The new clause affecting gipsy children runs thus:
“11. The expressions ‘Canal Boats,’ ‘Canal Boat,’ and ‘Boat,’ in the principal Act and this Act, and also in the regulations of the Local Government Board and Education Department, shall include all travelling and temporary dwellings not rated for the relief of the poor.”
I forwarded copies of the Amended Bill to Sir Charles Dilke, the new President of the Local Government Board, and also to Mr. Mundella, the Vice President of the Committee of Council on Education, and here are their replies. A few days previously I had written to Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Mundella, urging them to take up the Bill; in fact, I have for years been pressing the Government to take up the Bill, as one that will do much good and bring them much credit. Of course I cannot expect them to do impossibilities. I know their hands are full; at the same time the period has come when the sixty thousand canal and gipsy children must be educated and cared for by “hook or by crook,” as being of primary importance for the country’s welfare to the thousand and one things that are now before Parliament.
“Local Government Board, Whitehall,
March 14, 1883.“Dear Sir,
“I have to thank you for the copy of the Bill you have sent to Sir Charles Dilke. In consequence of Mr. Ashton Dilke’s death he will not be present in the House of Commons this week.
“Yours truly,
A. E. C. Bodley.“George Smith, Esq.”
“Privy Council Office,
March 14, 1883.“Sir,
“Mr. Mundella desires me to thank you for sending him a copy of your Canal Boats Act Amendment Bill enclosed in your letter of the 12th inst.
“Yours faithfully,
H. T. Bryant.“George Smith, Esq.”
My days of hard work, and scores of letters written in relation to the questions put to Mr. Dodson and Mr. Mundella, have brought forth the usual molehill of “under consideration.” The political fields of moral and social progress are full of crotchets and molehills. Would to God that either John Bull with his horns or John Straw with his spade would level them to the ground.
At any rate those mountainous molehills, six inches high, which are checking the van of social progress, laden as it is—aye, heaped up—with blessings for the thirty thousand poor little gipsy children who are starving to death in our midst, in the mud, rotten straw, filth, and rags of a soul-perishing and body-killing nature, amidst which the poor gipsy child has to live.
The greatest difficulties I know of are the dung heaps scattered about by sensational trash backwood gipsy writers. I can almost imagine our imported and other Demetriuses and damsels calling out on the steps of St. Stephen’s, Westminster, “Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth.” “Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people.” “Our craft is in danger to be set at nought.” “Let us hang the devil.”
The registration official overcomes “difficulties” when he registers a gipsy hawker’s van in order that he may extract £4 from him; and the policeman overcomes “difficulties” when he brings to bay before a bench of magistrates a gipsy child for stealing a turnip, or a gipsy poacher for making too free with a partridge. There are seas of “difficulties” to be waded through, it would seem, before the gipsy children are to be led to the school doors, and the sanitary inspectors to their suffocating, immoral, and unhealthy homes. It is un-English, wicked, and unjust to deliver the gipsy and other travelling children over to the policeman, without ever having taught them to know right from wrong in day and Sunday schools. A terrible day of reckoning and vengeance awaits us for our wrongdoings towards our present-day English gipsy children, think about it as lightly as we may.
The sanitary inspector steps into lodging-houses to prevent overcrowding. The factory inspector steps, without an invitation, into the workshop to prohibit the overworking of children. The Board of Trade officer will not allow overcrowding of ships, although they may be classed as A1 at Lloyd’s. Overcrowding in barracks and workhouses is not allowed, and the School Board officer steps into a labourer’s household—the head of which, with a large family surrounding him, only earns about 12s. per week—under pain of a fine and the “squire’s” displeasure, and orders the young urchins off “neck and crop” to school; while canal and gipsy children are left out in the cold.