse with the Gipsy race, and to have a better education given to them. At Fahlendorf, in Schütt, and in the district of Prassburg, all the children of the New Boors (Gipsies) above five years old were carried away in waggons on the night of the twenty-first of December, 1773, by overseers appointed for that purpose, in order, that, at a distance from their parents or relations, they might be more usefully educated and sent to work. (6) They were to be taught the principles of religion, and their children educated. Their children were prohibited running about their houses, streets, or roads naked, and they were not to be allowed to sleep promiscuously by each other without distinction of sex. (7) They were enjoined to attend church regularly, and to give proof of their Christian disposition, and they were not to wear large cloaks, which were chiefly used to hide the
things they had stolen. (8) They were to be kept to agriculture, and were only to be permitted to amuse themselves with music when their day’s work was finished. (9) The magistrates at every place were to be very attentive to see that no Gipsy wasted his time in idleness, and whoever was remiss in his work was to be liable to corporal punishment.
All these suggestions and plans of operation may not suit English life; be that as it may, they were suitable to the condition of the Hungarian Gipsies, and no doubt laid the foundation for the improvement that has taken place among them. The Hungarian Gipsies are educated, and are tillers of the soil. If a plan similar in some respects had been carried out with our Gipsies at the same period, we should not by this time have had a Gipsy-tent in the country, or an uneducated Gipsy in our land. What a different aspect would have presented itself ere this, if the 5,000 Gipsies among us had been tilling our waste lands and commons for the last century. With proper management, these 5,000 Gipsy men could have bought and kept under cultivation some 20,000 acres of land for the well-being of themselves and for the good of the country. There is neglect, indifference, and apathy somewhere. The blame will lay heavily upon some one when the accounts are made up.
It is appalling and humiliating to think that we, as a Christian nation, should have had in our midst for more than three centuries 15,000 to 20,000 poor ignorant Asiatic heathens, naturally sharp and clever, and next to nothing being done to reclaim them from their worse than midnight darkness. A heavy sin and responsibility lays at our doors. Take away John Bunyan, a few of the Smiths, Palmers, Lovells, Lees, Hearns, Coopers, Simpsons, Boswells, Eastwoods, Careys, Roberts, &c., and what do we find?—a black army of human beings who have done next to nothing—comparatively speaking—for the country’s good. They have cadged at our doors, lived on our commons, worn our
roads, been fed from our tables, sent their paupers to our workhouses, their idiots to our asylums, and not contributed one farthing to their maintenance and support. Rates and taxes are unknown to them. There is only one instance of them paying rates for their vans, and that is at Blackpool.
It is a black, burning shame and disgrace to see herds of healthy-looking girls and great strapping youths growing up in ignorance and idleness, not so much as exerting themselves to wash the filth off their bodies or make anything better than skewers. Their highest ambition is to learn slang, roll in the ditch, spread small-pox and fevers, threaten vengeance, and carry out revenge upon those who attempt to frustrate their evil designs. Excepting skewers, clothes-pegs, and a few other little things of this kind, they have not manufactured anything; the highest state of perfection they have arrived at is to be able to make and tie up a bundle of skewers, split a clothes-peg, tinker a kettle, mend a chair, see-saw on an old fiddle, rap their knuckles on a tambourine, clatter about with their feet, tickle the guitar, and make a squeaking noise through their teeth, that fiction and romance call singing. The most that can be said in their favour is, that a few of them have become respectable Christians and hard-working men and women, and have done something for the country’s good—and whose fault is it that there are not more? They have been the agents of hell, working out Satan’s designs, and we have stood by laughing and admiring their so-called pretty faces, scarlet cloaks, and “witching eyes.” For the life of me I can find no more bewitching beauty among them than can be found in our back slums any day, circumstances considered—and where does the blame lay?—upon our own shoulders for not paying more attention to the education and welfare of their children. It is truly horrible to think that we have had 15,000 to 20,000 young and old Gipsies at work, carrying out the designs of the infernal regions at the tip end of the roots of our national life, vigour, and Christianity.
Only the other day the country was much shocked, and rightly so, at a hundred poor Russian emigrants landing upon our shores; and yet we have two hundred times this quantity of Gipsies among us, and we quietly stand by and take no notice of their wretched condition. The time will come, and that speedily, when we shall have the scales taken off our eyes, and the thin, flimsy veil of romance torn to shreds. Sitting by and admiring their “pretty faces” and “witching eyes” will not save their souls, educate their children, or put them in the way of earning an honest livelihood. It is not pity—whining, sycophantic pity—alone that will do them good. The Rev. Mr. Cobbin’s Gipsy’s petition, written fifty years ago,
“Oh! ye who have tasted of mercy and love,
And shared in the blessings of pardoning grace,
Let us the kind fruits of your tenderness prove,
And pity, oh! pity, the poor Gipsy race.”