Question 7. “What is the advantage to be gained by registration?”
Registration is the first step towards the advantages that are to follow. By registration the owners and occupiers of the vans are known, and the School Board officers and sanitary inspectors have the initial powers to bring their influences to bear upon the children growing up without education. The gipsies and other travellers as a rule pass through the country under so many different names that unless the vans are registered and their owners known it would be impossible to carry out the reforms that are needed. I have not found one traveller who would object to their vans being registered, provided it could be brought about in an easy and inexpensive manner.
Question 8. “Do you not think that ten shillings per annum would be a heavy tax upon the gipsies and other travellers?”
Not if we take into account that poor people living in houses have to pay rates and taxes to a much greater amount than I propose that travellers should be called upon to pay for their certificates. In fact, they will be much the gainers if my system of a free education for the gipsy, canal, and other travelling children be carried out. For the ten shillings they would, as a rule, receive more than thirty shillings in educational advantages and remission of school fees.
Question 9. “How will the sanitary and other authorities know, as the vans pass through the country, whether they have been registered or not without the inspectors putting the owners to unnecessary inconvenience and annoyance?”
I propose that the name of the owner, the place where the van was registered, and the number of the certificate should be painted on the vans and other temporary and movable dwellings.
Question 10. “Do you not think that the travellers and gipsies would be much inconvenienced by having to register their vans every year?”
No, not if they were habitable, and in a fair condition in other ways. It would not require more than an hour once a year. The forms and certificates would only take a few minutes to fill up.
Question 11. “How do you propose bringing about the education of the gipsy and other travelling children?”
I would do as I have proposed in my “Gipsy Life” and Congress papers, viz., establish a free educational pass book, which book should not cost the parents more than one shilling, and on the plan set forth in my “Canal Adventures by Moonlight,” p. 162. The pass book would do for all the children living in the van or canal boat, and the child or children presenting it to any schoolmaster connected with any properly organized public school would claim at his hands a free education for so long a time as they presented themselves for admission. With the system of pass books there will not be the difficulties that would have been created by the pass-book system in the village dame school days of yore. Day schools, as you know, are now conducted upon the standard and code system. I will try to illustrate how the plan would work out in practice. Opposite my room windows across the green, all last week was an old tumble-down van in which there was a man, his wife, and seven children. Five of the children were of school age—none of them could tell a letter; but, supposing that Tom was in the First Standard, Betty in the Second, Bill in the Third, Polly in the Infants’, and Jack in the Fourth Standards, these classifications and particulars would be entered in the pass book, and supposing that the gipsy had sent the children with their pass book to the National School on his arrival in the village, the schoolmaster would immediately he had opened the book have seen to which standard each child belonged, and would have sent him or her into it.