In the year 1514 the gipsies landed in Scotland from the Continent, and from that date to the present time we have had in our midst over 30,000 men, women, and children with increasing numbers, going to and from our villages, towns, lanes, and fairs, and mixing with the simple, wise, gay, and foolish, leading the lives of vagabonds, demoralizing all they have been brought in contact with, by their lying, plundering, dirty, filthy, cheating, and crafty habits. In one word, the gipsies have been, and still are, a disgrace to Christian civilization. Of course there are exceptions among them, and I wish from the bottom of my heart that there were more.
They live huddled together regardless of either sex, age, or decency, under hedges, in tents, barns, or on the roadside, with but little regard for marriage ceremonies.
Their food, in many instances, is little better than garbage and refuse, and the most riff-raff of them bed themselves upon rotten straw.
We have also, at this late day, with sunny education gleaming on every hand, over 30,000 poor gipsy children of school age growing up as vagabonds, and not two per cent. of the whole able to read or write a sentence.
If our present-day gipsies had been of the romantic type of some two or three centuries ago, as pictured to us so beautifully by fascinating novelists, we might have wandered down the country green lanes, and by the side of rivulets, to admire their witchery, colours, and gipsy traits, exhibited with much refined skill, artistic touch, and feeling by gipsy writers; but the fact is, to state it plainly, the romantic gipsy of novels and romance has been dead long ago, and neither the stage, romance, nor imagination will ever bring him to life again in this country.
Our gipsies of to-day are neither more nor less than ignorant, idle tramps, scamps, and vagabonds. This I know full well, for I have found it out over and over again, not by hearsay, but by mixing and eating with them in their wretched abodes often during the last five years.
My sorrowful experience of them forty years ago, with casual acquaintances since, and onward to 1878, has not brought any traits of their character, as practised by them, that any sane-thinking, loyal, or observing man can admire, and the sooner our legislators deal with our gipsy vagabonds the better it will be for us as a nation.
Many of the gipsies have large hearts, and are most kindly, and they are also clever and musical. These features of gipsy life I have witnessed myself many times. The cause of their degraded position may be laid at the door of our Christian apathy, legislative indifference, social deadness, and philanthropic neglect.
The flickering and uncertain efforts of missionary agency will do something towards reclaiming our poor lost wandering little brothers and sisters, but not a tithe of what the social, sanitary, and educational laws of the country can do.
In the paper I had the honour to read before this Congress at Manchester, in 1879, I dealt more especially with the evils of gipsy life, only referring briefly to my remedy, the substance of which I have published in my “Gipsy Life,” and in various forms since 1878, and onward to this date, which, with additional suggestions, are as follow:—