Light again dawned at eventide, and we were enabled to retire to rest singing God’s praises as the candle flickered in the socket.
In my “Gipsy Life” I have shown, among other things which have never been mentioned by any gipsy writer before, the following particulars. First, the cause and probable date of the gipsies leaving India; second, the route by which they travelled to Europe; and third, the cause of their persecution after their arrival in England from the continent.
My gipsy paper did not give universal satisfaction to everybody outside the congress. My plain matter-of-fact statements raised the ire of a few little narrow-souled mortals, who had not the courage to appear in their own dress, and borrowed other people’s clothes—shooba Rye, &c.—to crouch in while they fired their popguns at me. Just as they were trying to swallow my papers, an article appeared in the Morning Post, stating that I “knew more than any man in England about the gipsies.” This was more than O Bongo, ho, no tïckno chavo could stand. Editors are not like most mortals, they have a perfect right to say what they please about anybody and everybody. They and other literary friends have been more than kind to the cause of the children and my unworthy self, for which I thank them from the bottom of my heart. Without their help I could not have got along. I sent the following letter to the Morning Post, bearing date October 11, 1882, relating to “Shooba Rye,” O Bongo, hó, no tïckno chavo:
“Your correspondent complains that I do not know sufficient of the gipsies. My congress papers and my ‘Gipsy Life’ show that I know a little. It is evident I know more than is pleasant to him, or he would not have hastily snatched up some one else’s badly-fitting night-dress to sally forth with his farthing candle in hand to put a ‘sprag’ into my wheel. Such backward movements are too late in the day to stop the sun of civilization and Christianity shedding its rays upon the path of the poor gipsy child and its home.
“I do not pretend to know more than forty years everyday practical observation and insight into the real hard facts of the conditions of the women and children employed in the brickyards and canal boats, and the dwellers in gipsy tents and vans can give me.
“Two days ago I came upon a family of gipsy ‘muggers,’ father, mother, and four children, travelling in a cart. The poor little children, whose ages ranged from four to twelve years, were stived up in a box on the cart, which box was 5 ft. long by 2 ft. 9 in. wide by 3 ft high, or about eleven cubic feet of space for each poor child. The children were all down with a highly infectious disease, carrying it from a village, where it had been raging, to Daventry and Northampton. I gave the children some apples, but the poor things said, ‘We are all ill and cannot eat them.’ None of these children could tell a letter. These are facts and not fiction; inartistically dressed, I admit, and without the flowers of poetical imagination to adorn them. Knowledge gained under the circumstances in which I have been placed, will, I think, be found nearly as valuable in improving the condition of neglected and suffering children as imaginative, unhealthy backwood fiction spun by the yard under drawing-room influences and by the side of drawing-room fires can be. At any rate, I have tried for many long years in my rough way to look at the sad condition of the women and children whose cause I have ventured to take in hand with both eyes open, one to their faults, and the other to their virtues; and also with a heart to feel and a hand to help, as my letters, papers, and books will show to those who have the patience to read them.
“I have not been content to sit upon mossy banks by the side of rippling rivulets, with a lovely sun shining overhead, and beneath the witching looks and mesmeric smiles of lovely damsels, swallowing love and other tales as gospel.
“It is time the hard facts and lot of our gipsies and their children—i.e., those travelling in vans, shows, and tents—were realized. It is time we asked ourselves the question, ‘What are the vast increasing numbers—over 30,000—of children tramping the country being trained for?’
“The fact is this: Parliament, Christians, moralists, and philanthropists have been content for generations to look at the gipsies and other travellers of the class through glasses tinted and prismed with the seven colours of the rainbow, handed to us by those who would keep the children in ignorance and sin, instead of taking them by the hand to help them out of their degrading position. My plan would improve their condition, without interfering with their liberty to any amount worth naming, considering the blessed advantages to be derived by the gipsies and others from it.
“No amount of misleading sentiment will stop me till the case of the poor children is remedied by the civilizing measures of the country—viz., education, sanitation, and moral precepts—extended to them by an Act of Parliament, as I have described in other places, which could be carried out, and a system of free education established, by means of a pass book, without any inconvenience or cost worth mention. Why should our present-day canal and gipsy children be left out in the cold?”