Mr. Smith is a general type of the race—gentlemanly, intelligent, and courteous. In years he must be over sixty, but he is still as straight as a poplar, and wiry and muscular as a man of thirty, He has in his time been an extensive horse dealer, and for years made regular visits to Ireland. He has purchased hundreds of Irish horses and disposed of them in France and Germany.
“No, sir,” he said, with an imperial toss of the head, “I’m not one of Lord Rosebery’s 138,000 vagrants. I belong to a race whose history began in the twilight of the world, back in a time when lords and dukes were not dreamt of. I pay a regular license for my caravan, and when I am moving about over the country I pay, like other gypsies, for permission to pitch my tent, the same as I do here. There is no vagrancy in that. I am unable to say how many gypsies may be in Scotland and England. Scotch Tinklers—men and women who wander about making spoons, soldering pails, and skellets—are not gypsies. They are simply pariahs. There is not a drop of gypsy blood in their veins. The scotch tinker lived originally in a house, but abandoned it from various causes. They are a drunken, useless class of people, these tinkers, but persons will have them related somehow to us true gypsies. I claim to be the
“KING OF THE ENGLISH GYPSIES,”
and act for our people all over Great Britain. Take, for instance, that question before Parliament recently of the education of gipsy children. I was in the House of Commons and examined. Here you see letters from Justin M’Carthy, the President of the Local Government Board, and from a number of Members of Parliament. What are my views, you ask, on the education of gypsy children? Well, I have embodied my opinions in a memorial to the Government. Briefly, this is what I say. Every gipsy child should be educated, just as I have educated these children there, now men and women. There is no reason why our children should not be sent to school. Here, for instance, I will be settled altogether some six months. If I had children of school age, do you think it would be a hardship for me to be compelled to keep them at school? Certainly not. My opinion is this, that if a gypsy is located in a place for two days, for a week, a month or a year, he should be compelled to send his children to school. There would be no hardship in that. There is where the gypsy settles always a school in the neighbourhood. It is only in centres of population that we can live now. The old romantic days of pitching your tent in the forest and living on the fruits of the chase are gone for ever. We can only live, I repeat, where there is population, and where you have population you must have schools. Out of six days in the week, no matter how much a gypsy may travel, his child, if he were anxious to give it merely the rudiments of education, would at least have two and three days at school in the week. That is my view, and it seems to meet with the approval of the Local Government Board.
“A man named George Smith—no friend of mine—of Coalville, has been slandering and defaming our people for years. He has been making money out of books he has written about us. I have challenged him scores of times to prove his statements, but he has never had the courage to meet me. Amongst other things he says that we
BURY OUR DEAD ANY WAY
and anywhere. I took the trouble to explode this lie, and went to London to do it. I obtained from the directors of cemeteries in England and Scotland certificates as to our mode of burial. These certificates in every instance disproved Smith’s slanders, but he has not had the courage to withdraw them. Why, we have even here a burying ground, which has been procured from Sir Archibald Campbell. My sister is buried there, and she brought her son all the way from Galway, in Ireland, to be interred here. That does not look like neglecting our dead, does it? Then this man from Coalville says that we are filthier than the pigs. Does this little place of mine look like a pig-stye? The real gipsy, the dweller in tents, is cleaner than those who reside in houses. If a dog should lick any plate or vessel it is not afterwards used, but is destroyed or disposed of. Is that like the conduct of persons who, according to this man, are swinish in their habits?
“We call ourselves Protestants of the Church of England, and are christened, married, and buried at the church nearest to us. We have not joined a church in Glasgow yet, but in Edinburgh we went to Dr. Rankin’s.
“When a death takes place in the camp the corpse is laid out on the ground. The body is usually kept for a week, and during that time none of us go to sleep. A light is kept burning and we
EAT NO MEAT