My visit to Yetholm brought out the fact more vividly to my mind than ever, that private flickering and fluttering missionary enterprise, apart from compulsory education, sanitation, and proper Government supervision, is powerless, and unable to reclaim our gipsies and their children from heathendom and its black midnight surroundings; and this I have stated all along in my letters, Congress papers, articles in the Graphic and Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, and in my “Gipsy Life,” &c. The case of the poor brickyard girls and boys and canal children proves this in an unmistakable manner beyond all doubt; at any rate, to those who have their eyes and ears open, and hearts and hands ready to help forward the country’s welfare. [329]
Some fifty years ago the Rev. John Baird, a godly minister at Yetholm, and a few warm hearted friends, commenced in right good earnest to reform the gipsies at Yetholm. A committee was formed, several hundreds of pounds were collected, steps taken to get the gipsy children to school, and for some years they issued encouraging reports concerning the gipsies. Plenty of proofs were forthcoming to show that the gipsy children could be made meet for heaven by the application of the laws of education, sanitation, and the gospel; they were, as a rule, as well conducted in school and church as other labouring-class children. In course of time the missionary zeal of the committee began to flag, and Mr. Baird handed them over to the magistrates, and he goes on to say: “Take the more respectable individual, and let him follow the occupation of the gipsy, and in a few years he will in all probability be as bad as any of them. It is almost folly and ignorance to say that a wandering gipsy may be a respectable character. The thing seems to be possible and, theoretically, not improbable; but practically the wandering gipsy is almost without exception a disreputable person. His wandering life leads to innumerable evils. In kindness to themselves, therefore, their occupation, were it even a useful one to society, should be put down; but it is not only useless, but positively injurious to themselves and others. Their life is one of petty crime; their death involved in all the gloom of ignorance and despair.”
What are the results to-day of the years of toil and the hundreds of pounds which have been spent upon the gipsy children at Yetholm? Only one gipsy is to be found going to church on Sundays. And whose fault is it? Certainly not the gipsy children’s, nor yet that of Mr. Baird and his friends, but that of the State and the country. Mr. Baird gave proof that education had made some gipsy children into useful servants and good citizens; and why not more? Would to God that our noble Queen, our statesmen, and our philanthropists would listen to the gipsy children’s cry which has been going upward to heaven from our doors during the last three hundred and sixty-eight years, and is still unheard and unheeded by the Christians of England. Their tears, instead of softening our hearts, have turned them into icicles, sneers, and frozen sympathies, and the devilish, sensual gipsy novelists have transformed the bright lively looks of the girls into wicked designs and immoral purposes. Every retarding act and backward movement of those who would keep the poor gipsy children in ignorance will be a thorn in their pillow at the close of life, as the crest of the eternal wave appears in view with savage, bewildering reality. It is a serious thing to drag women and children downhill, and it is one that will not be banished by the artistic touches of dark, sensual, misleading gipsy romance, however finely drawn and dexterously spun.
The Yetholm gipsies, living, roosting, and nestling in their degrading, demoralizing, and squalid manner, have, during the last three centuries, from beneath the shadow of the sacred parish church and within the sound of its heavenly chimes, sent forth into England, Scotland, and the world over two thousand dark missionaries, trained in all the crimes of sin and wrong-doing, to spread misery and moral and eternal death on every hand, without our ever putting out our hands as a nation to arrest or sweeten the stream of iniquity which has been floating by our doors for so long. Good Lord, wake us all up from our sleep of moral death into which we are falling, bound hand and foot by selfish interests—money, greed, sensual pleasures, and fascinating delights.
Gipsying in this country comes up before us in various forms, enough to send a cold, thrilling shudder through one’s nature. A friend whom I know well, in Leicester, told me only the other day that one of her distant relations at Greetham, in Rutlandshire, had SOLD, some year or so ago, his dark-eyed and dark-haired pretty girl of about twelve summers to a gang of gipsies for TWO SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE AND A GALLON OF BEER, and the poor lost creature is now tramping and travelling the country, no one knows where. This poor girl’s mother is living in comfortable service in Leicester. One can hardly imagine a husband and wife, father and mother, so utterly lost to all natural feeling as to sell their child for half a crown; but so it is, and no doubt she is making money for the gipsy scoundrels and inhuman brutes. My heart often bleeds for the little lost gipsy girl, concerning whom slap-dash gipsy song-writers can call forth thrills of momentary pleasurable excitement from sensual gipsy admirers as they pass round the “loving cup.”
I often wonder what kind of song it is the poor child’s inhuman mother sings to while away the pleasurable duties of her station and the silent hours of the night; and while her offspring lies like a dog crouched on a heap of straw, half starved, dressed in rags, filth, and vermin, in some tent at the bottom of some dark lane by the side of a wood, listening with wide-open eyes to the screeching of game and weazels, the howling of the wind, and the beating of the hail and rain against her thin midnight shelter from stormy blasts.
While in Scotland a friend told me that recently he was in a hairdresser’s shop, and while he was undergoing shampooing and a scenting process, a poor, half-frozen, half-naked, Scotch gipsy girl, with dishevelled hair, came, with a small tin can in her hand, begging with tears in her eyes for some hot water. My friend was struck with the poor gipsy girl’s sorrowful, soul-mourning condition and request, and he asked her what she wanted the hot water for. “Please, my good gentleman,” said the girl, tremblingly, “my mother’s hair is frozen to the ground, and I want a little hot water to loosen it with. Mother can’t get up till it is loosened, and there is no one else in the tent to fetch the water and to get her up but me, sir.” What a tale of sorrow did the poor child relate. How sadly true is this of the gipsies and show people, and other travelling children all over our highly favoured and heavenly exalted country to-day. Our gipsies, by their own wrong-doings, lying, thieving, poaching, cheating, fortune-telling, idleness, profanity, sabbath-breaking, and other deadly sins, have bound themselves to the ground under our eyes, and we have stood by with our hands in our pockets, winking, blinking, and chuckling at their heartrending condition. Some thirty thousand gipsy children have, for the last three hundred and fifty years, received from door to door cuffs, kicks, crumbs, crusts, smiles, curses, and flattery, but have never, except in a flickering way, had extended to them the hand of practical help and sympathy. They have lived on our commons, in our lanes, by the side of our woods, in our dark, black alleys, in our prisons and workhouses. The little seedlings of hope that God has planted in the breasts of the poor gipsy children, we have, instead of encouraging them, trampled upon, and the little tender buds and blades as they peeped forth we have trodden down.
The children are lying and dying in the mud, with none to deliver. As a result of our negligence and indifference to the wants of the poor gipsy child, we shall some day have a crop of thistles, hard, sharp, and strong, difficult to handle and more difficult to uproot, think about it lightly as we may. The cries of the gipsy children have filled the earth, and reached heaven for help; but we have barred the school doors against them, and locked in their faces the gates through which they should have been led to health, prosperity, civilization, Christianity, and heaven. Gipsy women’s wails and gipsy children’s cries are going upward and upward; and to-day the gipsy, show, and canal children are at our doors dressed in rags and dirt, with matted hair, and tears in their eyes, beseeching us to take them into our embraces and soul-saving institutions, to lead them heavenward and to God, and still we refuse to listen to their entreaties. Shall we refuse to do so any longer? God grant that there may be a speedy breaking of bars, bolts, and locks that have bound our gipsies, show people, and their children to their debasing customs, and that our noble Queen, Senators, and Lawgivers may open the doors of the blessed institutions with which our seagirt isle is covered to our gipsies and their children without one moment’s delay, before our candlestick is removed and glory departed.
The Englishmen of our England of to-day have it within their power to show to the world how to improve the condition of the gipsy and canal children as no other nation has ever had before, without trampling under foot liberty and civil rights. Shall we with folded hands stand by with the blood of the canal and gipsy children hanging upon our garments, with awful effect, while the lambs of Christ’s flock are groping their way to misery, ruin, and woe? Shall we put out our hand to save the children? It is for my countrymen to answer “Yes” or “No.”
I asked my friend John Harris, the Cornish poet, to kindly help on the cause of the gipsy children, and right gladly he did it; and here is his touching poem. May it sink deep into our hearts!