Transcribed from the 1880 Haughton and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

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GIPSY LIFE:

BEING AN ACCOUNT

of

OUR GIPSIES AND THEIR CHILDREN.

with
SUGGESTIONS FOR THEIR IMPROVEMENT.

by
GEORGE SMITH, of Coalville.

london:
HAUGHTON & CO., 10, PATERNOSTER ROW.

[All Rights Reserved.]

1880.

I give my warmest thanks to W. H. Overend, Esq., for the block forming the Frontispiece, which he has kindly presented to me on the condition that the picture occupies the position it does in this book; and also to the proprietor of the Illustrated London News for the blocks to help forward my work, the pictures of which appeared in his journal in November and December of last year and January in the present year, as found herein on pages 42, 48, 66, 76, 96, 108, 118, 122, 174, 192, 236, 283.

I must at the same time express my heart-felt thanks to the manager and proprietors of the Graphic for the blocks forming the illustrations on pages 1, 132, 170, 222, 228, 248, 272, 277, and which appeared in their journal on March 13th in the present year, and which they have kindly presented to me to help forward my object, connected with which sketches, at the kind request of the Editor, I wrote the article.

W. H. Overend, Esq., was the artist for the sketches in the Illustrated London News, and Herbert Johnson, Esq., was the artist for the sketches in the Graphic.

I also tender my warmest thanks to the Press generally for the help rendered to me during the crusade so far, without which I should have done but little.

to the most honourable
THE PEERS AND MEMBERS
of the
HIGH COURT OF PARLIAMENT.

I have taken the liberty of humbly dedicating this work to you, the object of which is not to tickle the critical ears of ethnologists and philologists, but to touch the hearts of my countrymen on behalf of the poor Gipsy women and children and other roadside Arabs flitting about in our midst, in such a way as to command attention to these neglected, dark, marshy spots of human life, whose seedlings have been running wild among us during the last three centuries, spreading their poisonous influence abroad, not only detrimental to the growth of Christianity and the spread of civilisation, but to the present and eternal welfare of the children; and, what I ask for is, that the hand of the Schoolmaster may be extended towards the children; and that the vans and other temporary and movable abodes in which they live may be brought under the eye and influence of the Sanitary Inspector.

Very respectfully yours,
GEORGE SMITH,
Of Coalville.

April 30th, 1880.

INDEX.

Illustrations.

Part I.—Rambles in Gipsydom.

The origin of the Gipsies, as to who they are; when they became regarded as a peculiar race of wandering, wastrel, ragamuffin vagabonds; the primary object they had in view in setting out upon their shuffling, skulking, sneaking, dark pilgrimage; whether they were driven at the point of the sword, or allured onwards by the love of gold, designing dark deeds of plunder, cruelty, and murder, or anxious to seek a haven of rest; the route by which they travelled, whether over hill and dale, by the side of the river and valley, skirting the edge of forest and dell, delighting in the jungle, or pitching their tent in the desert, following the shores of the ocean, or topping the mountains; whether they were Indians, Persians, Egyptians, Ishmaelites, Roumanians, Peruvians, Turks, Hungarians, Spaniards, or Bohemians; the end of their destination; their religious views—if any—their habits and modes of life have been during the last three or four centuries wrapped, surrounded, and encircled in mystery, according to some writers who have been studying the Gipsy character. They have been a theme upon which a “bookworm” could gloat, a chest of secret drawers into which the curious delight to pry, a difficult problem in Euclid for the mathematician to solve; and an unreadable book for the author. A conglomeration of languages for the

scholar, a puzzle for the historian, and a subject for the novelist. These are points which it is not the object of this book to attempt to clear up and settle; all it aims at, as in the case of my “Cry of the Children from the Brick-yards of England,” and “Our Canal Population,” is, to tell “A Dark Chapter in the Annals of the Poor,” little wanderers, houseless, homeless, and friendless in our midst. At the same time it will be necessary to take a glimpse at some of the leading features of the historical part of their lives in order to get, to some extent, a knowledge of the “little ones” whose pitiable case I have ventured to take in hand.

Paint the words “mystery” and “secrecy” upon any man’s house, and you at once make him a riddle for the cunning, envious, and crafty to try to solve; and this has been the case with the Gipsies for generations, and the consequence has been, they have trotted out kings, queens, princes, bishops, nobles, ladies and gentlemen of all grades, wise men, fools, and fanatics, to fill their coffers, while they have been standing by laughing in their sleeves at the foolishness of the foolish.

In Spain they were banished by repeated edicts under the severest penalties. In Italy they were forbidden to remain more than two nights in the same place. In Germany they were shot down like wild beasts. In England during the reign of Elizabeth, it was felony, without the “benefit of the clergy,” to be seen in their company. The State of Orleans decreed that they should be put to death with fire and sword—still they kept coming.

In the last century, however, a change has come over several of the European Governments. Maria Theresa in 1768, and Charles III. of Spain in 1783, took measures for the education of these poor outcasts in the habits of a civilised life with very encouraging results. The experiment is now being tried in Russia with signal success. The emancipation of the Wallachian Gipsies is a fact accomplished, and the best results are being achieved.

The Gipsies have various names assigned to them in different countries. The name of Bohemians was given to them by the French, probably on account of their coming to France from Bohemia. Some derive the word Bohemians from the old French word “Boëm,” signifying a sorcerer. The Germans gave them the name of “Ziegeuner,” or wanderers. The Portuguese named them “Siganos.” The Dutch called them “Heiden,” or heathens. The Danes and Swedes, “Tartars.” In Italy they are called “Zingari.” In Turkey and the Levant, “Tschingenes.” In Spain they are called “Gitanos.” In Hungary and Transylvania, where they are very numerous, they are called “Pharaoh Nepek,” or “Pharaoh’s People.” The notion of their being Egyptian is entirely erroneous—their appearance, manners, and language being totally different from those of either the Copts or Fellahs; there are many Gipsies now in Egypt, but they are looked upon as strangers.

Notwithstanding that edicts have been hurled against them, persecuted and hunted like vermin during the Middle Ages, still they kept coming. Later on, laws more merciful than in former times have taken a more humane view of them and been contented by classing them as “vagrants and scoundrels”—still they came. Magistrates, ministers, doctors, and lawyers have spit their spite at them—still they came; frowning looks, sour faces, buttoned-up pockets, poverty and starvation staring them in the face—still they came. Doors slammed in their faces, dogs set upon their heels, and ignorant babblers hooting at them—still they came; and the worst of it is they are reducing our own “riff-raff” to their level. The novelist has written about them; the preacher has preached against them; the drunkards have garbled them over in their mouths, and yelped out “Gipsy,” and stuttered “scamp” in disgust; the swearer has sworn at them, and our “gutter-scum gentlemen” have told them to “stand off.” These “Jack-o’-th’-Lantern,” “Will-o’-th’-Wisp,” “Boo-peep,” “Moonshine Vagrants,”

“Ditchbank Sculks,” “Hedgerow Rodneys,” of whom there are not a few, are black spots upon our horizon, and are ever and anon flitting before our eyes. A motley crowd of half-naked savages, carrion eaters, dressed in rags, tatters, and shreds, usually called men, women, and children, some running, walking, loitering, traipsing, shouting, gaping, and staring; the women with children on their backs, and in their arms; old men and women tottering along “leaning upon their staffs;” hordes of children following in the rear; hulking men with lurcher dogs at their heels, sauntering along in idleness, spotting out their prey; donkeys loaded with sacks, mules with tents and sticks, and their vans and waggons carrying ill-gotten gain and plunder; and the question arises in the mind of those who take an interest in this singularly unfortunate race of beings: From whence came they? How have they travelled? By what routes did they travel? What is their condition, past and present? How are they to be dealt with in any efforts put forth to improve their condition? These are questions I shall in my feeble way endeavour to solve; at any rate, the two latter questions; the first questions can be dealt better with by abler hands than mine.

I would say, in the first place, that it is my decided conviction that the Gipsies were neither more nor less, before they set out upon their pilgrimage, than a pell-mell gathering of many thousands of low-caste, good for nothing, idle Indians from Hindustan—not ashamed to beg, with some amount of sentiment in their nature, as exhibited in their musical tendencies and love of gaudy colours, and except in rare instances, without any true religious motives or influences. It may be worth while to notice that I have come to the conclusion that they were originally from India by observing them entirely in the light given to me years ago of the different characters of human beings both in Asia, Europe, and Africa. Their habits, manners, and customs, to me, is a sufficient test, without calling in the aid of the

philologist to decide the point of their originality. I may here remark that in order to get at the real condition of the Gipsies as they are at the present day in this country, and not to have my mind warped or biassed in any way, I purposely kept myself in ignorance upon the subject as to what various authors have said either for or against them until I had made my inquiries and the movement had been afloat for several months. The first work touching the Gipsy question I ever handled was presented to me by one of the authors—Mr. Crofton—at the close of my Social Science Congress paper read at Manchester last October, entitled “The Dialect of the English Gipsies,” which work, without any disrespect to the authors—and I know they will overlook this want of respect—remained uncut for nearly two months. With further reference to their Indian origin, the following is an extract from “Hoyland’s Historical Survey,” in which the author says:—“The Gipsies have no writing peculiar to themselves in which to give a specimen of the construction of their dialect. Music is the only science in which the Gipsies participate in any considerable degree; they likewise compose, but it is after the manner of the Eastern people, extempore.” Grellmann asserts that the Hindustan language has the greatest affinity with that of the Gipsies. He also infers from the following consideration that Gipsies are of the lowest class of Indians, namely, Parias, or, as they are called in Hindustan, Suders, and goes on to say that the whole great nation of Indians is known to be divided into four ranks, or stocks, which are called by a Portuguese name, Castes, each of which has its own particular sub-division. Of these castes, the Brahmins is the first; the second contains the Tschechterias, or Setreas; the third consists of the Beis, or Wazziers; the fourth is the caste of the above-mentioned Suders, who, upon the peninsula of Malabar, where their condition is the same as in Hindustan, are called Parias and Pariers. The first were appointed by Brahma to seek after knowledge, to give instruction,

and to take care of religion. The second were to serve in war. The third were, as the Brahmins, to cultivate science, but particularly to attend to the breeding of cattle. The caste of the Suders was to be subservient to the Brahmins, the Tschechterias, and the Beis. These Suders, he goes on to say, are held in disdain, and they are considered infamous and unclean from their occupation, and they are abhorred because they eat flesh; the three other castes living entirely on vegetables. Baldeus says the Parias or Suders are a filthy people and wicked crew. It is related in the “Danish Mission Intelligencer,” nobody can deny that the Parias are the dregs and refuse of all the Indians; they are thievish, and have wicked dispositions. Neuhof assures us, “the Parias are full of every kind of dishonesty; they do not consider lying and cheating to be sinful.” The Gipsy’s solicitude to conceal his language is also a striking Indian trait. Professor Pallas says of the Indians round Astracan, custom has rendered them to the greatest degree suspicious about their language. Salmon says that the nearest relations cohabit with each other; and as to education, their children grow up in the most shameful neglect, without either discipline or instruction. The missionary journal before quoted says with respect to matrimony among the Suders or Gipsies, “they act like beasts, and their children are brought up without restraint or information.” “The Suders are fond of horses, so are the Gipsies.” Grellmann goes on to say “that the Gipsies hunt after cattle which have died of distempers in order to feed on them, and when they can procure more of the flesh than is sufficient for one day’s consumption, they dry it in the sun. Such is the constant custom with the Suders in India.” “That the Gipsies and natives of Hindustan resemble each other in complexion and shape is undeniable. And what is asserted of the young Gipsy girls rambling about with their fathers, who are musicians, dancing with lascivious and indecent gesture to divert any person who is willing to give them a small

gratuity for so acting, is likewise perfectly Indian.” Sonneratt confirms this in the account he gives of the dancing girls of Surat. Fortune-telling is practised all over the East, but the peculiar kind professed by the Gipsies, viz., chiromancy, constantly referring to whether the parties shall be rich or poor, happy or unhappy in marriage, &c., is nowhere met with but in India. Sonneratt says:—“The Indian smith carries his tools, his shop, and his forge about with him, and works in any place where he can find employment. He has a stone instead of an anvil, and his whole apparatus is a pair of tongs, a hammer, a beetle, and a file. This is very much like Gipsy tinkers,” &c. It is usual for Parias, or Suders, in India to have their huts outside the villages of other castes. This is one of the leading features of the Gipsies of this country. A visit to the outskirts of London, where the Gipsies encamp, will satisfy any one upon this point, viz., that our Gipsies are Indians. In isolated cases a strong religious feeling has manifested itself in certain persons of the Bunyan type of character and countenance—a strong frame, with large, square, massive forehead, such as Bunyan possessed; for it should be noted that John Bunyan was a Gipsy tinker, with not an improbable mixture of the blood of an Englishman in his veins, and, as a rule, persons of this mixture become powerful for good or evil. A case in point, viz., Mrs. Simpson and her family, has come under my own observation lately, which forcibly illustrates my meaning, both as regards the evil Mrs. Simpson did in the former part of her life, and for the last twenty years in her efforts to do good among persons of her class, and also among others, as she has travelled about the country. The exodus of the Gipsies from India may be set down, first, to famine, of which India, as we all know, suffers so much periodically; second, to the insatiable love of gold and plunder bound up in the nature of the Gipsies—the West, from an Indian point of view, is always looked upon as a land of gold, flowing with milk and honey; third, the hatred the Gipsies have for wars,

and as in the years of 1408 and 1409, and many years previous to these dates, India experienced some terrible bloody conflicts, when hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were butchered by the cruel monster Timur Beg in cold blood, and during the tenth and eleventh centuries by Mahmood the Demon, on purpose to make proselytes to the Mohammedan faith, it is only natural to suppose that under those circumstances the Gipsies would leave the country to escape the consequences following those calamities, over-populated as it was, numbering close upon 200,000,000 of human beings. [8] I am inclined to think that it

would be hunger and starvation upon their heels that would be the propelling power to send them forward in quest of food. From Attock, Peshawur, Cabul, and Herat, they would tramp through Persia by Teheran, and enter the Euphrates Valley at Bagdad. From Calcutta, Madras, Seringapatam, Bangalore, Goa, Poonah, Hydrabad, Aurungabad, Nagpoor, Jabbulpoor, Benares, Allahabad, Surat, Simla, Delhi, Lahore, they would wander along to the mouth of the river Indus, and commence their journey at Hydrabad, and travelling by the shores of the Indian Ocean, stragglers coming in from Bunpore, Gombaroon, the commencement of the Persian Gulf, when they would travel by Bushino to Bassora. At this place they would begin to scatter themselves over some parts of Arabia, making their headquarters near Molah, Mecca, and other parts of the country, crossing over Suez, and getting into Egypt in large numbers. Others would take the Euphrates Valley route, which, by the way, is the route of the proposed railway to India. Tribes branching off at Kurnah, some to Bagdad, following the course of the river Tigris to Mosul and Diarbeker, and others would go to Jerusalem, Damuscus, and Antioch, till they arrived at Allepo and Alexandretta. Here may be considered the starting-point from which they spread over Asiatic Turkey in large numbers, till they arrived before Constantinople at the commencement of the fourteenth century.

Straggling Gipsies no doubt found their way westward prior to the wars of Timur Beg, and in this view I am supported by the fact that two of our own countrymen—Fitz-Simeon and Hugh the Illuminator, holy friars—on their pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1322, called at Crete, and there found some Gipsies—I am inclined to think only a few sent out as a kind of advance-guard or feeler, adopting the plan they have done subsequently in peopling Europe and England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Brand, in his observations in “Popular Antiquities,” is of opinion also that the Gipsies fled from Hindustan when Timur Beg ravaged India with a view of making Mohammedans of the heathens, and it is calculated that during his deeds of blood he butchered 500,000 Indians. Some writers suppose that the Gipsies, in order to escape the sword of this human monster, came into Europe through Egypt, and on this account were called English Gipsies.

In a paper read by Colonel Herriot before the Royal Asiatic Society, he says that the Gipsies, or Indians—called by some Suders, by others Naths or Benia, the first signifying rogue, the second dancer or tumbler—are to be met in large numbers in that part of Hindustan which is watered by the Ganges, as well as the Malwa, Gujerat, and the Deccan.

The religious crusades to the Holy Land commenced in the year 1095 and lasted to 1270. It was during the latter part of the time of the Crusades, and prior to the commencement of the wars by Timur Beg, that the Gipsies flocked by hundreds of thousands to Asiatic Turkey. While the rich merchants and princes were trying to outvie each other in their costly equipages, grandeur, and display of gold in their pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and the tremendous death-struggles between Christianity, Idolatry, and Mohammedism, the Gipsies were busily engaged in singing songs and plundering, and in this work they were encouraged by the Persians as they passed through their territory. The Persians have always been friendly to these wandering, loafing Indians, for

we find that during the wars of India by Timur Beg, and other monsters previous, they were harbouring 20,000 of these poor low-caste and outcast Indians; and, in fact, the same thing may be said of the other countries they passed through on their way westward, for we do not read of their being persecuted in these countries to anything like the extent they have been in Europe. This, no doubt, arises from the affinity there is between the Indian, Persian, and Gipsy races, and the dislike the Europeans have towards idlers, loafers, liars, and thieves; and especially is this so in England. Gipsy life may find favour in the East, but in the West the system cannot thrive. A real Englishman hates the man who will not work, scorns the man who would tell him a lie, and would give the thief who puts his hands into his pocket the cat-o’-nine-tails most unmercifully. The persecutions of the Gipsies in this country from time to time has been brought about, to a great extent, by themselves. John Bull dislikes keeping the idle, bastard children of other nations. He readily protects all those who tread upon English soil, but in return for this kindness he expects them, like bees, to be all workers. Drones, ragamuffins, and rodneys cannot grumble if they get kicked out of the hive. If 20,000 Englishmen were to tramp all over India, Turkey, Persia, Hungary, Spain, America, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, South Africa, Germany, or France, in bands of from, say two to fifty men, women, and children, in a most wretched; miserable condition, doing little else but fiddling upon the national conscience and sympathies, blood-sucking the hardworking population, and frittering their time away in idleness, pilfering, and filth, I expect, and justly so, the inhabitants would begin to “kick,” and the place would no doubt get rather warm for Mr. John Bull and his motley flock. If the Gipsies, and others of the same class in this country, will begin to “buckle-to,” and set themselves out for real hard work, instead of cadging from door to door, they will find, notwithstanding they are called Gipsies, John Bull

extending to them the hand of brotherhood and sympathy, and the days of persecution passed.

One thing is remarkable concerning the Gipsies—we never hear of their being actually engaged in warfare. They left India for Asiatic Turkey before the great and terrible wars broke out during the fourteenth century, and before the great religious wars concerning the Mohammedan faith in Turkey, during the fourteenth century, they fled to Western Europe. Thus it will be seen that they “would sooner run a mile than fight a minute.” The idea of cold steel in open day frightens them out of their wits. Whenever a war is about to take place in the country in which they are located they will begin to make themselves scarce; and, on the other hand, they will not visit a country where war is going on till after it is over, and then, vulture-like, they swoop down upon the prey. This feature is one of their leading characteristics; with some honourable exceptions, they are always looked upon as long-sighted, dark, deep, designing specimens of fallen humanity. For a number of years prior to the capture of Constantinople by Mohammed II. in 1453 the Gipsies had commenced to wend their way to various parts of Europe. The 200,000 Gipsies who had emigrated to Wallachia and Moldavia, their favourite spot and stronghold, saw what was brewing, and had begun to divide themselves into small bands. A band of 300 of these wanderers, calling themselves Secani, appeared in 1417 at Lüneburg, and in 1418 at Basil and Bern in Switzerland. Some were seen at Augsberg on November 1, 1418. Near to Paris there were to be seen numbers of Gipsies in 1424, 1426, and 1427; but it is not likely they remained long in Paris. Later on we find them at Arnheim in 1429, and at Metz in 1430, Erfurt in 1432, and in Bavaria in 1433. The reason they appeared at these places at those particular times, was, no doubt, owing to the internal troubles of France; for it was during 1429 that Joan of Arc raised the siege of Orleans. The Gipsies appearing

in small bands in various parts of the Continent at this particular time were, no doubt, as Mr. Groom says in his article in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” sent forward by the main body of Gipsies left behind in Asiatic and European Turkey, to spy out the land whither they were anxious to bend their ways; for it was in the year 1438, fifteen years before the terrible struggle by the Mohammedans for Constantinople, that the great exodus of Gipsies from Wallachia, Roumania, and Moldavia, for the golden cities of the West commenced. From the period of 1427 to 1514, a space of about eighty-seven years—except spies—they were content to remain on the Continent without visiting our shores; probably from two causes—first, their dislike to crossing the water; second, the unsettled state of our own country during this period. For it should be remembered that the Wars of the Roses commenced in 1455, Richard III. was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and in 1513 the Battle of Flodden took place in Scotland, in which the Scots were defeated. The first appearance of the Gipsies in large numbers in Great Britain was in Scotland in 1514, the year after the Battle of Flodden. Another remarkable coincidence connected with their appearance in this country came out during my inquiries; but whether there is any foundation for it further than it is an idea floating in my brain I have not yet been able to ascertain, as nothing is mentioned of it in any of the writings I have perused. It seems reasonable to suppose that the Gipsies, would retain and hand down some of their pleasant, as well as some of the bitter, recollections of India, which, no doubt, would at this time be mentioned to persons high in position—it should be noted that the Gipsies at this time were favourably received at certain head-quarters amongst merchants and princes—for we find that within fourteen years after the landing of the Indians upon our shores attempts were made to reach India by the North-east and North-west passages, which proved a disastrous affair. Then, again, in 1579 Sir F. Drake’s expedition set out

for India. In 1589 the Levant Company made a land expedition, and in all probability followed the track by which the Gipsies travelled from India to the Holy Land in the fourteenth century, by the Euphrates valley and Persian Gulf.

Towards the end of the year 1417, in the Hanseatic towns on the Baltic coast and at the mouth of the Elbe, there appeared before the gates of Lüneburg, and later on at Hamburg, Lübeck, Wirmar, Rostock, and Stralsuna, a herd of swarthy and strange specimens of humanity, uncouth in form, hideous in complexion, and their whole exterior shadowed forth the lowest depths of poverty and degradation. A cloak made of the fragments of oriental finery was generally used to disguise the filth and tattered garments of their slight remaining apparel. The women and young children travelled in rude carts drawn by asses or mules; the men trudged alongside, casting fierce and suspicious glances on those they met, thief-like, from underneath their low, projecting foreheads and eyebrows; the elder children, unkempt and half-clad, swarmed in every direction, calling with shrill cries and monkey-like faces and grimaces to the passers-by to their feats of jugglery, craft, and deception. Forsaking the Baltic provinces the dusky band then sought a more friendly refuge in central Germany—and it was quite time they had begun to make a move, for their deeds of darkness had oozed out, and a number of them paid the penalty upon the gallows, and the rest scampered off to Meissen, Leipsic, and Herse. At these places they were not long in letting the inhabitants know, by their depredations, witchcraft, devilry, and other abominations, the class of people they had in their midst, and the result was their speedy banishment from Germany; and in 1418, after wandering about for a few months only, they turned their steps towards Switzerland, reaching Zurich on August 1st, and encamped during six days before the town, exciting much sympathy by their pious tale and sorrowful appearance. In Switzerland the

inhabitants were more gullible, and the soft parts of their nature were easily getatable, and the consequence was the Gipsies made a good thing of it for the space of four years. Soon after leaving Zurich, according to Dr. Mikliosch, the wanderers divided their forces. One detachment crossed the Botzberg and created quite a panic amongst the peaceable inhabitants of Sisteron, who, fearing and imagining all sorts of evils from these satanic-looking people, fed them with a hundred loaves, and induced them, for the good of their health, to make themselves miserably less. We next hear of them in Italy, in 1422. After leaving Asiatic Turkey, and in their wanderings through Russia and Germany, the Asiatic, sanctimonious, religious halo, borrowed from their idolatrous form and notions of the worship of God in the East, had suffered much from exposure to the civilising and Christianising influences of the West; and the result was their leaders decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome to regain, under the cloak of religion, some of the self-imagined lost prestige; and in this they were, at any rate, for a time, successful. On the 11th day of July, 1422, a leader of the Gipsies, named Duke Andrew, arrived at Bologna, with men, women and children, fully one hundred persons, carrying with them, as they alleged, a decree signed by the King of Hungary, permitting them, owing to their return to the Christian faith—stating at the same time that 4,000 had been re-baptised—to rob without penalty or hindrance wherever they travelled during seven years. Here these long-faced, pious hypocrites were in clover, as a reward for their professed re-embracing Christianity. After the expiration of this term they told the open-mouthed inhabitants, as a kind of sweetener, that they were to present themselves to the Pope, and then return to India—aye, with the spoils of their lying campaign, gained by robbing and plundering all they came in contact with. The result of their deceitful, lying expedition to Rome was all they could wish, and they received a fresh passport from

. the Pope, asking for alms from his faithful flock on behalf of these wretches, who have been figuring before western nations of the world—sometimes as kings, counts, martyrs, prophets, witches, thieves, liars, and murderers; sometimes laying their misfortunes at the door of the King of Egypt, the Sultan of Turkey, religious persecution in India, the King of Hungary, and a thousand other Gorgios since them. Sometimes they would appear as renegade Christians, converted heathens, Roman Catholics, in fact, they have been everything to everybody; and, so long as the “grist was coming to the mill,” it did not matter how or by whom it came.

By an ordinance of the State of Orleans in the year 1560 it was enjoined that all those impostors and vagabonds who go tramping about under the name of Bohemians and Egyptians should quit the kingdom, on penalty of the galleys. Upon this they dispersed into lesser companies, and spread themselves over Europe. They were expelled from Spain in 1591. The first time we hear of them in England in the public records was in the year 1530, when they were described by the statute 22 Hen. VIII., cap. 10, as “an outlandish people calling themselves Egyptians. Using no craft nor seat of merchandise, who have come into this realm and gone from shire to shire, and place to place, in great company, and used great subtile, crafty means to deceive the people, bearing them in hand, that they by palmistry could tell men’s and women’s fortunes, and so many times by craft and subtilty have deceived the people of their money, and also have committed many heinous felonies and robberies. Wherefore they are directed to avoid the realm, and not to return under pain of imprisonment and forfeiture of their goods and chattels; and upon their trials for any felony which they may have committed they shall not be entitled to a jury de medietate linguæ.” As if the above enactment was not sufficiently strong to prevent these wretched people multiplying in our midst and carrying on their abominable practices,

it was afterwards enacted by statutes 1 and 2 Ph., and in c. 4 and 5 Eliz., cap. 20, “that if any such person shall be imported into this kingdom, the importer shall forfeit £40. And if the Egyptians themselves remain one month in this kingdom, or if any person being fourteen years old (whether natural-born subject or stranger), which hath been seen or found in the fellowship of such Egyptians, or which hath disguised him or herself like them, shall remain in the same one month, or if several times it is felony, without the benefit of the clergy.”

Sir Matthew Hale informs us that at the Suffolk Assizes no less than thirteen Gipsies were executed upon these statutes a few years before the Restoration. But to the honour of our national humanity—which at the time of these executions could only have been in name and not in reality, for those were the days of bull-fighting, bear-baiting, and like sports, the practice of which in those dark ages was thought to be the highest pitch of culture and refinement—no more instances of this kind were thrown into the balance, for the public conscience had become somewhat awakened; the days of enlightenment had begun to dawn, for by statute 23, George III., cap. 51, it was enacted that the Act of Eliz., cap. 20, is repealed; and the statute 17 George II., cap. 5, regards them under the denomination of “rogues and vagabonds;” and such is the title given to them at the present day by the law of the land—“Rogues and Vagabonds.”

Borrow, in page 10 of his “Bible in Spain,” says: “Shortly after their first arrival in England, which is upwards of three centuries since, a dreadful persecution was raised against them, the aim of which was their utter extermination—the being a Gipsy was esteemed a crime worthy of death, and the gibbets of England groaned and creaked beneath the weight of Gipsy carcases, and the miserable survivors were literally obliged to creep into the earth in order to preserve their lives. But these days passed by; their persecutors became weary of persecuting them; they

showed their heads from the caves where they had hidden themselves; they ventured forth increased in numbers, and each tribe or family choosing a particular circuit, they fairly divided the land amongst them.

“In England the male Gipsies are all dealers in horses [this is not exactly the case with the Gipsies of the present day], and sometimes employ their time in mending the tin and copper utensils of the peasantry; the females tell fortunes. They generally pitch their tents in the vicinity of a village or small town, by the roadside, under the shelter of the hedges and trees. The climate of England is well known to be favourable to beauty, and in no part of the world is the appearance of the Gipsies so prepossessing as in that country. Their complexion is dark, but not disagreeably so; their faces are oval, their features regular, their foreheads rather low, and their hands and feet small.

“The crimes of which these people were originally accused were various, but the principal were theft, sorcery, and causing disease among the cattle; and there is every reason for supposing that in none of these points they were altogether guiltless.

“With respect to sorcery, a thing in itself impossible, not only the English Gipsies, but the whole race, have ever professed it; therefore, whatever misery they may have suffered on that account they may be considered as having called it down upon their own heads.

“Dabbling in sorcery is in some degree the province of the female Gipsy. She affects to tell the future, and to prepare philters by means of which love can be awakened in any individual towards any particular object; and such is the credulity of the human race, even in the more enlightened countries, that the profits arising from their practices are great. The following is a case in point:—Two females, neighbours and friends, were tried some years since in England for the murder of their husbands. It appeared that they were in love with the same individual, and

had conjointly, at various times, paid sums of money to a Gipsy woman to work charms to captivate his affection. Whatever little effect the charm might produce, they were successful in their principal object, for the person in question carried on for some time a criminal intercourse with both. The matter came to the knowledge of the husbands, who, taking means to break off this connection, were respectively poisoned by their wives. Till the moment of conviction these wretched females betrayed neither emotion nor fear; but then their consternation was indescribable, when they afterwards confessed that the Gipsy who had visited them in prison had promised to shield them from conviction by means of her art.

“Poisoning cattle is exercised by them in two ways: by one, they merely cause disease in the animals, with the view of receiving money for curing them upon offering their services. The poison is generally administered by powders cast at night into the mangers of the animals. This way is only practised upon the larger cattle, such as horses and cows. By the other, which they practise chiefly on swine, speedy death is almost invariably produced, the drug administered being of a highly intoxicating nature, and affecting the brain. Then they apply at the house or farm where the disaster has occurred for the carcase of the animal, which is generally given them without suspicion, and then they feast on the flesh, which is not injured by the poison, it only affecting the head.”

In looking at the subject from a plain, practical, common-sense point of view—divested of “opinions,” “surmises,” “technicalities,” “similarities,” certain ethnological false shadows and philological mystifications, the little glow-worm in the hedge-bottom on a dark night, which our great minds have been running after for generations, and “natural consequences,” “objects sought,” and “certain results”—we shall find that the same thing has happened to the Gipsies, or Indians, centuries ago, that has happened to all nations at one

time or other. There can be no doubt but that terrible internal struggles took place, and hundreds of thousands of the inhabitants were butchered in cold blood, in India, during the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries; there can be no question, also, that the 200,000,000 inhabitants, in this over-populated country, would suffer, in various forms, the direst consequences of war, famine, and bloodshed; and, it is more than probable, that hundreds of thousands of the idle, low-caste Indians, too lazy to work, too cowardly to fight in open day, with no honourable ambition or true religious instincts in their nature, other than to aspire to the position similar to bands of Nihilists, Communists, Socialists, or Fenians of the present day, would emigrate to Wallachia, Roumania, or Moldavia, which countries, at that day, were looked upon as England is at the present time. The Gipsies, many centuries ago, as now, did not believe in yokes being placed round their necks. The fact of 200,000 of these emigrants, about whom, after all, there is not much mystery, emigrating to Wallachia in such large numbers, proves to my mind that there was a greater power behind them and before them than is usually supposed to be the case, and than that attending wandering minstrels, impelling them forward. Mohammedism, soldiers, and death would not be looked upon by the Gipsies as pleasant companions. By fleeing for their lives they escaped death, and Wallachia was to the Gipsies, for some time, what America has been to the Fenians—an ark of safety and the land of Nod. Many of the Gipsies themselves imagine that they are the descendants of Ishmael, from the simple fact that it was decreed by God, they say, that his descendants should wander about in tents, and they were to be against everybody, and everybody against them. This erroneous impression wants removing, or the Gipsies will never rise in position.

In no country in the world is there so much caste feeling, devilish jealousy, and diabolical revenge manifested as in

India. These are true types and traits of Indian character, especially of the lower orders and those who have lost caste; the Turks, Arabs, Egyptians, Roumanians, Hungarians, and Spaniards sink into insignificance when compared with the Afghans, Hindus, and other inhabitants of some of the worst parts of India. Any one observing the Gipsies closely, as I have been trying to do for some time, outside their mystery boxes, with their thin, flimsy veil of romance and superstitious turn of their faces, will soon discover their Indian character. Of course their intermixture with Circassians and other nations, in the course of their travels from India, during five or six centuries, till the time they arrived at our doors, has brought, and is still bringing, to the surface the blighted flowers of humanity, whose ancestral tree derived its nourishment from the soil of Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Roumania, Wallachia, Moldavia, Spain, Hungary, Norway, Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as the muddy stream of Gipsyism has been winding its way for ages through various parts of the world; and, I am sorry to say, this little dark stream has been casting forth an unpleasant odour and a horrible stench in our midst, which has so long been fed and augmented by the dregs of English society from Sunday-schools and the hearthstones of pious parents. The different nationalities to be seen among the Gipsies, in their camps and tents, may be looked upon as so many bastard off-shoots from the main trunk of the trees that have been met with in their wanderings.

In no part of the globe, owing principally to our isolation, is the old Gipsy character losing itself among the street-gutter rabble as in our own; notwithstanding this mixture of blood and races, the diabolical Indian elements are easily recognisable in their wigwams. Then, again, their Indian origin can be traced in many of their social habits; among others, they squat upon the ground differently to the Turk, Arab, and other nationalities, who are pointed to by some writers

as being the ancestors of the Gipsies. Their tramping over the hills and plains of India, and exposure to all the changes of the climate, has no doubt fitted them, physically, for the kind of life they are leading in various parts of the world. To-day Gipsies are to be found in almost every part of the civilised countries, between the frozen regions of Siberia and the burning sands of Africa, squatting about in their tents. The treatment of the women and children by the men corresponds exactly with the treatment the women and children are receiving at the hands of the low-caste Indians. The Arabian women, the Turkish women, and Egyptian women, may be said to be queens when set up in comparison with the poor Gipsy woman in this country. In Turkey, Arabia, Egypt, and some other Eastern nations, the women are kept in the background; but among the low-caste Indians and Gipsies the women are brought to the front divested of the modesty of those nations who claim to be the primogenitors of the Gipsy tribes and races. Among the lower orders of Indians, from whom the Gipsies are the outcome, most extraordinary types of characters and countenances are to be seen. Any one visiting the Gipsy wigwams of the present day will soon discover the relationship.

In early life, as among the Indians, some of the girls are pretty and interesting, but with exposure, cruelty, immorality, debauchery, idle and loose habits, the pretty, dark-eyed girl soon becomes the coarse, vulgar woman, with the last trace of virtue blown to the winds. If any one with but little keen sense of observation will peep into a Gipsy’s tent when the man is making pegs and skewers, and contrast him with the low-caste Indian potter at his wheel and the carpenter at his bench—all squatting upon the ground—he will not be long in coming to the conclusion that they are all pretty much of the same family.

Ethnologists and philologists may find certain words used by the Gipsies to correspond with the Indian language, and this adds another proof to those I have already adduced;

but, to my mind, this, after the lapse of so many centuries, considering all the changes that have taken place since the Gipsies emigrated, is not the most convincing argument, any more than our forms of letters, the outcome of hieroglyphics, prove that we were once Egyptians. No doubt, there are a certain few words used by all nations which, if their roots and derivations were thoroughly looked into, a similarity would be found in them. As America, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa have been fields for emigrants from China and Europe during the last century, so, in like manner, Europe was the field for certain low-caste poor emigrants from India during the two preceding centuries, with this difference—the emigrants from India to Europe were idlers, loafers who sought to make their fortunes among the Europeans by practising, without work, the most subtle arts of double-dealing, lying, deception, thieving, and dishonesty, and the fate that attends individuals following out such a course as this has attended the Gipsies in all their wanderings; the consequence has been, the Gipsy emigrants, after their first introduction to the various countries, have, by their actions, disgusted those whom they wished to cheat and rob, hence the treatment they have received. This cannot be said of the emigrant from England to America and our own or other colonies. An English emigrant, on account of his open conduct, straightforward character, and industry, has been always respected. In any country an English emigrant enters, owing to his industrious habits, an improvement takes place. In the country where an Indian emigrant of the Gipsy tribe enters the tendency is the reverse of this, so far as their influence is concerned—downward to the ground and to the dogs they go. In these two cases the difference between civilisation and Christianity and heathenism comes out to a marked degree.

In a leading article in the Edinburgh Review, July, 1878, upon the origin and wanderings of the Gipsies, the following

appears:—“We next encounter them in Corfu, probably before 1346, since there is good reason to believe them to be indicated under the name of homines vageniti in a document emanating from the Empress Catharine of Valois, who died in that year; certainly, about 1370, when they were settled upon a fief recognised as the feudum Acinganorum by the Venetians, who, in 1386, succeeded to the right of the House of Valois in the island. This fief continued to subsist under the lordship of the Barons de Abitabulo and of the House of Prosalendi down to the abolition of feudalism in Corfu in the beginning of the present century. There remain to be noted two important pieces of evidence relating to this period. The first is contained in a charter of Miracco I., Waiwode of Wallachia, dated 1387, renewing a grant of forty ‘tents’ of Gipsies, made by his uncle, Ladislaus, to the monastery of St. Anthony of Vodici. Ladislaus began to reign in 1398. The second consists in the confirmation accorded in 1398 by the Venetian governor of Nanplion of the privileges extended by his predecessors to the Acingani dwelling in that district. Thus we find Gipsies wandering through Crete in 1322, settled in Corfu from 1346, enslaved in Wallachia about 1370, protected in the Peloponnesus before 1398. Nor is there is any reason to believe that their arrival in those countries was a recent one.”

Niebuhr, in his travels through Arabia, met with hordes of these strolling Gipsies in the warm district of Yemen, and M. Sauer in like manner found them established in the frozen regions of Siberia. His account of them, published in 1802, shows the Gipsy to be the same in Northern Russia as with us in England. He describes them as follows:—“I was surprised at the appearance of detached families throughout the Government of Tobolsk, and upon inquiry I learned that several roving companies of these people had strolled into the city of Tobolsk.” The governor thought of establishing a colony of them, but they were too cunning for

the simple Siberian peasant. He placed them on a footing with the peasants, and allotted a portion of land for cultivation with a view of making them useful members of society. They rejected houses even in this severe climate, and preferred open tents or sheds. In Hungary and Transylvania they dwell in tents during the summer, and for their winter quarters make holes ten or twelve feet deep in the earth. The women, one writer says, “deal in old clothes, prostitution, wanton dances, and fortune-telling, and are indolent beggars and thieves. They have few disorders except the measles and small-pox, and weaknesses in their eyes caused by the smoke. Their physic is saffron put into their soup, with bleeding.” In Hungary, as with other nations, they have no sense of religion, though with their usual cunning and hypocrisy they profess the established faith of every country in which they live.

The following is an article taken from the Saturday Review, December 13th, 1879:—“It has been repeated until the remark has become accepted as a sort of truism that the Gipsies are a mysterious race, and that nothing is known of their origin. And a few years ago this was true; but within those years so much has been discovered that at present there is really no more mystery attached to the beginning of those nomads than is peculiar to many other peoples. What these discoveries or grounds of belief are we shall proceed to give briefly, our limits not permitting the detailed citation of authorities. First, then, there appears to be every reason for believing with Captain Richard Burton that the Jats of North-Western India furnished so large a proportion of the emigrants or exiles who, from the tenth century, went out of India westward, that there is very little risk in assuming it as an hypothesis, at least, that they formed the Hauptstamm of the Gipsies of Europe. What other elements entered into these, with whom we are all familiar, will be considered presently. These Gipsies came from India, where caste is established and callings are

hereditary even among out-castes. It is not assuming too much to suppose that, as they evinced a marked aptitude for certain pursuits and an inveterate attachment to certain habits, their ancestors had in these respects resembled them for ages. These pursuits and habits were, that:—They were tinkers, smiths, and farriers. They dealt in horses, and were naturally familiar with them. They were without religion. They were unscrupulous thieves. Their women were fortune-tellers, especially by chiromancy. They ate without scruple animals which had died a natural death, being especially fond of the pig, which, when it has thus been ‘butchered by God,’ is still regarded even by the most prosperous Gipsies in England as a delicacy. They flayed animals, carried corpses, and showed such aptness for these and similar detested callings that in several European countries they long monopolised them. They made and sold mats, baskets, and small articles of wood. They have shown great skill as dancers, musicians, singers, acrobats; and it is a rule almost without exception that there is hardly a travelling company of such performers, or a theatre in Europe or America, in which there is not at least one person with some Romany blood. Their hair remains black to advanced age, and they retain it longer than do Europeans or ordinary Orientals. They speak an Aryan tongue, which agrees in the main with that of the Jats, but which contains words gathered from other Indian sources. Admitting these as the peculiar pursuits of the race, the next step should be to consider what are the principal nomadic tribes of Gipsies in India and Persia, and how far their occupations agree with those of the Romany of Europe. That the Jats probably supplied the main stock has been admitted. This was a bold race of North-Western India which at one time had such power as to obtain important victories over the caliphs. They were broken and dispersed in the eleventh century by Mahmoud, many thousands of them wandering to the West. They were without religion,

‘of the horse, horsey,’ and notorious thieves. In this they agree with the European Gipsy. But they are not habitual eaters of mullo balor, or ‘dead pork;’ they do not devour everything like dogs. We cannot ascertain that the Jat is specially a musician, a dancer, a mat and basket-maker, a rope-dancer, a bear-leader, or a pedlar. We do not know whether they are peculiar in India among the Indians for keeping their hair unchanged to old age, as do pure-blood English Gipsies. All of these things are, however, markedly characteristic of certain different kinds of wanderers, or Gipsies, in India. From this we conclude—hypothetically—that the Jat warriors were supplemented by other tribes.

“Next to the word Rom itself, the most interesting in Romany is Zingan, or Tchenkan, which is used in twenty or thirty different forms by the people of every country, except England, to indicate the Gipsy. An incredible amount of far-fetched erudition has been wasted in pursuing this philological ignis-fatuus. That there are leather-working and saddle-working Gipsies in Persia who call themselves Zingan is a fair basis for an origin of the word; but then there are Tchangar Gipsies of Jat affinity in the Punjab. Wonderful it is that in this war of words no philologist has paid any attention to what the Gipsies themselves say about it. What they do say is sufficiently interesting, as it is told in the form of a legend which is intrinsically curious and probably ancient. It is given as follows in ‘The People of Turkey,’ by a Consul’s Daughter and Wife, edited by Mr. Stanley Lane Poole, London, 1878:—

“‘Although the Gipsies are not persecuted in Turkey, the antipathy and disdain felt for them evinces itself in many ways, and appears to be founded upon a strange legend current in the country. This legend says that when the Gipsy nation were driven out of their country and arrived at Mekran, they constructed a wonderful machine to which a wheel was attached.’ From the context of this imperfectly told story, it would appear as if the Gipsies could not travel further until this wheel should revolve:—‘Nobody appeared to be able to turn it, till in the midst of their vain efforts some evil spirit presented himself under the disguise of a sage, and informed the chief, whose name was Chen, that the wheel would be made to turn only when he had married his sister Guin. The chief accepted the advice, the wheel turned round, and the name of the tribe after this incident became that of the combined names of the brother and sister, Chenguin, the appellation of all the Gipsies of Turkey at the present day.’ The legend goes on to state that, in consequence of this unnatural marriage, the Gipsies were cursed and condemned by a Mohammedan saint to wander for ever on the face of the earth. The real meaning of the myth—for myth it is—is very apparent. Chen is a Romany word, generally pronounced Chone, meaning the moon, while Guin is almost universally rendered Gan or Kan. Kan is given by George Borrow as meaning sun, and we have ourselves heard English Gipsies call it kan, although kam is usually assumed to be right. Chen-kan means, therefore, moon-sun. And it may be remarked in this connection that the Roumanian Gipsies have a wild legend stating that the sun was a youth who, having fallen in love with his own sister, was condemned as the sun to wander for ever in pursuit of her turned into the moon. A similar legend exists in Greenland and the island of Borneo, and it was known to the old Irish. It was very natural that the Gipsies, observing that the sun and moon were always apparently wandering, should have identified their own nomadic life with that of these luminaries. It may be objected by those to whom the term ‘solar myth’ is as a red rag that this story, to prove anything, must first be proved itself. This will probably not be far to seek. If it can be found among any of the wanderers in India, it may well be accepted, until something better turns up, as the possible origin of the greatly disputed Zingan. It is quite as plausible as Dr. Mikliosch’s derivation from the Acingani— ̓Ατσίyανοι—‘an unclean, heretical Christian sect, who dwelt in Phrygia and Lycaonia from the seventh till the eleventh century.’ The mention of Mekran indicates clearly that the moon-sun story came from India before the Romany could have obtained any Greek name. And if the Romany call themselves Jengan, or Chenkan, or Zin-gan, in the East, it is extremely unlikely that they ever received such a name from the Gorgios in Europe.”

Professor Bott, in his “Die Zigeuner in Europa und Asien,” speaks of the Gipsies or Lüry as follows:—“In the great Persian epic, the ‘Shah-Nameh’—in ‘Book of Kings,’ Firdusi—relates an historical tradition to the following effect. About the year 420 a.d., Behrâm Gûr, a wise and beneficent ruler of the Sassanian dynasty, finding that his poorer subjects languished for lack of recreation, bethought himself of some means by which to divert their spirits amid the oppressive cares of a laborious life. For this purpose he sent an embassy to Shankal, King of Canaj and Maharajah of India, with whom he had entered into a strict bond of amity, requesting him to select from among his subjects and transmit to the dominions of his Persian ally such persons as could by their arts help to lighten the burden of existence, and lend a charm to the monotony of toil. The result was the importation of twelve thousand minstrels, male and female, to whom the king assigned certain lands, as well as an ample supply of corn and cattle, to the end that, living independently, they might provide his people with gratuitous amusement. But at the end of one year they were found to have neglected agricultural operations, to have wasted their seed corn, and to be thus destitute of all means of subsistence. Then Behrâm Gûr, being angry, commanded them to take their asses and instruments, and roam through the country, earning a livelihood by their songs. The poet concludes as follows:—‘The Lüry, agreeably to this mandate, now wander about the world in search of employment,

associating with dogs and wolves, and thieving on the road, by day and by night.’” These words were penned nearly nine centuries ago, and correctly describe the condition of one of the wandering tribes of Persia at the present day, and they have been identified by some travellers as members of the Gipsy family.

Dr. Von Bott goes on to say this:—“The tradition of the importation of the Lüry from India is related by no less than five Persian or Arab writers: first, about the year 940 by Hamza, an Arab historian, born at Ispahan; next, as we have seen, by Firdusi; in the year 1126 by the author of the ‘Modjmel-al-Yevaryk;’ in the fifteenth century by Mirkhoud, the historian of the Sassanides. The transplanted musicians are called by Hamza Zuth, and in some manuscripts of Mirkhoud’s history the same name occurs, written, according to the Indian orthography, Djatt. These words are undistinguishable when pronounced, and, in fact, may be looked upon as phonetically equivalent, the Arabic z being the legitimate representative of the Indian dj. Now Zuth or Zatt, as it is indifferently written, is one of the designations of the Syrian Gipsies, and Djatt is the tribal appellative of the ancient Indian race still widely diffused throughout the Punjab and Beloochistan. Thus we find that the modern Lüry, who may, without fear of error, be classed as Persian Gipsies, derive a traditional origin from certain Indian minstrels called by an Arab author of the tenth century Zuth, and by a Persian historian of the fifteenth, Djatt, a name claimed, on the one hand by the Gipsies frequenting the neighbourhood of Damascus, and on the other by a people dwelling in the valley of the Indus.” The Djatts were averse to religious speculation, and rejected all sectarian observances; the Hindu was mystical and meditative, and a slave to the superstitions of caste. From a remote period there were Djatt settlements along the shores of the Persian Gulf, plainly indicating the route by which the Gipsies travelled westward from India, as I have before

intimated, rather than endure the life of an Indian slave under the Mohammedan task-masters. Liberty! liberty! free and wild as partridges, with no disposition to earn their bread by the sweat of the brow, ran through their nature like an electric wire, which the chirp of a hedge-sparrow in spring-time would bring into action, and cause them to bound like wild asses to the lanes, commons, and moors. They have always refused to submit to the Mohammedan faith: in fact, the Djatts have accepted neither Brahma nor Budda, and have never adopted any national religion whatever. The church of the Gipsies, according to a popular saying in Hungary, “was built of bacon, and long ago eaten by the dogs.” Captain Richard F. Burton wrote in 1849, in his work called the “Sindh, and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus:”—“It seems probable, from the appearance and other peculiarities of the race, that the Djatts are connected by consanguinity with that singular race, the Gipsies.” Some writers have endeavoured to prove that the Gipsies were formerly Egyptians; but, from several causes, they have never been able to show conclusively that such was the case. The wandering Gipsies in Egypt, at the present day, are not looked upon by the Egyptians as in any way related to them. Then, again, others have tried to prove that the Gipsies are the descendants of Hagar; but this argument falls to the ground simply because the connecting links have not been found. The two main reasons alleged by Mr. Groom and those who try to establish this theory are, first, that the Ishmaelites are wanderers; second, that they are smiths, or workers in iron and brass. The Mohammedans claim Ishmael as their father, and certainly they would be in a better position to judge upon this point eleven centuries ago then we possibly can be at this late date. And so, in like manner, where it is alleged that the Gipsies sprang from, Roumania, Wallachia, Moldavia, Spain, and Hungary.

The following are specimens of Indian characters, taken

from “The People of India,” prepared under the authority of the Indian Government, and edited by Dr. Forbes Watson, M.A., and Sir John William Kaye, F.R.S. In speaking of the Changars, they say that these Indians have an unenviable character for thieving and general dishonesty, and form one of the large class of unsettled wanderers which, inadmissible to Hinduism and unconverted to the Mohammedan faith, lives on in a miserable condition of life as outcasts from the more civilised communities. Changars are, in general, petty thieves and pickpockets, and have no settled vocation. They object to continuous labour. The women make baskets, beg, pilfer, or sift and grind corn. They have no settled places of residence, and live in small blanket or mat tents, or temporary sheds outside villages. They are professedly Hindus and worshippers of Deree or Bhowanee, but they make offerings at Mohammedan shrines. They have private ceremonies, separate from those of any professed faith, which are connected with the aboriginal belief that still lingers among the descendants of the most ancient tribes of India, and is chiefly a propitiation of malignant demons and malicious sprites. They marry exclusively among themselves, and polygamy is common. In appearance, both men and women are repulsively mean and wretched; the features of the women in particular being very ugly, and of a strong aboriginal type. The Changars are one of the most miserable and useless of the wandering tribes of the upper provinces. They feed, as it were, on the garbage left by others, never changing, never improving, never advancing in the social rank, scale, or utility—outcast and foul parasites from the earliest ages, and they so remain. The Changars, like other vagrants, are of dissolute habits, indulging freely in intoxicating liquors, and smoking ganjia, or cured hemp leaves, to a great extent. Their food can hardly be particularised, and is usually of the meanest description; occasionally, however, there are assemblies of the caste, when sheep are killed and eaten; and at marriages

and other domestic occurrences feasts are provided, which usually end in foul orgies. In the clothes and person the Changars are decidedly unclean, and indeed, in most respects the repulsiveness of the tribes can hardly be exceeded.

The Doms are a race of Gipsies found from Central India to the far Northern frontier, where a portion of their early ancestry appear as the Domarr, and are supposed to be pre-Aryan. In “The People of India,” we are told that the appearance and modes of life of the Doms indicate a marked difference from those who surround them (in Behar). The Hindus admit their claim to antiquity. Their designation in the Shastras is Sopuckh, meaning dog-eater. They are wanderers, they make baskets and mats, and are inveterate drinkers of spirits, spending all their earnings on it. They have almost a monopoly as to burning corpses and handling all dead bodies. They eat all animals which have died a natural death, and are particularly fond of pork of this description. “Notwithstanding profligate habits, many of them attain the age of eighty or ninety; and it is not till sixty or sixty-five that their hair begins to get white.” The Domarr are a mountain race, nomads, shepherds, and robbers. Travellers speak of them as “Gipsies.” A specimen which we have of their language would, with the exception of one word, which is probably an error of the transcriber, be intelligible to any English Gipsy, and be called pure Romany. Finally, the ordinary Dom calls himself a Dom, his wife a Domni, and the being a Dom, or the collective Gipsydom, Domnipana. D in Hindustani is found as r in English Gipsy speech—e.g., doi, a wooden spoon, is known in Europe as roi. Now in common Romany we have, even in London:—

Of this word rom we shall more to say. It may be observed that there are in the Indian Dom certain distinctly-marked and degrading features, characteristic of the European Gipsy, which are out of keeping with the habits of warriors, and of a daring Aryan race which withstood the caliphs. Grubbing in filth as if by instinct, handling corpses, making baskets, eating carrion, living for drunkenness, does not agree with anything we can learn of the Jats. Yet the European Gipsies are all this, and at the same time ‘horsey’ like the Jats. Is it not extremely probable that during the “out-wandering” the Dom communicated his name and habits to his fellow-emigrants?

The marked musical talent characteristic of the Slavonian and other European Gipsies appears to link them with the Lüri of Persia. These are distinctly Gipsies; that is to say, they are wanderers, thieves, fortune-tellers, and minstrels. The Shah-Nameh of Firdusi tells us that about the year 420 a.d., Shankal, the Maharajah of India, sent to Behram Gour, a ruler of the Sassanian dynasty in Persia, ten thousand minstrels, male and female, called Lüri. Though lands were allotted to them, with corn and cattle, they became from the beginning irreclaimable vagabonds. Of their descendants, as they now exist, Sir Henry Pottinger says:—

“They bear a marked affinity to the Gipsies of Europe.” [“Travels in Beloochistan and Scinde,” p. 153.] “They speak a dialect peculiar to themselves, have a king to each troupe, and are notorious for kidnapping and pilfering. Their principal pastimes are drinking, dancing, and music. . . . They are invariably attended by half a dozen of bears and monkeys that are broken in to perform all manner of grotesque tricks. In each company there are always two or three members who profess . . . modes of divining which procure them a ready admission into every society.” This account, especially with the mention of trained bears and monkeys, identifies them with the Ricinari, or bear-leading

Gipsies of Syria (also called Nuri), Turkey, and Roumania. A party of these lately came to England. We have seen these Syrian Ricinari in Egypt. They are unquestionably Gipsies, and it is probable that many of them accompanied the early migration of Jats and Doms.

The following is the description of another low-caste, wandering tribe of Indians, taken from “The People of India,” called “Sanseeas,” vagrants of no particular creed, and make their head-quarters near Delhi. The editor, speaking of this tribe, says that they have been vagrants from the earliest periods of Indian history. They may have accompanied Aryan immigrants or invaders, or they may have risen out of aboriginal tribes; but whatever their origin, they have not altered in any respect, and continue to prey upon its population as they have ever done, and will continue to do as long as they are in existence, unless they are forcibly restrained by our Government and converted, as the Thugs have been, into useful members of society.

They are essentially outcasts, admitted to no other caste fellowship, ministered to by no priests, without any ostensible calling or profession, totally ignorant of everything but their hereditary crime, and with no settled place of residence whatever; they wander as they please over the land, assuming any disguise they may need, and for ever preying upon the people. When they are not engaged in acts of crime, they are beggars, assuming various religious forms, or affecting the most abject poverty. The women and children have the true whine of the professional mendicant, as they frequent thronged bazaars, receiving charity and stealing what they can. They sell mock baubles in some instances, but only as a cloak to other enterprises, and as a pretence of an honest calling. The men are clever at assuming disguises; and being often intelligent and even polite in their demeanour, can become religious devotees, travelling merchants, or whatever they need to further their ends. They are perfectly unscrupulous and very daring in their proceedings.

The Sanseeas are not only Thugs and Dacoits, but kidnappers of children, and in particular of female children, who are readily sold even at very tender ages to be brought up as household slaves, or to be educated by professional classes for the purpose of prostitution. These crimes are the peculiar offence of the women members of the tribe. Generally a few families in company wander over the whole of Northern India, but are also found in the Deccan, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in association with Khimjurs, or a class of Dacoits, called Mooltanes. It is, perhaps, a difficult question for Government to deal with, but it is not impossible, as the Thugs have been employed in useful and profitable arts, and thus reclaimed from pursuits in which they have never known in regard to others the same instincts of humanity which exist among ourselves. Sanseeas have as many wives and concubines as they can support. Some of the women are good-looking, but with all classes, women and men, exists an appearance of suspicion in their features which is repulsive. They are, as a class, in a condition of miserable poverty, living from hand to mouth, idle, disreputable, restless, without any settled homes, and for the most part without even habitations. They have no distinct language of their own, but speak a dialect of Rajpootana, which is disguised by slang or argot terms of their own that is unintelligible to other classes. In “The People of India” mention is made of another class of wandering Indians, called Nuts, or Nâths, who correspond to the European Gipsy tribes, and like these, have no settled home. They are constant thieves. The men are clever as acrobats. The women attend their performances, and sing or play on native drums or tambourines. The Nuts do not mix with or intermarry with other tribes. They live for the most part in tents made of black blanket stuff, and move from village to village through all parts of the country. They are as a marked race, and generally distrusted wherever they go.

They are musicians, dancers, conjurers, acrobats, fortune-tellers, blacksmiths, robbers, and dwellers in tents. They eat everything, except garlic. There are also in India the Banjari, who are spoken of by travellers as “Gipsies.” They are travelling merchants or pedlars. Among all of these wanderers there is a current slang of the roads, as in England. This slang extends even into Persia. Each tribe has its own, but the general name for it is Rom.

It has never been pointed out, however, that there is in Northern and Central India a distinct tribe, which is regarded even by the Nats and Doms and Jats themselves, as peculiarly and distinctly Gipsy. “We have met,” says one writer, “in London with a poor Mohammedan Hindu of Calcutta. This man had in his youth lived with these wanderers, and been, in fact, one of them. He had also, as is common with intelligent Mohammedans, written his autobiography, embodying in it a vocabulary of the Indian Gipsy language. This MS. had unfortunately been burned by his English wife, who informed the writer that she had done so ‘because she was tired of seeing a book lying about which she could not understand.’ With the assistance of an eminent Oriental scholar who is perfectly familiar with both Hindustani and Romany, this man was carefully examined. He declared that these were the real Gipsies of India, ‘like English Gipsies here.’ ‘People in India called them Trablus or Syrians, a misapplied word, derived from a town in Syria, which in turn bears the Arabic name for Tripoli. But they were, as he was certain, pure Hindus, and not Syrian Gipsies. They had a peculiar language, and called both this tongue and themselves Rom. In it bread was called Manro.’ Manro is all over Europe the Gipsy word for bread. In English Romany it is softened into maro or morro. Captain Burton has since informed us that manro is the Afghan word for bread; but this our ex-Gipsy did not know. He merely said that he did not know it in any Indian dialect except that of the

Rom, and that Rom was the general slang of the road, derived, as he supposed, from the Trablus.”

These are, then, the very Gipsies of Gipsies in India. They are thieves, fortune-tellers, and vagrants. But whether they have or had any connection with the migration to the West we cannot establish. Their language and their name would seem to indicate it; but then it must be borne in mind that the word Rom, like Dom, is one of wide dissemination, Dom being a Syrian Gipsy word for the race. And the very great majority of even English Gipsy words are Hindu, with an admixture of Persian, and not belonging to a slang of any kind. As in India, churi is a knife, nak, the nose, balia, hairs, and so on, with others which would be among the first to be furnished with slang equivalents. And yet these very Gipsies are Rom, and the wife is a Romni, and they use words which are not Hindu in common with European Gipsies. It is therefore not improbable that in these Trablus, so called through popular ignorance, as they are called Tartars in Egypt and Germany, we have a portion at least of the real stock. It is to be desired that some resident in India would investigate the Trablus.

Grellmann in his German treatise on Gipsies, says:—“They are lively, uncommonly loquacious and chattering, fickle in the extreme, consequently inconstant in their pursuits, faithless to everybody, even their own kith and kin, void of the least emotion of gratitude, frequently rewarding benefits with the most insidious malice. Fear makes them slavishly compliant when under subjection, but having nothing to apprehend, like other timorous people, they are cruel. Desire of revenge often causes them to take the most desperate resolutions. To such a degree of violence is their fury sometimes excited, that a mother has been known in the excess of passion to take her small infant by the feet, and therewith strike the object of her anger. They are so addicted to drinking as to sacrifice what is most necessary

to them that they may feast their palates with ardent spirits. Nothing can exceed the unrestrained depravity of manners existing among them. Unchecked by any idea of shame they give way to every libidinous desire. The mother endeavours by the most scandalous arts to train up her daughter for an offering to sensuality, and she is scarcely grown up before she becomes the seducer of others. Laziness is so prevalent among them that were they to subsist by their own labour only, they would hardly have bread for two of the seven days in the week. This indolence increases their propensity to stealing and cheating. They seek to avail themselves of every opportunity to satisfy their lawless desires. Their universal bad character, therefore, for fickleness, infidelity, ingratitude, revenge, malice, rage, depravity, laziness, knavery, thievishness, and cunning, though not deficient in capacity and cleverness, renders them people of no use in society. The boys will run like wild things after carrion, let it stink ever so much, and where a mortality happens among the cattle, there these wretched creatures are to be found in the greatest numbers.”

So devilish are their hearts, deep-rooted their revenge, and violent their language under its impulse, that it is woe to the man who comes within their clutches, if he does not possess an amount of tact sufficient to cope with them. A man who desires to tackle the Gipsies must have his hands out of his pockets, “all his buttons on,” “his head screwed upon the right place,” and no fool, or he will be swamped before he leaves the place. This I experienced myself a week or two since. During the months of November and December of last year, my friend, the Illustrated London News, had a number of faithful sketches showing Gipsy life round London; these, it seems, with the truthful description I have given of the Gipsies, in my letters, papers, &c., encouraged by the untruthful, silly, and unwise remarks of a clergyman, not overdone with too much wisdom and

common sense, residing in the neighbourhood of N--- Hill, seemed to have raised the ire of the Gipsies in the neighbour hood of L--- Road (I will not go so far as to say that the minister of Christ Church did it designedly, if he did, and with the idea of stopping the work of education among the Gipsy children—it is certain that this farthing rushlight has mistaken his calling) to such an extent that a friend wrote to me, stating that the next time I went to the neighbourhood of N--- Hill I “must look out for a warm reception,” to which I replied, that “the sooner I had it the better, and I would go for it in a day or two;” accordingly I went, believing in the old Book, “Resist the devil and he will flee from thee.” Upon my first approach towards them, I was met with sour looks, scowls, and not over polite language, but with a little pleasantry, chatting, and a few little things, such as Christmas cards, oranges to give to the children, the sun began to beam upon their countenances, and all passed off with smiles, good humour, and shakes of the hands, till I came to a man who had the colour and expression upon his face of his satanic majesty from the regions below. It took me all my time to smile and say kind things while he was pacing up and down opposite his tent, with his hands clenched, his eye like fire, step quick, reminding me of Indian revenge. He was speaking out in no unmistakable language, “I should like to see you hung like a toad by the neck till you are dead, that I should, and I mean it from my heart.” When I asked him to point out anything I had said or done that was not correct, he was in a fix, and all he could say was, that “I would be likely to stop his game.” Every now and then he would thrust his hands into his pockets, as if feeling for his clasp-knife, and then again, occasionally, he would give a shrug of the shoulders, as if he felt not at all satisfied. I felt in my pocket, and opened my small penknife. I thought it might do a little service in case he should “close in upon me.” Just to feel his pulse, and set his heart a beating, I told him, good-humouredly, that

“I was not afraid of half-a-dozen better men than he was if they would come one at a time, but did not think I could tackle them all at once.” This caused him to open his eyes wider than I had seen them before, as if in wonder and amazement at the kind of fellow he had come in contact with. I told him I was afraid that he would find me a queer kind of customer. Gipsies as a rule are cowards, and this feature I could see in his actions and countenance. However, after talking matters over for some time we parted friends, feeling thankful that the storm had abated.

The Gipsies plan of attacking a house, town, city, or country for the sake of pillage, plunder, and gain remains the same to-day as it did eight centuries ago. They do not generally resort to open violence as the brigands of Spain, Turkey and other parts of the East. They follow out an organised system, at least, they go to work upon different lines. In the first place, they send a kind of advance-guard to find out where the loot and soft hearts lay and the weaknesses of those who hold them, and when this has been done they bring all the arts their evil disposition can devise to bear upon the weak points till they are successful. When Mahmood was returning with his victorious army from the war in the eleventh century with the spoils and plunder of war upon their backs, and while the soldiers were either lain down to rest or allured away with the Gipsy girls’ “witching eyes,” the old Gipsies, numbering some hundreds, who where camping in the neighbourhood, bolted off with their war prizes; this so enraged Mahmood, after finding out that he had been sold by a lot of low-caste Indians or Gipsies, that he sent his army after them and slew the whole band of these wandering Indians.

Sometimes they will put on a hypocritical air of religious sanctity; at other times they will dress their prettiest girls in Oriental finery and gaudy colours on purpose to catch the unwary; at other times they will try to lay hold of the

sympathic by sending out their old women and tottering men dressed in rags; and at other times they will endeavour to lay hold of the benevolent by sending out women heavily laden with babies, and in this way they have Gipsyised and are still Gipsyising our own country from the time they landed in Scotland in the year 1514, until they besieged London now more than two centuries ago, planting their encampments in the most degraded parts on the outskirts of our great city; and this holds good of them even to this day. They are never to be seen living in the throng of a town or in the thick of a fight. In sketching the plan of campaigning for the day, the girls with pretty “everlasting flowers” go in one direction, the women with babies tackle the tradesmen and householders by selling skewers, clothes-pegs, and other useful things, but in reality to beg, and the old women with the assistance of the servant girls face the brass knockers through the back kitchen. The men are all this time either loitering about the tents or skulking down the lanes spotting out their game for the night, with their lurcher dogs at their heels. Thus the Gipsy lives and thus the Gipsy dies, and is buried like a dog; his tent destroyed, and his soul flown to another world to await the reckoning day. He can truthfully say as he leaves his tenement of clay behind, “No man careth for my soul.” Charles Wesley, no doubt, in his day, had seen vast numbers of these wandering English heathens in various parts of the country as he travelled about on his missionary tour, and it is not at all improbable but that they were in his mind when those soul-inspiring, elevating, and tear-fetching lines were penned by him in 1748, and first published by subscription in his “Hymns and Sacred Poems,” 2 vols., 1749, the profits of which enabled him to get a wife and set up housekeeping on his own account at Bristol. They are words that have healed thousands of broken hearts, fixed the hopes of the downcast on heaven, and sent the sorrowful on his way rejoicing; and they are words that will live as

long as there is a Methodist family upon earth to lisp its song of triumph.

“Come on, my partners in distress,
My comrades through the wilderness,
Who still your bodies feel;
A while forget your griefs and fears,
And look beyond this vale of tears,
To that celestial hill.

“Beyond the bounds of time and space,
Look forward to that heavenly place,
The saints’ secure abode;
On faith’s strong eagle-pinions rise,
And force your passage to the skies,
And scale the mount of God.

“Who suffer with our Master here,
We shall before His face appear,
And by His side sit down;
To patient faith the prize is sure;
And all that to the end endure
The cross, shall wear the crown.”

It is impossible to give anything like a correct number of Gipsies that are outside Europe. Many travellers have attempted to form some idea of the number, and have come to the conclusion that there were not less than 3,000 families in Persia in 1856, and in 1871 there were not less than 67,000 Gipsies in Armenia and Asiatic Turkey. In Egypt of one tribe only there are 16,000. With regard to the number of Gipsies there are in America no one has been able to compute; but by this time the number must be considerable, for stragglers have been wending their way there from England, Europe, and other parts of the world for some time.

Mikliosch, in 1878, stated that there are not less than 700,000 in Europe. Turkey, previous to the war with Russia, 104,750, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1874 contained 9,537. Servia in 1874 had 24,691; in 1873 Montenegro

had 500, and in Roumania there are at the present time from 200,000 to 300,000. According to various official estimates in Austria there are about 10,000, and in 1846 Bohemia contained 13,500, and Hungary 159,000. In Transylvania in 1850 there were 78,923, and in Hungary proper there were in 1864, 36,842. In Spain there are 40,000; in France from 3,000 to 6,000; in Germany and Italy, 34,000; Scandinavia, 1,500; in Russia they numbered in 1834, 48,247, exclusive of Polish Gipsies. Ten years later they numbered 1,427,539, and in 1877 the number is given as 11,654. It seems somewhat strange that the number of Gipsies should be in 1844, 1,427,539, and thirty-five years later the number should have been reduced to 11,654. Presuming these figures to be correct, the question arises, What has become of the 1,415,885 during the last thirty-five years?

As regards the number of Gipsies in England, Hoyland in his day, 1816, calculated that there were between 15,000 and 18,000, and goes on to say this:—“It has come to the knowledge of the writer what foundation there has been for the report commonly circulated that a member of Parliament had stated in the House of Commons, when speaking on some question relating to Ireland, that there were not less than 36,000 Gipsies in Great Britain.

“To make up such an aggregate the numerous hordes must have been included who traverse most of the nation with carts and asses for the sale of earthenware, and live out of doors great part of the year, after the manner of the Gipsies. These potters, as they are commonly called, acknowledge that Gipsies have intermingled with them, and their habits are very similar. They take their children along with them on travel, and, like the Gipsies, regret that they are without education.” Mr. Hoyland says that he endeavoured to obtain the number of pot-hawking families of this description who visited the earthenware manufactories at Tunstall, Burslem, Longport, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent,

Fenton, Longton, and other places in Staffordshire, but without success.

Borrow, in his time, 1843, put the number as upwards of 10,000. The last census shows that there were under 4,000; but then it should be borne in mind that the Gipsies decidedly objected to their numbers being taken. Their reason for taking this step and putting obstacles in the way of the census-takers has never been stated, except that they looked upon it with a superstitious regard and dislike, the same as they look upon photographers, painters, and artists, as kind of Bengaw, for whom Gipsy models will sit for soonakei, Roopeno, or even a posh-hovi. They told me that during the day the census was taken they made it a point to always be upon the move, and skulking about in the dark. The census returns for the number of canal-boatmen gives under 12,000. The Duke of Richmond stated in the House of Lords, August 8, 1877, that there were between 29,000 and 80,000 canal boatmen. The number I published in the daily papers in 1873, viz., 100,000 men, women, and children is being verified as the Canal Boats Act is being put into operation.

At a pretty good rough estimate I reckon there are at least from 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsies in the United Kingdom. Apart from London, if I may take ten of the Midland counties as a fair average, there are close upon 3,000 Gipsy families living in tents and vans in the by-lanes, and attending fairs, shows, &c.; and providing there are only man, wife, and four children connected with each charmless, cheerless, wretched abodes called domiciles, this would show us 18,000; and judging from my own inquiries and observation, and also from the reliable statements of others who have mixed among them, there are not less than 2,000 on the outskirts of London in various nooks, corners, and patches of open spaces. Thus it will be seen, according to this statement, we shall have 1,000 Gipsies for every 1,750,000 of the inhabitants in our great London; and this proportion will be fully borne out throughout the rest of the country;

so taking either the Midland counties or London as an average, we arrive at pretty much the same number—i.e., 15,000 to 20,000 in our midst, and moving about from place to place. Upon Leicester Race Course, at the last races, I counted upwards of ninety tents, vans, and shows; connected with each there would be an average of man, woman, and three children. A considerable number of Gipsies would also be at Nottingham, for the Goose Fair was on about the same time. One gentleman tells me that he has seen as many as 5,000 Gipsies collected together at one time in the North of England.

Of this 20,000, 19,500 cannot read a sentence and write a letter. The highest state of their education is to make crosses, signs, and symbols, and to ask people to tell them the names of the streets, and read the mile-posts for them. The full value of money they know perfectly well. Out of this 20,000 there will be 8,000 children of school age loitering about the tents and camps, and not learning a single letter in the alphabet. The others mostly will tell you that they have “finished their education,” and when questioned on the point and asked to put three letters together, you put them into a corner, and they are as dumb as mutes. Of the whole number of Gipsy children probably a few hundreds might be attending Sunday-schools, and picking up a few crumbs of education in this way. Then, again, we have some 1,500 to 2,000 families of our own countrymen travelling about the country with their families selling hardware and other goods, from Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds, Leicester, the Staffordshire potteries, and other manufacturing towns, from London, Liverpool, Nottingham, and other places, the children running wild and forgetting in the summer, as a show-woman told me, the little education they receive in the winter.

Caravans will be moving about in our midst with “fat babies,” “wax-work models,” “wonders of the age,” “the greatest giant in the world,” “a living skeleton,” “the

smallest man alive,” “menageries,” “wild beast shows,” “rifle galleries,” and like things connected with these caravans; there will be families of children, none of whom, or at any rate but very few of them, are receiving an education and attending any school, and living together regardless of either sex or age, in one small van. In addition to these, we have some 3,000 or 4,000 children of school age “on the road” tramping with their parents, who sleep in common lodging-houses, and who might be brought under educational supervision on the plan I shall suggest later on in this book. Altogether, with the Gipsies, we have a population of over 30,000 outside our educational and sanitary laws, fast drifting into a state of savagery and barbarism, with our hands tied behind us, and unable to render them help.

“I was a bruised reed
Pluck’d from the common corn,
Play’d on, rude-handled, worn,
And flung aside, aside.”

Dr. Grosart, “Sunday at Home.”

Part II.
Commencement of the Gipsy Crusade.

When as a lad I trudged along in the brick-yards, now more than forty years ago, I remember most vividly that the popular song of the employés of that day was

“When lads and lasses in their best
Were dress’d from top to toe,
In the days we went a-gipsying
A long time ago;
In the days we went a-gipsying,
A long time ago.”

Every “brick-yard lad” and “brick-yard wench” who would not join in singing these lines was always looked upon as a “stupid donkey,” and the consequence was that upon all occasions, when excitement was needed as a whip, they were “struck up;” especially would it be the case when the limbs of the little brick and clay carrier began to totter and were “fagging up.” When the task-master perceived the “gang” had begun to “slinker” he would shout out at the top of his voice, “Now, lads and wenches, strike up with the:

“‘In the days we went a-gipsying, a long time ago.’”

And as a result more work was ground out of the little English slave. Those words made such an impression upon me at the time that I used to wonder what “gipsying” meant. Somehow or other I imagined that it was connected with fortune-telling, thieving and stealing in one form or other, especially as the lads used to sing it with “gusto”

when they had been robbing the potato field to have “a potato fuddle,” while they were “oven tenting” in the night time. Roasted potatoes and cold turnips were always looked upon as a treat for the “brickies.” I have often vowed and said many times that I would, if spared, try to find out what “gipsying” really was. It was a puzzle I was always anxious to solve. Many times I have been like the horse that shies at them as they camp in the ditch bank, half frightened out of my wits, and felt anxious to know either more or less of them. From the days when carrying clay and loading canal-boats was my toil and “gipsying” my song, scarcely a week has passed without the words

“When lads and lasses in their best
Were dress’d from top to toe,
In the days we went a-gipsying
A long time ago,”

ringing in my ears, and at times when busily engaged upon other things, “In the days we went a-gipsying” would be running through my mind. In meditation and solitude; by night and by day; at the top of the hill, and down deep in the dale; in the throng and battle of life; at the deathbed scene; through evil report and good report these words, “In the days we went a-gipsying,” were ever and anon at my tongue’s end. The other part of the song I quickly forgot, but these words have stuck to me ever since. On purpose to try to find out what fortune-telling was, when in my teens I used to walk after working hours from Tunstall to Fenton, a distance of six miles, to see “old Elijah Cotton,” a well-known character in the Potteries, who got his living by it, to ask him all sorts of questions. Sometimes he would look at my hands, at other times he would put my hand into his, and hold it while he was reading out of the Bible, and burning something like brimstone-looking powder—the forefinger of the other hand had to rest upon a particular passage or verse; at other times he would give me some of this

yellow-looking stuff in a small paper to wear against my left breast, and some I had to burn exactly as the clock struck twelve at night, under the strictest secrecy. The stories this fortune-teller used to relate to me as to his wonderful power over the spirits of the other world were very amusing, aye, and over “the men and women of this generation.” He was frequently telling me that he had “fetched men from Manchester in the dead of the night flying through the air in the course of an hour;” and this kind of rubbish he used to relate to those who paid him their shillings and half-crowns to have their fortunes told. My visits lasted for a little time till he told me that he could do nothing more, as I was “not one of his sort.” Like Thomas called Didymus, “hard of belief.” Except an occasional glance at the Gipsies as I have passed them on the road-side, the subject has been allowed to rest until the commencement of last year, when I mentioned the matter to my friends, who, in reply, said I should find it a difficult task; this had the effect of causing a little hesitation to come over my sensibilities, and in this way, between hesitation and doubt, matters went on till one day in July last year, when the voice of Providence and the wretched condition of the Gipsy children seemed to speak to me in language that I thought it would be perilous to disregard. On my return home one evening I found a lot of Gipsies in the streets; it struck me very forcibly that the time for action had now arrived, and with this view in mind I asked Moses Holland—for that was his name, and he was the leader of the gang—to call into my house for some knives which required grinding, and while his mate was grinding the knives, for which I had to pay two shillings, I was getting all the information I could out of him about the Gipsy children—this with some additional information given to me by Mr. Clayton and several other Gipsies at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, together with a Gipsy woman’s tale to my wife, mentioned in my “Cry of the Children from the Brick-yards

of England,” brought forth my first letter upon the condition of the poor Gipsy children as it appeared in the Standard, Daily Chronicle, and nearly every other daily paper on August 14th of last year:—“Some years since my attention was drawn to the condition of these poor neglected children, of whom there are many families eking out an existence in the Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Staffordshire lanes. Two years since a pitiful appeal was made in one of our local papers asking me to take up the cause of the poor Gipsy children; but I have deferred doing so till now, hoping that some one with time and money at his disposal would come to the rescue. Sir, a few weeks since our legislators took proper steps to prevent the maiming of the little show children, who are put through excruciating practices to please a British public, and they would have done well at the same time if they had taken steps to prevent the warping influence of a vagrant’s life having its full force upon the tribes of little Gipsy children, dwelling in calico tents, within the sound of church bells—if living under the body of an old cart, protected by patched coverlets, can be called living in tents—on the roadside in the midst of grass, sticks, stones, and mud; and they would have done well also if they had put out their hand to rescue from idleness, ignorance, and heathenism our roadside arabs, i.e., the children living in vans, and who attend fairs, wakes, &c. Recently I came across some of these wandering tribes, and the following facts gleaned from them will show that missionaries and schoolmasters have not done much for them. Moses Holland, who has been a Gipsy nearly all his life, says he knows about two hundred and fifty families of Gipsies in ten of the Midland counties and thinks that a similar proportion will be found in the rest of the United Kingdom. He has seen as many as ten tents of Gipsies within a distance of five miles. He thinks there will be an average of five children in each tent. He has seen as many as ten or twelve children in some tents, and not many of

them able to read or write. His child of six months old—with his wife ill at the same time in the tent—sickened, died, and was ‘laid out’ by him, and it was also buried out of one of those wretched abodes on the roadside at Barrow-upon-Soar, last January. When the poor thing died he had not sixpence in his pocket. In shaking hands with him as we parted his face beamed with gladness, and he said that I was the first who had held out the hand to him during the last twenty years. At another time later on I came across Bazena Clayton, who said that she had had sixteen children, fifteen of whom are alive, several of them being born in a roadside tent. She says that she was married out of one of these tents; and her brother died and was buried out of a tent at Packington, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch. This poor woman knows about three hundred families of Gipsies in eleven of the Midland and Eastern counties, and has herself, so she says, four lots of Gipsies travelling in Lincolnshire at the present time. She said she could not read herself, and thinks that not one Gipsy in twenty can. She has travelled all her life. Her mother, named Smith, of whom there are not a few, is the mother of fifteen children, all of whom were born in a tent. A Gipsy lives, but one can scarcely tell how; they generally locate for a time near hen-roosts, potato-camps, turnip-fields, and game-preserves. They sell a few clothes-lines and clothes-pegs, but they seldom use such things themselves. Washing would destroy their beauty. Telling fortunes to servant girls and old maids is a source of income to some of them. They sleep, but in many instances lie crouched together, like so many dogs, regardless of either sex or age. They have blood, bone, muscle, and brains, which are applied in many instances to wrong purposes. To have between three and four thousand men and women, and fifteen thousand children classed in the census as vagrants and vagabonds, roaming all over the country, in ignorance and evil training, that carries peril with it, is not a pleasant look-out for the future; and I

claim on the grounds of justice and equity, that if these poor children, living in vans and tents and under old carts, are to be allowed to live in these places, they shall be registered in a manner analogous to the Canal Boats Act of 1877, so that the children may be brought under the Compulsory Clauses of the Education Acts, and become Christianised and civilised as other children.”

The foregoing letter, as it appeared in the Standard, brought forth the following leading article upon the subject the following day, August 15th, in which the writer says:—“We yesterday published a letter from Mr. George Smith, whose efforts to ameliorate and humanise the floating and transitory population of our canals and navigable rivers have already borne good fruit, in which he calls attention to the deserted and almost hopeless lot of English Gipsy children. Moses Holland—the Hollands are a Gipsy family almost as old as the Lees or the Stanleys, and a Holland always holds high rank among the ‘Romany’ folk—assures Mr. Smith that in ten of the Midland counties he knows some two hundred and fifty families of Gipsies, and that none of their children can read or write. Bazena Clayton, an old lady of caste, almost equal to that of a Lee or a Holland, confirms the story. She has lived in tents all her life. She was born in a tent, married from a tent, has brought up a family of sixteen children, more or less, under the same friendly shelter, and expects to breathe her last in a tent. That she can neither read nor write goes without saying; although doubtless she knows well enough how to ‘kair her patteran,’ or to make that strange cross in the dust which a true Gipsy alway leaves behind him at his last place of sojourn, as a mark for those of his tribe who may come upon his track. ‘Patteran,’ it may be remarked, is an almost pure Sanscrit word cognate with our own ‘path;’ and the least philological raking among the chaff of the Gipsy dialect will show their secret argot to be, as Mr. Leland calls it, ‘a curious old tongue, not merely allied to Sanscrit, but perhaps in

point of age an elder though vagabond sister or cousin of that ancient language.’ No Sanscrit or even Greek scholar can fail to be struck by the fact that, in the Gipsy tongue, a road is a ‘drum,’ to see is to ‘dicker,’ to get or take to ‘lell,’ and to go to ‘jall;’ or, after instances so pregnant, to agree with Professor von Kogalnitschan that ‘it is interesting to be able to study a Hindu dialect in the heart of Europe.’ Mr. Smith, however, being a philanthropist rather than a philologist, takes another view of the question. His anxiety is to see the Gipsies—and especially the Gipsy children—reclaimed. ‘A Gipsy,’ he reminds us, ‘lives, but one can scarcely tell how; they generally locate for a time near hen-roosts, potato-camps, turnip-fields, and game-preserves. They sell a few clothes-lines and clothes-pegs; but they seldom use such things themselves. Washing would destroy their beauty . . . To have between three and four thousand men and women, and eight or ten thousand children, classed in the census as vagrants and vagabonds, roaming all over the country in ignorance and evil training, is not a pleasant look-out for the future; and I claim that if these poor children, living in vans and tents and under old carts, are to be allowed to live in these places, they shall be registered in a manner analogous to the Canal Boats Act, so that the children may be brought under the Education Acts, and become Christianised and civilised.’

“Mr. Smith, it is to be feared, hardly appreciates the insuperable difficulty of the task he proposes. The true Gipsy is absolutely irreclaimable. He was a wanderer and a vagabond upon the face of the earth before the foundations of Mycenæ were laid or the plough drawn to mark out the walls of Rome; and such as he was four thousand years ago or more, such he still remains, speaking the same tongue, leading the same life, cherishing the same habits, entertaining the same wholesome or unwholesome hatred of all civilisation, and now, as then, utterly devoid of even the simplest rudiments of religious belief. His whole attitude of mind is

negative. To him all who are not Gipsies, like himself, are ‘Gorgios,’ and to the true Gipsy a ‘Gorgio’ is as hateful as is a ‘cowan’ to a Freemason. It would be interesting to speculate whether, when the Romany folk first began their wanderings, the ‘Gorgios’ were not—as the name would seem to indicate—the farmers or permanent population of the earth; and whether the nomad Gipsy may not still hate the ‘Gorgio’ as much as Cain hated Abel, Ishmael Isaac, and Esau Jacob. Certain in any case it is that the Gipsy, however civilised he may appear, remains, as Mr. Leland describes him, ‘a character so entirely strange, so utterly at variance with our ordinary conceptions of humanity, that it is no exaggeration whatever to declare that it would be a very difficult task for the best writer to convey to the most intelligent reader any idea of such a nature.’ The true Gipsy is, to begin with, as devoid of superstition as of religion. He has no belief in another world, no fear of a future state, nor hope for it, no supernatural object of either worship or dread—nothing beyond a few old stories, some Pagan, some Christian, which he has picked up from time to time, and to which he holds—much as a child holds to its fairy tales—uncritically and indifferently. Ethical distinctions are as unknown to him as to a kitten or a magpie. He is kindly by nature, and always anxious to please those who treat him well, and to win their affection. But the distinction between affection and esteem is one which he cannot fathom; and the precise shade of meum and tuum is as absolutely unintelligible to him as was the Hegelian antithesis between nichts and seyn to the late Mr. John Stuart Mill. To make the true Gipsy we have only to add to this an absolute contempt for all that constitutes civilisation. The Gipsy feels a house, or indeed anything at all approaching to the idea of a permanent dwelling, to amount to a positive restraint upon his liberty. He can live on hedgehog and acorns—though he may prefer a fowl and potatoes not strictly his own. Wherever a hedge gives shelter he will roll himself

up and sleep. And it is possibly because he has no property of his own that he is so slow to recognise the rights of property in others. But above all, his tongue—the weird, corrupt, barbarous Sanscrit ‘patter’ or ‘jib,’ known only to himself and to those of his blood—is the keynote of his strange life. In spite of every effort that has been made to fathom it, the Gipsy dialect is still unintelligible to ‘Gorgios’—a few experts such as Mr. Borrow alone excepted. But wherever the true Gipsy goes he carries his tongue with him, and a Romany from Hungary, ignorant of English as a Chippeway or an Esquimaux, will ‘patter’ fluently with a Lee, a Stanley, a Locke, or a Holland, from the English Midlands, and make his ‘rukkerben’ at once easily understood. Nor is this all, for there are certain strange old Gipsy customs which still constitute a freemasonry. The marriage rites of Gipsies are a definite and very significant ritual. Their funeral ceremonies are equally remarkable. Not being allowed to burn their dead, they still burn the dead man’s clothes and all his small property, while they mourn for him by abstaining—often for years—from something of which he was fond, and by taking the strictest care never to even mention his name.

“What are we to do with children in whom these strange habits and beliefs, or rather wants of belief, are as much part of their nature as is their physical organisation? Darwin has told us how, after generations had passed, the puppy with a taint of the wolf’s blood in it would never come straight to its master’s feet, but always approach him in a semicircle. Not Kuhleborhn nor Undine herself is less susceptible of alien culture than the pure-blooded Gipsy. We can domesticate the goose, we can tame the goldfinch and the linnet; but we shall never reclaim the guinea-fowl, or accustom the swallow to a cage. Teach the Gipsy to read, or even to write; he remains a Gipsy still. His love of wandering is as keen as is the instinct of a migratory bird for its annual passage; and exactly as the prisoned cuckoo

of the first year will beat itself to death against its bars when September draws near, so the Gipsy, even when most prosperous, will never so far forsake the traditions of his tribe as to stay long in any one place. His mind is not as ours. A little of our civilisation we can teach him, and he will learn it, as he may learn to repeat by rote the signs of the zodiac or the multiplication table, or to use a table napkin, or to decorously dispose of the stones in a cherry tart. But the lesson sits lightly on him, and he remains in heart as irreclaimable as ever. Already, indeed, our Gipsies are leaving us. They are not dying out, it is true. They are making their way to the Far West, where land is not yet enclosed, where game is not property, where life is free, and where there is always and everywhere room to ‘hatch the tan’ or put up the tent. Romany will, in all human probability, be spoken on the other side of the Atlantic years after the last traces of it have vanished from amongst ourselves. We begin even now to miss the picturesque aspects of Gipsy life—the tent, the strange dress, the nomadic habits. English Gipsies are no longer pure and simple vagrants. They are tinkers, or scissor-grinders, or basket-makers, or travel from fair to fair with knock-’em-downs, or rifle galleries, or itinerant shows. Often they have some ostensible place of residence. But they preserve their inner life as carefully as the Jews in Spain, under the searching persecution of the Inquisition, preserved their faith for generation upon generation; and even now it is a belief that when, for the sake of some small kindness or gratuity, a Gipsy woman has allowed her child to be baptised, she summons her friends, and attempts to undo the effect of the ceremony by subjecting the infant to some weird, horrible incantation of Eastern origin, the original import of which is in all probability a profound mystery to her. There is a quaint story of a Yorkshire Gipsy, a prosperous horse-dealer, who, becoming wealthy, came up to town, and, amongst other sights, was shown a goldsmith’s window. His sole

remark was that the man must be a big thief indeed to have so many spoons and watches all at once. The expression of opinion was as naïve and artless as that of Blucher, when observing that London was a magnificent city ‘for to sack.’ Mr. Smith’s benevolent intentions speak for themselves. But if he hopes to make the Gipsy ever other than a Gipsy, to transform the Romany into a Gorgio, of to alter habits of life and mind which have remained unchanged for centuries, he must be singularly sanguine, and must be somewhat too disposed to overlook the marvellously persistent influences of race and tongue.”

Rather than the cause of the children should suffer by presenting garbled or one-sided statements, I purpose quoting the letters and articles upon the subject as they have appeared. To do otherwise would not be fair to the authors or just to the cause I have in hand. The flattering allusions and compliments relating to my humble self I am not worthy of, and I beg of those who take an interest in the cause of the little ones, and deem this book worthy of their notice, to pass over them as though such compliments were not there. The following are some of the letters that have appeared in the Standard in reply to mine of the 14th instant. “B. B.” writes on August 16th:—“Would you allow an Irish Gipsy to express his views touching George Smith’s letter of this date in your paper? Without in the least desiring to warp his efforts to improve any of his fellow-creatures, it seems to me that the poor Gipsy calls for much less sympathy, as regards his moral and social life, than more favoured classes of the community. Living under the body of an old cart, ‘within the sound of church bells,’ in the midst of grass, sticks, and stones, by no means argues moral degradation; and if your correspondent looks up our criminal statistics he will not find one Gipsy registered for every five hundred criminals who have not only been within hearing of the church bells but also listening to the preacher’s voice. It should be remembered

that the poor Gipsy fulfils a work which is a very great convenience to dwellers in out-of-the-way places—brushes, baskets, tubs, clothes-stops, and a host of small commodities, in themselves apparently insignificant, but which enable this tribe to eke out a living which compares very favourably with the hundreds of thousands in our large cities who set the laws of the land as well as the laws of decency at defiance. As to education—well, let them get it, if possible; but it will be found they possess, as a rule, sufficient intelligence to discharge the duties of farm-labourers; and already they are beginning to supply a felt want to the agriculturist whose educated assistant leaves him to go abroad.”

“An Old Woman” writes as follows:—“In the article on Gipsies in the Standard of to-day I was struck with the truth of this; remark—‘He is kindly by nature, and always anxious to please those who treat him well, and to win their affections.’ I can give you one instance of this in my own family, although it happened long, long ago. The Boswell tribe of Gipsies used to encamp once a year near the village in which my grandfather (my mother’s father), who was a miller and farmer, lived; and there grew up a very kindly feeling between the head of the tribe and my grandfather and his family. Some of the Gipsies would often call at my grandfather’s house, where they were always received kindly, and oftener still, on business or otherwise, at the mill, to see ‘Pe-tee,’ as they called my grandfather, whose Christian name was Peter. Once upon a time my grandfather owed a considerable sum of money, and, alas! could not pay it; and his wife and children were much distressed. I believe they feared he would be arrested. Everything is known in a village; and the news of what was feared reached the Gipsies. The idea of their friend Pe-tee being in such trouble was not borne quietly; the chief and one or two more appeared at the farm-house, asking to see my grandmother. They told her they had come to pay my

grandfather’s debt; ‘he should never be distressed for the money,’ they said, ‘as long as they had any.’ I believe some arrangement had been made about the debt, but nevertheless my grandmother felt just as grateful for the kindness. The head of the tribe wore guineas instead of buttons to his coat, and when his daughter was married her dowry was measured in guineas, in a pint measure. I suppose, as in the old ballad of ‘The Beggar of Bethnal Green,’ the suitor would give measure for measure. The villagers all turned out to gaze each year when they heard the ‘Boswell gang’ were coming down the one long street; the women of the tribe, fine, bold, handsome-looking women, in ‘black beaver bonnets, with black feathers and red cloaks,’ sometimes quarrelled, and my mother, then a girl, saw the procession several times stop in the middle of the village, and two women (sometimes more) would fall out of the ranks, hand their bonnets to friends, strip off cloak and gown, and fight in their ‘shift’ sleeves, using their fists like men. The men of the tribe took no notice, stood quietly about till the fight was over, and then the whole bevy passed on to their camping-ground. My grandfather never passed the tents without calling in to see his friends, and it would have been an offence indeed if he had not partaken of some refreshment. Two or three times my mother accompanied him, and whenever and wherever they met her they were always very kind and respectful to ‘Pe-tee’s little girl.’ In after years, when visiting her native village, she often inquired if it was known what had become of the tribe; at last she heard from some one it was thought they had settled in Canada: at any rate they had passed away for ever from that part of England.”

Mr. Leland wrote as follows in the Standard, August 19:—“As you have kindly cited my work on the English Gipsies in your article on them, and as many of your readers are giving their opinions on this curious race, perhaps you will permit me to make a few remarks on the subject.

Mr. Smith is one of those honest philanthropists whom it is the duty of every one to honour, and I for one, honour him most sincerely for his kind wishes to the Romany; but, with all my respect, I do not think he understands the travellers, or that they require much aid from the ‘Gorgios,’ being quite capable of looking out for themselves. A tacho Rom, or real Gipsy, who cannot in an emergency find his ten, or even twenty, pounds is a very exceptional character. As I have, even within a few days, been in company, and on very familiar footing with a great number of Romanys of different families of the dark blood who spoke the ‘jib’ with unusual accuracy, I write under a fresh impression. The Gipsy is almost invariably strong and active, a good rough rider and pedestrian, and knowing how to use his fists. He leads a very hard life, and is proud of his stamina and his pluck. Of late years he kairs, or ‘houses,’ more than of old, particularly during the winter, but his life at best requires great strength and endurance, and this must, of course, be supported by a generous diet. In fact, he lives well, much better than the agricultural labourer. Let me explain how this is generally done. The Gipsy year may be said to begin with the races. Thither the dark children of Chun-Gwin, whether pure blood, posh an’ posh (half-and-half), or churedis, with hardly a drop of the kalo-ratt, flock with their cocoa-nuts and the balls, which have of late taken the place of the koshter, or sticks. With them go the sorceresses, old and young, who pick up money by occasional dukkerin, or fortune-telling. Other small callings they also have, not by any means generally dishonest. Wherever there is an open pic-nic on the Thames, or a country fair, or a regatta at this season, there are Romanys. Sometimes they appear looking like petty farmers, with a bad, or even a good, horse or two for sale. While summer lasts this is the life of the poorer sort.

“This merry time over, they go to the Livinengro tem, or hop-land—i.e., Kent. Here they work hard, not neglecting

the beer-pot, which goes about gaily. In this life they have great advantages over the tramps and London poor. Hopping over, they go, almost en masse, or within a few days, to London to buy French and German baskets, which they get in Houndsditch. Of late years they send more for the baskets to be delivered at certain stations. Some of them make baskets themselves very well, but, as a rule, they prefer to buy them. While the weather is good they live by selling baskets, brooms, clothes-lines, and other small wares. Most families have their regular ‘beats’ or rounds, and confine themselves to certain districts. In winter the men begin to chiv the kosh, or cut wood—i.e., they make butchers’ skewers and clothes-pegs. Even this is not unprofitable, as a family, what between manufacturing and selling them, can earn from twelve to eighteen shillings a week. With this and begging, and occasional jobs of honest hard work which they pick up here and there, they contrive to feed well, find themselves in beer, and pay, as they now often must, for permission to camp in fields. Altogether they work hard and retire early.

“Considering the lives they lead, Gipsies are not dishonest. If a Gipsy is camped anywhere, and a hen is missing for miles around, the theft is always at once attributed to him. The result is that, being sharply looked after by everybody, and especially by the police, they cannot act like their ancestors. Their crimes are not generally of a heinous nature. Chiving a gry, or stealing a horse, is, I admit, looked upon by them with Yorkshire leniency, nor do they regard stealing wood for fuel as a great sin. In this matter they are subject to great temptation. When the nights are cold—

“Could anything be more alluring
Than an old hedge?

“As for Gipsy lying, it is so peculiar that it would be hard to explain. The American who appreciates the phrase ‘to sit down and swap lies’ would not be taken in by a

Romany chal, nor would an old salt who can spin yarns. They enjoy hugely being lied unto, as do all Arabs or Hindus. Like many naughty children, they like successful efforts of the imagination. The old dyes, or mothers, are ‘awful beggars,’ as much by habit as anything; but they will give as freely as they will take, and their guest will always experience Oriental hospitality. They are very fond of all gentlemen and ladies who take a real interest in them, who understand them, and like them. To such people they are even more honest than they are to one another. But it must be a real aficion, not a merely amateur affectation of kindness. Owing to their entire ignorance of ordinary house and home life, they are like children in many respects, though so shrewd in others. Among the Welsh Gipsies, who are the most unsophisticated and the most purely Romany, I have met with touching instances of gratitude and honesty. The child-like ingenuity which some of them manifested in contriving little gratifications for myself and for Professor E. H. Palmer, who had been very kind to them, were as naïve as amiable. I have observed that some Gipsies of the more rustic sort loved to listen to stories, but, like children, they preferred those which they had heard several times and learned to like. They knew where the laugh ought to come in. The Gipsy is both bad and good, but neither his faults nor his virtues are exactly what they are supposed to be. He is certainly something of a scamp—and, nomen est omen, there is a tribe of Scamps among them—but he is not a bad scamp, and he is certainly a most amusing and eccentric one.

“There is not the least use in trying to ameliorate the condition of the Gipsy while he remains a traveller. He will tell you piteous stories, but he will take care of himself. As Ferdusi sings:

“‘Say what you will and do what you can,
No washing e’er whitens the black Zingan.’

“The only kindness he requires is a little charity and

forgiveness when he steals wood or wires a hare. All wrong doubtless; but something should be allowed to one whose ancestors were called ‘dead-meat eaters’ in the Shastras. Should the reader wish to reform a Gipsy, let him explain to the Romany that the days for roaming in England are rapidly passing away. Tell him that for his children’s sake he had better rent a cheap cottage; that his wife can just as well peddle with her basket from a house as from a waggon, and that he can keep a horse and trap and go to the races or hopping ‘genteely.’ Point out to him those who have done the same, and stimulate his ambition and pride. As for suffering as a traveller he does not know it. I once asked a Gipsy girl who was sitting as a model if she liked the drom (road) best, or living in a house. With sparkling eyes and clapping her hands she exclaimed, ‘oh, the road! the road!’”

Mr. Beerbohm writes under date August 19th:—“In reading yesterday’s article on the customs and idiosyncrasies of Gipsies I was struck by the similarity they present to many peculiarities I have observed among the Patagonian Indians. To those curious in such matters it may be of interest to know that the custom of burning all the goods and chattels of a deceased member of the tribe prevails among the Patagonians as among the Gipsies; and the identity of custom is still further carried out, inasmuch as with the former, as with the latter, the name of the deceased is never uttered, and all allusion to him is strictly avoided. So much so, that in those cases when the deceased has borne some cognomen taken from familiar objects, such as ‘Knife,’ ‘Wool,’ ‘Flint,’ &c., the word is no longer used by the tribe, some other sound being substituted instead. This is one of the reasons why the Tshuelche language is constantly fluctuating, but few of the words expressing a proper meaning, as chronicled by Fitzroy and Darwin (1832), being now in use.”

The Rev. Mr. Hewett writes to the Standard, under date August 19th, to say that he baptised two Gipsy children in

1871. One might ask, in the language of one of the “Old Book,” “What are these among so many?” The following letter from Mr. Harrison upon the subject appeared on August 20th:—“I have just returned from the head-quarters of the Scotch Gipsies—Yetholm (Kirk), a small village nestling at the foot of the Cheviots in Roxburghshire. Here I saw the abode of the Queen, a neat little cottage, with well-trimmed garden in front. Inside all was a perfect pattern of neatness, and the old lady herself was as clean ‘as a new pin.’ As I passed the cottage a carriage and pair drove up, and the occupants, four ladies, alighted and entered the cottage. I was afterwards told that they were much pleased with their visit, and that, in remembrance of it, each of the four promised to send a new frock to the Queen’s grandchild. The Queen’s son (‘the Prince,’ as he is called) I saw at St. James’s Fair, where he was swaggering about in a drunken state, offering to fight any man. I believe he was subsequently locked up. In the month of August there are few Gipsies resident in Yetholm: they are generally on their travels selling crockeryware (the country people call the Gipsies ‘muggers,’ from the fact that they sell mugs), baskets made of rushes, and horn spoons, both of which they manufacture themselves. I have a distinct recollection of Will Faa, the then King of the Gipsies. He was 95 when I knew him, and was lithe and strong. He had a keen hawk eye, which was not dimmed at that extreme age. He was considered both a good shot and a famous fisher. There was hardly a trout hole in the Bowmont Water but he knew, and his company used to be eagerly sought by the fly-fishers who came from the South. My opinion of the Gipsies—and I have seen much of them during the last forty years—is that they are a lazy, dissolute set of men and women, preferring to beg, or steal, or poach, to work, and that, although many efforts have been made (more especially by the late Rev. Mr. Baird, of Yetholm), to settle them, they are irreclaimable. There are but two policemen in

Yetholm and Kirk Yetholm, but sometimes the assistance of some of the townsfolk is required to bring about order in that portion of the village in which the Gipsies reside. I may say that the townsfolk do not fraternise with the Gipsies, who are regarded with the greatest suspicion by the former. Ask a townsman of Yetholm what he thinks of the Gipsies, and he will tell you they are simply vagabonds and impostors, who lounge about, and smoke, and drink, and fight. In fact, they are the very scum of the human race; and, what is more singular, they seem quite satisfied to remain as they are, repudiating every attempt at reformation.”

“F. G. S.” writes:—“One of your correspondents suggests that the silence of the Gipsies concerning their dead is carried so far as to consign them to nameless graves. In my churchyard there is a headstone, ‘to the memory of Mistress Paul Stanley, wife of Mr. Paul Stanley, who died November, 1797,’ the said Mistress Stanley having been the Queen of the Stanley tribe. In my childhood I remember that annually some of the members of the tribe used to come and scatter flowers over the grave; and when my father had restored the stone, on its falling into decay, a deputation of the tribe thanked him for so doing. I have reason to think they still visit the spot, to find, I am sorry to say, the stone so decayed now as to be past restoration, and I would much like to see another with the same inscription to mark the resting-place of the head of a leading tribe of these interesting people.”

To these letters I replied as under, on August 21st:—“The numerous correspondents who have taken upon themselves to reply to my letter that appeared in your issue of the 14th inst., and to show up Gipsy life in some of its brightest aspects, have, unwittingly, no doubt, thoroughly substantiated and backed up the cause of my young clients—i.e., the poor Gipsy children and our roadside arabs—so far as they have gone, as a reperusal of the letters will show the most casual observer of our hedge-bottom heathens of

Christendom. At the same time, I would say the tendency of some of the remarks of your correspondents has special reference to the adult Gipsies, roamers and ramblers, and, consequently, there is a fear that the attention of some of your readers may be drawn from the cause of the poor uneducated children, living in the midst of sticks, stones, ditches, mud, and game, and concentrated upon the ‘guinea buttons,’ ‘black-haired Susans,’ ‘red cloaks,’ ‘scarlet hoods,’ the cunning craft of the old men, the fortune-telling of the old women, the ‘sparkling eyes’ and ‘clapping of hands,’ and ‘twopenny hops’ of the young women, who certainly can take care of themselves, just as other un-Christianised and uncivilised human beings can. I do not profess—at any rate, not for the present—to take up the cause of the men and women ditch-dwelling Gipsies in this matter; I must leave that part of the work to fiction writers, clergymen, and policemen, abler hands than mine. I may not be able, nor do I profess, to understand the singular number of the masculine gender of dad, chavo, tikeno, moosh, gorjo, raklo, rakli, pal palla; the feminine gender dei, tikeno, chabi, joovel, gairo, rakle, raklia, pen penya, or the plural of the masculine gender dada, chavi, and the feminine gender deia, chavo; but, being a matter of fact kind of man—out of the region of romance, fantastical notions, enrapturing imagery, nicely coloured imagination, clever lying and cleverer deception, beautiful green fields, clear running rivulets, the singing of the wood songster, bullfinch, and wren, in the midst of woodbine, sweetbriar, and roses—with an eye to observe, a heart to feel, and a hand ready to help, I am led to contemplate, aye, and to find out if possible, the remedy, though my friends say it is impossible—just because it is impossible it becomes possible, as in the canal movement—for the wretched condition of some eight to ten thousand little Gipsy children, whose home in the winter is camping half-naked in a hut, so called, in the midst of ‘slush’ and snow, on the borders of a picturesque

ditch and roadside, winterly delights, Sunday and week day alike. The tendency of human nature is to look on the bright side of things; and it is much more pleasant to go to the edge of a large swamp, lie down and bask in the summer’s sun, making ‘button-holes’ of daisies, buttercups, and the like, and return home and extol the fine scenery and praise the richness of the land, than to take the spade, in shirt-sleeves and heavy boots, and drain the poisonous water from the roots of vegetation. Nevertheless, it has to be done, if the ‘strong active limbs’ and ‘bright sparkling eyes’ are to be turned to better account than they have been in the past. It is not creditable to us as a Christian nation, in size compared with other nations not much larger than a garden, to have had for centuries these heathenish tribes in our midst. It does not speak very much for the power of the Gospel, the zeal of the ministers of Christ’s Church, and the activity of the schoolmaster, to have had these plague spots continually flitting before our eyes without anything being done to effect a cure. It is true something has been done. One clergyman, who has ‘had opportunities of observing them,’ if not brought in daily contact with them, tells us that some eight or nine years since he publicly baptised two Gipsy children. Another tells us that some time since he baptised many Gipsy children, as if baptism was the only thing required of the poor children for the duties and responsibilities of life and a future state. Better a thousand times have told us how many poor roadside arabs and Gipsy children they have taken by the hand to educate and train them, so as to be able to earn an honest livelihood, instead of ‘cadging’ from door to door, and telling all sorts of silly stories and lies. How many poor children’s lives have been sacrificed at the hands of cruelty, starvation, and neglect, and buried under a clod without the shedding of a tear, it is fearful to contemplate. The idlers, loafers, rodneys, mongrels, gorgios, and Gipsies are increasing, and will increase, in our midst, unless we put our hand

upon the system, from the simple fact that by packing up with wife and children and ‘taking to the road,’ he thus escapes taxes, rent, and the School-board officer. This they see, and a ‘few kind words’ and ‘gentle touches’ will never cause them to see it in any other light. The sooner we get the ideal, fanciful, and romantic side of a vagrant’s and vagabond’s life removed from our vision, and see things as they really are, the better it will be for us. For the life of me I cannot see anything romantic in dirt, squalor, ignorance, and misery. Ministers and missionaries have completely failed in the work, for the simple reason that they have never begun it in earnest; consequently, the schoolmaster and School-board officer must begin to do their part in reclaiming these wandering tribes, and this can only be done in the manner stated by me in my previous letter.”

In the Leicester Free Press the following appeared on August 16th:—“Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, is earning the title of the Children’s Friend. His ‘Cry of the Brick-yard Children’ rang through England, and issued in measures being adopted for their protection. His description of the canal-boat children has also resulted in legislation for their relief. Now I see Mr. Smith has put in a good word for Gipsy children. It will surprise a good many who seldom see or hear of these Gipsies, except perhaps at the races, to find how numerous they are even in this county. I do not think the number is at all exaggerated. A few days ago while driving down a rural lane in the country I ‘interviewed’ one of these children, who had run some hundreds of yards ahead, in order to open a gate. At first the young, dark-eyed, swarthy damsel declared she did not know how many brothers and sisters she had, but on being asked to mention their names she rattled them over, in quick succession, giving to each Christian name the surname of Smith—thus, Charley Smith, Emma Smith, Fanny Smith, Bill Smith, and the like, till she had enumerated either thirteen or fifteen juvenile Smiths, all of whom lived with their parents in a tent which was

pitched not far from the side of the lane. Of education the child had had none, but she said she went to church on a Sunday with her sister. This is a sample of the kind of thing which prevails, and in his last generous movement Mr. Smith, of Coalville, will be acting a good part to numerous children who, although unable to claim relationship, rejoice in the same patronymic as himself.”

In the Derby Daily Telegraph, under date August 16th, the following leading article was published:—“When the social history of the present generation comes to be written a prominent place among the list of practical philanthropists will be assigned to George Smith, of Coalville. The man is a humanitarian to the manner born. His character and labours serve to remind us of the broad line which separates the real apostle of benevolence from what may be termed the ‘professional’ sample. George Smith goes about for the purpose of doing good, and—he does it. He does not content himself with glibly talking of what needs to be done, and what ought to be done. He prefers to act upon the spirit of Mr. Wackford Squeers’ celebrated educational principle. Having discovered a sphere of Christian duty he goes and ‘works’ it. Few more splendid monuments of practical charity have been reared than the amelioration of the social state of our canal population—an achievement which has mainly been brought about by Mr. Smith’s indomitable perseverance and self-denial. A few years ago we were accustomed to speak of the dwellers in these floating hovels as beings who dragged out a degraded existence in a far-off land. We were gloomily told that they could not be reached. Orators at fashionable missionary-meetings were wont to speak of them as irreclaimable heathens who bid defiance to civilising influences from impenetrable fastnesses. Mr. George Smith may be credited with having broken down this discreditable state of things. He brought us face to face with this unfortunate section of our fellow-creatures, with what result it is not

necessary to say. The sympathies of the public were effectually roused by the narratives which revealed to us the deplorable depths of human depravity into which vast numbers of English people had fallen. The sufferings of the children in the gloomy, pestiferous cabins used for ‘living’ purposes especially excited the country’s pity. At this present moment the lot of these poor waifs is far from being inviting, but it is vastly different from what it was a short time back. It was only a few days ago that the Duke of Richmond, in reply to no less a personage than the Archbishop of Canterbury, announced that express arrangements had been made by the Government to meet the educational requirements of the once helpless and neglected victims.

“Mr. Smith has now embarked upon a fresh crusade against misery and ignorance. He has turned his attention from the ‘water Gipsies’ to their brethren ashore. He has already began to busy himself with the condition of ‘our roadside arabs,’ as he calls them. We fear Mr. Smith in prosecuting this good work of his is doomed to perform a serious act of disenchantment. The ideal Gipsy is destined to be scattered to the winds by the unvarnished picture which Mr. Smith will cause to be presented to our vision. He does not pretend to show us the romantic, fantastically-dressed creature whose prototypes have long been in the imaginations of many of us as types of the Gipsy species. Those of our readers who have formed their notions of Gipsy life upon the strength of the assurances which have been given them by the late Mr. G. P. R. James and kindred writers will find it hard to substitute for the joyous scenes of sunshine and freedom he has associated with the nomadic existence, the dull, wearisome round of squalor and wretchedness which is found, upon examination, to constitute the principal condition of the Gipsy tent. Whether it is that in this awfully prosaic period of the world’s history the picturesque and jovial rascality which novelist and poet have insisted in connecting with the Ishmaelites is stamped ruthlessly out of

being by force of circumstances, it is barely possible to say. Perhaps Gipsies, in common with other tribes of the romantic past, have gradually become denuded of their old attractiveness. It is, we confess, rather difficult to believe that Bamfylde Moore Carew (wild, restless fellow though he was) would persistently have linked his lot with that of the poor, degraded, poverty-stricken wretches whom Mr. Smith has taken in hand. Perchance it happens that our old heroes of song and story have, so far as England is concerned, deteriorated as a consequence of the money-making, business-like atmosphere that they are compelled to breathe, and that with more favoured climes they are to be seen in much of their primitive glory. In Hungary, for instance, it is declared that Gipsy life is pretty much what it is represented to be in our own glowing pages of fiction. The late Major Whyte-Melville, in a modern story declared to be founded on fact, introduces us to a company of these continental wanderers who, with their beautiful Queen, seem to invest the scenes from our old friend, ‘The Bohemian Girl,’ with something akin to probability. But there is, of course, a limit to even Mr. Smith’s labours. Hungary is beyond his jurisdiction. He does not pretend to carry his experience of the Gipsies further than the Midlands. Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and our neighbouring counties have offered him the examples he requires with his new campaign. The lot of the roamers who eke out a living in the adjacent lanes and roadways is, he explains to us, as pitiful as anything of the sort well could be. The tent of the Gipsy he finds to be as filthy and as repulsive as the cabin of the canal-boat. Human beings of both sexes and of all ages are huddled together without regard to comfort. As a necessary sequence the women and children are the chief sufferers in a social evil of this sort. The men are able to rough it, but the weaker sex and their little charges are reduced to the lowest paths of misery. Children are born, suffer from disease, and die in the canvas hovels; and are committed to the dust by the

roadside. One old woman told Mr. Smith ‘that she had had sixteen children, fifteen of whom are alive, several of them being born in a roadside tent. She says that she was married out of one of these tents; and her brother died and was buried out of a tent at Packington, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch.’ The experience of this old crone is akin to that of most of her class. She also tells Mr. Smith that she could not read herself, and she did not believe one in twenty could. Morally, as well as from a sanitary point of view, Gipsy life, as it really exists, is a social plague-spot, and consequently a social danger. Especially does this contention apply to the children, of whom Mr. Smith estimates that there are ten thousand roaming over the face of the country as vagrants and vagabonds. It is to be hoped many months will not be allowed to elapse before this difficulty is seriously and successfully grappled with. Mr. Smith’s counsel as to the children is that ‘living in vans and tents and under old carts, if they are to be allowed to live in these places they should be registered in a manner analogous to the Canal Boats Act of 1877, so that the children may be brought under the compulsory clauses of the Education Acts, and become Christianised and civilised as other children.’ The Duke of Richmond and his department may do much to facilitate Mr. Smith’s crusade without temporising with the prejudices of red-tapeism.”

Figaro writes August 27th:—“Our old friend having successfully tackled the brick-yard children, and the floating waifs and strays of our barge population, has now taken the little Gipsies in hand, with a view of bringing them under the supervision of the School Board system now general in this country. He is a bold and energetic man, but we are bound to say we doubt a little whether he will be able to tame the offspring of the merry Zingara, and pass them all through the regulation educational standard. Should he succeed, we shall be thenceforth surprised at nothing, but be quite prepared to hear that Mr. Smith has

become chairman of a society for changing the spots of the leopard, or honorary director of an association for changing the Ethiopian’s skin!”

The following letter from the Rev. J. Finch, a rural dean, appeared in the Standard, August 30th:—“The following facts may not be without some interest to those who have read the letters which have recently appeared in the pages of the Standard respecting Gipsies. During the thirty years I have been rector of this parish, members of the Boswell family have been almost constantly resident here. I buried the head of the family in 1874, who died at the age of 87. He was a regular attendant at the parish church, and failed not to bow his head reverently when he entered within the House of God. His burial was attended by several sons resident, as Gipsies, in the Midland counties, and a headstone marks the grave where his body rests. I never saw, or heard, any harm of the man. He was a quiet and inoffensive man, and worked industriously as a tinman within a short time of his death. If he had rather a sharp eye for a little gift, that is a trait of character by no means confined to Gipsies. One of his daughters was married here to a member of the Boswell tribe, and another, who rejoiced in the name of Britannia, I buried in her father’s grave two years ago. After his death she and her mother removed to an adjoining parish, where she was confirmed by Bishop Selwyn in 1876. Regular as was the old man at church, I never could persuade his wife to come. In 1859 I baptized, privately, an infant of the same tribe, whose parents were travelling through the parish, and whose mother was named Elvira. Great was the admiration of my domestics at the sight of the beautiful lace which ornamented the robe in which the child was brought to my house. Clearly there are Gipsies, and those of a well-known tribe, glad to receive the ministrations of the Church.”

I next turned my steps towards London, having heard

that Gipsies were to be found in the outskirts of this Babylon. I set off early one morning in quest of them from my lodgings, not knowing whither; but my earliest association came to my relief. Knowing that Gipsies are generally to be found in the neighbourhood of brick-yards, I took the ’bus to Notting Hill, and after asking the policeman, for neither clergyman or other ministers could tell me where they were to be found, I wended my way to Wormwood Scrubs, and the following letter, which appeared in the Daily News, September 6th of last year, is the outcome of that “run out,” and is as follows:—“It has been the custom for years—I might almost say centuries—when speaking of the Gipsies, to introduce in one form or other during the conversation either ‘the King of the Gipsies,’ ‘the Queen,’ or some other member of ‘the Royal Family.’ It may surprise many of your readers who cling to the romantic side of a Gipsy’s life, and shut their eyes to the fearful amount of ignorance, wretchedness, and misery there is amongst them, to say that this extraordinary being is nothing but a mythological jack-o’-th’-lantern, phantom of the brain, illusion, the creation of lying tongues practising the art of deception among some of the ‘green horns’ in the country lanes, or on the village greens. It is true there are some ‘horse-leeches’ among the Gipsies who have got fat out of their less fortunate hedge-bottom brethren and the British public, who delight in calling them either ‘the King,’ ‘Queen,’ ‘Prince,’ or ‘Princess.’ It is true also that there are vast numbers of the Gipsies who, with a chuckle, tongue in cheek, wink of the eye, side grin and a sneer, say they have these important personages amongst them; and if any little extra stir is being made at a fair-time in the country lanes, in the neighbourhood of straw-yards, they will be sure to tell them that either the ‘king,’ ‘queen,’ or some member of the ‘royal family’ is being married or visiting them; and nothing pleases the poor, ignorant Gipsies better than to get the bystanders, with mouths open,

to believe their tales and lies. I should think that there is scarcely a county in England but what a Gipsy king’s or queen’s wedding has not taken place there within the last twenty years. There was one in Bedfordshire not long since; another at Epping Forest; and the last I heard of this wonderful airy being was that he had taken up his head-quarters at the Royal Hotel, Liverpool, and a carriage with eight wheels and six piebald horses had been presented to him as a wedding present from the Gipsies. Gipsy ‘kings,’ ‘queens,’ and ‘princes,’ their marriages and deaths, are innumerable among the ‘royal family.’ It is equally believing in moonshine and air-bubbles to believe that the Gipsies never speak of their dead. There is a beautiful headstone put in a little churchyard about two and a half miles from Barnet in memory of the Brinkly family, and it is carefully looked after by members of the family; one of the Lees has a tombstone erected to his memory in Hanwell Cemetery; and such silly nonsense is put out by the cunning, crafty Gipsies as ‘dazzlers,’ to enable them more readily to practise the art of lying and deception upon their gullible listeners. Then again, with reference to the Gipsies having a religion of their own. There is not a word of truth in this imaginative notion prevalent in the minds or some who have been trying to study their habits. Excepting the language of some of the old-fashioned real Gipsies, and a few other little peculiarities, any one studying the real hard facts of a Gipsy’s life with reference to the amount of ignorance, and everything that is bad among them, will come to the conclusion that there is much among them to compare very unfavourably with the most neglected in our back streets and slums. Of course, there are some good among them, as with other ‘ragamuffin’ ramblers. The following particulars, related to me by a well-known Gipsy woman in the neighbourhood of ‘Wormwood Scrubs’ and the ‘North Pole,’ remarkable for her truthfulness, honesty, and uprightness, will tend

to show that my previous statement as regards the amount of ignorance prevalent among the poor Gipsy children has not been over-stated. She has had six brothers and one sister, all born in a tent, and only one of the eight could read a little. She has had nine children born in a tent, four of whom are alive, and only one could read and write a little. She has seventeen grandchildren, and only two of them can read and write a little, and thinks this a fair average of other Gipsy children. She tells me that she got a most fat living for more than twenty years by telling lies and fortunes to servant-girls, old maids, and young men, mostly out of a book of which she could not read a sentence, or tell a letter. She said she had heard that I had taken up the cause of the poor Gipsy children to get them educated, and, with hands uplifted and tears in her eyes, which left no doubt of her meaning, said, ‘I do hope from the bottom of my heart that God will bless and prosper you in the work till a law is passed, and the poor Gipsy children are brought under the School Board, and their parents compelled to send them to school as other people are. The poor Gipsy children are poor, ignorant things, I can assure you.’ She also said ‘Does the Queen wish all our poor Gipsy children to be educated?’ I told her that the Queen took special interest in the children of the working-classes, and was always pleased to hear of their welfare. Again, with tears trickling down her face, she said, ‘I do thank the Lord for such a good Queen, and for such a noble-hearted woman. I do bless her. Do Thou, ‘Lord, bless her!’ After some further conversation, and taking dinner with her in her humble way in the van, she said she hoped I would not be insulted if she offered me, as from a poor Gipsy woman, a shilling to help me in the work of getting a law passed to compel the Gipsies to send their children to school. I took the shilling, and, after making her a present of a copy of the new edition of my ‘Cry of the Children from the Brick-yards of England,’ which she wrapped in a

beautiful white cloth, and after a shake of the hand, we parted, hoping to meet again on some future day.”

The foregoing letter brought forth the following letter from Mr. Daniel Gorrie, and appeared in the Daily News under date September 13th, as under:—“Mr. George Smith, Coalville, Leicester, whose letter on the above subject appears in your impression to-day, succeeded so well in his efforts on behalf of the poor slave-children of the Midland brick-yards, that it is to be hoped he will attain equal success in drawing attention to the pitiful condition of the Gipsy children, who are allowed to grow up as ignorant as savages that never saw the face nor heard the voice of a Christian missionary. In one of the late Thomas Aird’s poems, entitled ‘A Summer Day,’ there are some lines which, with your permission, I should like to quote, that are in perfect accord with Mr. Smith’s wise and kindly suggestion. The lines are these:—

“‘In yonder sheltered nook of nibbled sward,
Beside the wood, a Gipsy band are camped;
And there they’ll sleep the summer night away.
By stealthy holes their ragged, brawny brood
Creep through the hedges, in their pilfering quest
Of sticks and pales to make their evening fire.
Untutored things scarce brought beneath the laws
And meek provisions of this ancient State.
Yet is it wise, with wealth and power like hers,
To let so many of her sons grow up
In untaught darkness and consecutive vice?
True, we are jealous, free, and hate constraint
And every cognisance, o’er private life;
Yet, not to name a higher principle,
’Twere but an institute of wise police
That every child, neglected of its own,
State claimed should be, State seized and taught and trained
To social duty and to Christian life.
Our liberties have limbs, manifold;
So let the national will, which makes restraint
Part of its freedom, oft the soundest part,
Power-arm the State to do the large design.’

“The above lines, I may add, were written by the poet (in losing whom Mr. Thomas Carlyle lost one of his oldest and most valued friends) many, many years before the Education Acts now in force came into existence. As many parents might not like the idea of Gipsy children attending the same Board schools as their own, would it not be possible to establish special schools in those parts of the Midland counties where Gipsies ‘most do congregate’?”

To which I replied as under, in the Daily News bearing date September 13th:—“In reply to Mr. Gorrie’s letter which appears in your issue of this morning, I consider that it would be unwise and impracticable to build separate schools for either the brick-yard, canal-boat, Gipsy, or other children moving about the country, in tents, vans, &c., for their use solely; especially would it be so in the case of Gipsy children and roadside arabs. What I have been and am still aiming at is the education of these children, not by isolating them from other working-classes—colliers, potters, ironworkers, factory hands, tradesmen, &c.—but by bringing them in daily contact with the children of these parents, and also under some of the influences of our little missionary civilisers who are brought up and receiving some of their education in drawing-rooms, and whose parents cannot afford to send them to boarding-schools, colleges, &c., and have to content themselves by having their children educated at either the national, British, or Board schools. I confess that it is not pleasant to hear that our children have picked up vulgar words at school; and it requires patience, care, and watchfulness on the part of parents to counteract some of the downward tendencies resulting from an uneven mixing of children brought up and educated under such influences. Better by far put up with these little ills than others we know not of, the outcome of ignorance. On the other hand, it is pleasing to note how glad the parents of Gipsy, canal-boat, and brick-yard children are when their children pick up ‘fine words’ and become more ‘gentlerified’ by mixing with

children higher up the social scale. Bad habits, words, and actions are generally picked up between school times. It would be well for us to rub down class feeling among children as much as possible as regards their education. The children of brick-makers, canal-boatmen, and Gipsies are of us and with us, and must be taken hold of, educated, and elevated in things pertaining to their future welfare. The ‘turning up of the nose,’ by those whose duty, education, and privilege should have taught them better things, at these poor children has had more to do in bringing about their pitiable and ignorant condition than can be imagined. The Canal Boats Act, if wisely carried out, will before long bring about the education of the canal-boat children; and in order to bring the Gipsy children, show children, and other roadside arabs under the Education Acts, I am seeking to have all movable habitations, i.e., tents, vans, shows, &c., in which the families live who are earning a living by travelling from place to place, registered and numbered, as in the case of canal-boats, and the parents compelled ‘by hook or by crook’ to send their children to school at the place wherever they may be temporarily located, be it national, British, or Board school. The education of these children should be brought about at all risks and inconveniences, or we may expect a blacker page in the social history of this country opening to our view than we have seen for many a long day.”

The following leading article upon Gipsies and other tramps of a similar class appeared in the Standard, September 10th, 1879, and as it relates to the subject I have in hand I quote it in full:—“Not only in his ‘Uncommercial Traveller,’ but in many other scattered passages of his works, Dickens, who for many years lived in Kent, has described the intolerable nuisance inflicted by tramps upon residents in the home counties, and has sketched the natural history of the sturdy vagabond who infests our roads and highways from early spring to late

autumn, with a minuteness and power of detail worthy of a Burton. The subject of vagabondage is not, however, confined in its interest to the Metropolis and its adjacent parts. In the United States the habitual beggar has become as serious a nuisance, and, indeed, source of positive danger, as he was once amongst ourselves; and in the State of Pennsylvania more especially it has been found necessary to pass what may be described as an Habitual Vagrants Act for his suppression. That the terms of this enactment should be excessively severe is hardly matter of astonishment, when we bear in mind the fate of little Charley Ross. Early in the year 1874 a couple of men who were travelling up and down the country in a waggon stole from the home of his parents in Germantown, Pennsylvania, a boy of some seven years named Charley Ross. They then sent letters demanding a large sum of money for his restoration. The ransom increased, until no less than twenty thousand dollars was insisted upon. While the parents, on the one hand, were attempting to raise the money, and while the police were endeavouring to arrest the kidnappers, all negotiations fell through. The two men believed to have been concerned in the abduction were shot down in the act of committing a burglary on Rhode Island, and from that day to this the fate of Charley Ross has remained a mystery. Under these circumstances, public opinion has naturally run high, and it has been provided that any habitual tramp making his way from place to place, without earning an honest livelihood, shall be liable to imprisonment with hard labour for a period of twelve months; and that tramps who enter dwellings without permission, who carry fire-arms, or other weapons, or who threaten to injure either persons or property, shall be put to work in the common penitentiary for a period of three years. Pennsylvania in this is but reverting to the old law of England in the Tudor days. In the time of Henry VIII. vagrants were whipped at the cart’s tail, without distinction of either sex or age. The whipping-post,

together with the stocks, was a conspicuous ornament of every parish green, and it was not until the year 1791 that the whipping of women was expressly forbidden by statute. There were other enactments even more severe. By an act of Elizabeth idle soldiers and marines, or persons pretending to be soldiers or marines, wandering about the realm, were held ipso facto guilty of felony, and hundreds of such offenders were publicly executed. Another act of the same kind was directed against Gipsies, by which any Gipsy, or any person over fourteen who had been seen or found in their fellowship, was guilty of felony if he remained a month in the kingdom; and in Hale’s ‘Pleas of the Crown’ we learn that at one Suffolk Assizes no less than thirteen Gipsies were executed on the strength of this barbarous act, and without any other reason or cause whatever.

“The ancient severity of our Statute Book has long since been modified, and the worst that can now befall ‘idle persons and vagabonds, such as wake on the night and sleep on the day, and haunt customable taverns and ale-houses, and routs about; and no man wot from whence they come ne whither they go,’ is a brief period of hard labour under the provisions of the Vagrant Act. Under this comprehensive statute are swept together as into one common net a vast variety of petty offenders, of whom some are deemed ‘idle and disorderly persons,’ other ‘rogues and vagabonds,’ and others again ‘incorrigible rogues.’ Under one or other of these heads are unlicensed hawkers or pedlars; persons wandering abroad to beg or causing any child to beg; persons lodging in any outhouse or in the open air, not having any visible means of subsistence, and not giving a good account of themselves; persons playing or betting in the public street; and notorious thieves loitering about with intent to commit a felony. At the present period of the year the country in the neighbourhood not of the Metropolis alone, but of all large towns, is filled with offenders of this kind. Indeed, the sturdy tramp renders the country to a

very great extent unsafe for ladies who have ventured to go about without protection. Ostensibly he is a vendor of combs, or bootlaces, or buttons, or is in quest of a hop-picking job, or is a discharged soldier or sailor, or a labourer out of employment. But whatever may be his pretence, his mode of procedure is more or less the same. If he can come upon a roadside cottage left in the charge of a woman, or possibly only of a young girl, he will demand food and money, and if the demand be not instantly complied with will never hesitate at violence. Indeed, when we remember how many horrible outrages have within the last few years been committed by ruffians of this kind, it is quite easy to understand the severity necessary in less civilised times. Only recently the Spaniard Garcia murdered an entire family in Wales; and some few years ago, at Denham, near Uxbridge, a small household was butchered for the sake of a few shillings and such little plunder as the humble cottage afforded. And although grave crimes of this kind are happily rare, and tend to become rarer, petty violence is far from uncommon. Many ladies resident in the country can tell how they have been beset upon the highway by sturdy tramps of forbidding aspect, to whom, in despair, they have given alms to an amount which practically made the solicitation an act of brigandage. The farmer’s wife and the bailiff tell us how haystacks are converted into temporary lodging-houses, chickens stolen, and outbuildings plundered. Only too often the rogues are in direct league with the worst offenders in London. Whitechapel supplies a large contingent of the Kentish hop-pickers, and the ‘traveller’ who is ostensibly in search of a haymaking or hopping job is, as often as not, spying out the land, and planning profitable burglaries to be carried out in winter with the aid of his colleagues.

“There is, no doubt, much about the tramp that is picturesque. A romantic imagination pictures him as a sort of peripatetic philosopher, with more of Jacques in him than of Autolycus; living in constant communion with

Nature; sleeping in the open air; subsisting on the scantiest fare; slaking his thirst at the running brook; and only begging to be allowed to live his own childlike and innocent life, as purposeless as the butterflies, as happy as the swallows, as destitute of all worldly ends and aims as are the very violets of the hedge-row. Æsthetic enthusiasm of this kind is apt to be severely checked by the prosaic realities of actual existence. The tramp, like the noble savage, is a relic of uncivilised life with which we can very well afford to dispense. There is no appreciation of the country about him; no love of Nature for its own sake. In winter he becomes an inmate of the workhouse, where he almost always proves himself turbulent and disorderly. As soon as it becomes warm enough to sleep in a haystack, or under a hedge, or in a thick clump of furze and bracken, he discharges himself from ‘the Union’ and takes to ‘the roads.’ From town to town he begs or steals his way, safe in the assurance that should things go amiss the nearest workhouse must always provide him with gratuitous board and lodging. Work of any kind, although he vigorously pretends to be in ‘want of a job,’ is utterly abhorrent to him. Home county farmers, led by that unerring instinct which is the unconscious result of long experience, know the tramp at once, and can immediately distinguish him from the bonâ-fide ‘harvester,’ in quest of honest employment. The tramp, indeed, is the sturdy idler of the roads—a cousin-german of the ‘beach-comber,’ who is the plague of consuls and aversion of merchant skippers. In almost every port of any size the harbour is beset by a gang of idle fellows, whose pretence is that they are anxious to sign articles for a voyage, but who are, in reality, living from hand to mouth. Captains know only too well that the true ‘beach-comber’ is always incompetent, often physically unfit for work, and constitutionally mutinous. When his other resources fail, he throws himself upon the nearest consul of the nation to which he may claim to belong, and a very

considerable sum is yearly wasted in providing such ramblers with free passages to what they please to assert is the land of their birth. Harbour-masters and port authorities generally are apt to treat notorious offenders of this kind somewhat summarily, and our local police and poor-law officers are ill-advised if they do not follow the good example thus set, and show the tramp as little mercy as possible. Leniency, indeed, of any kind he simply regards as weakness. He would be a highwayman if the existing conditions of society allowed it, and if he had the necessary personal courage. As it is, he is a blot upon our country life, and an eyesore on our roads. Vagabondage is not a heritage with him, as it is with the genuine Gipsies. He has taken to it from choice, and the true-bred Romany will always regard him with contempt, as a mere migratory gaol bird, who knows no tongue of the roads beyond the cant or ‘kennick’ of thieves—a Whitechapel argot, familiarity with which at once tells its own tale. Fortunately, our existing law is sufficient to keep the nuisance in check, if only it be resolutely administered. The tramp, however, trades upon spurious sympathy. There will always be weak-minded folk to pity the poor man whom the hard-hearted magistrates have sent to gaol for sleeping under a haystack—forgetting that this interesting offender is, as a rule, no better than a common thief at large, who will steal whatever he can lay his hands on, and who makes our lanes and pleasant country byways unpleasant, if not actually dangerous.”

The foregoing article upon Gipsies and tramps brought from a correspondent in the Standard, under date September 12th, the following letter:—“I have just been reading the article in your paper on the subject of tramps. If you could stand at my gate for one day, you would be astonished to see the number of tramps passing through our village, which is on the high road between two of the principal towns in South Yorkshire; and the same may be

said of any place in England situated on the main road, or what was formerly the coach road. We seldom meet tramps in town, except towards evening, when they come in for the casual ward. They spend their day in the country, passing from one town to another, and to those who reside near the high road, as I do, they are an intolerable nuisance. A tramp in a ten mile journey, which occupies him all day, will frequently make 1s. 6d. or 2s. a day, besides being supplied with food, and the more miserable and wretched he can make himself appear, the more sympathy he will get, and if he is lucky enough to meet a benevolent old lady out for her afternoon drive he will get 6d. or 1s. from her. She will say ‘Poor man,’ and then go home thinking how she has helped ‘that poor, wretched man’ on his way. Tramps are a class of people who never have worked, and who never will, except it be in prison, and, as long as they can get a living for nothing, they will continue to be, as you say in your article, ‘A blot upon the country and an eyesore on our roads.’

“I always find the quickest way of getting rid of a tramp is to threaten him with the police, and I am quite sure if every householder would make a rule never to relieve tramps with money, and only those who are crippled, with food, the number would soon be decreased. If people have any old clothes or spare coppers to give away, I am sure they will soon find in their own town or village many cases more worthy of their charity than the highway tramp. I do not recommend anybody to find a tramp even temporary employment, unless they can stand over him and then see the man safe off the premises, and even then he may come again at night as a burglar; but I am sure work could be found at 1s. 6d. or 2s. a day by our corporations or on the highways, where, under proper supervision, these idle vagabonds would be made to earn an honest living. You will find that nine out of ten tramps have been in prison and have no character, and although they may say they

‘want work,’ they really do not mean it. Not long ago I caught a great rough fellow trying to get the dinner from a little girl who was taking it to her father at his work. ‘Poor man! he must have been very hungry,’ I fancy I hear the benevolent old lady saying. Of course, during the last year we have had many men ‘on the road’ who are really in search of work, but I always tell them that there is as much work in one place as another, and unless they really have a situation in view they should not go tramping from town to town. Many of them have no characters to produce, and I expect when they find ‘tramping’ is such a pleasant and easy mode of living they will join the ranks and become roadsters also.”

In May’s Aldershot Advertiser, September 13th, 1879, the following is a leading article upon the condition of Gipsies:—“The incoming of September reminds us that in the hop districts this is the season of advent of those British nomads—the Gipsies, the only class for whom there is so little legislation, or with whose actions and habits, lawless as they are, the agents of the law so seldom interfere. The miners of the Black Country owe the suppression of juvenile labour and the short time law to the long exertions of the generous-hearted Richard Oastler. The brickmaker may no longer debase and ruin, both morally and physically, his child of the tender age of nine or ten years, by turning it—boy or girl—into the brick-yard to toil, shoeless and ragged, at carrying heavy lumps on its head. The canal population—they who are born and die in the circumscribed hole at the end of a barge, dignified by the name of ‘cabin,’ are just now receiving the special attention of Mr. Smith, of Coalville, and certainly, excepting the section of whom I am writing, there is not to be found in privileged England a people so utterly debased and regardless of the characteristics of civilised life. The Factory Act prevents the employing of boys or girls under a certain age, and secures for those who are legally employed a sufficient time

for recreation. But who cares for, or thinks about, the wandering Romany? True, Police-Constable Argus receives authority by which he, sans cérémonie, commands them to ‘move on,’ should he come across any by the roadside in his diurnal or nocturnal perambulations. But it often occurs that the object for which they ‘camped’ in the spot has been accomplished. The farmer’s hedge has been made to supply them with fuel for warmth and for culinary purposes; his field has been trespassed upon, and fodder stolen for their overworked and cruelly-treated quadrupeds; so, the ‘move on’ simply means a little inconvenience resulting from their having to transfer their paraphernalia to another ‘camp ground’ not far off. They also enjoy certain immunities which are withheld from other classes. Excepting that some of them pay for a hawker’s licence, they roam about as they list, untaxed and uncontrolled, though the earnings of most of them amount to a considerable sum every year; as they are free from the conventional rule which requires the house-dwelling population, often at great inconvenience, to ‘keep up appearances,’ it often happens that the wearer of the most tattered garments earns the most money. They can and do live sparingly, and spend lavishly. The labour which they choose is the most remunerative kind. Ploughing or stone-breaking is not the employment, which the Gipsy usually seeks! He takes the cream and leaves the skimmed milk for the cottier, and having done all there is to do of the kind he chooses, he is off to some other money-making industry. A Gipsy will make four harvests in one year; first he goes ‘up the country,’ as he calls going into Middlesex, for ‘peas-hacking.’ That over, he goes into Sussex (Chichester—’wheat-fagging’ or tying), and on that being done, returns toward Hampshire—North Hants—to ‘fag’ or tie, and that being done he enters Surrey for hop-picking (previously securing a ‘bin’ in one of the gardens). Some idea of his gross earnings may be obtained from the following fact:—Two able-bodied men, an old woman of

about 75 years of age, and two women, earned on a farm in one harvest, no less than £42. After that, they went hop-picking, and, in answer to my question, ‘How much will they earn there?’ the farmer, who is a hop-grower, said, ‘More than they have here.’ These operations were performed in less than a quarter of the year. In the places through which they pass to their work they sell what they can, and at night pitch their tent or draw their van on some common or waste land, buy no corn for their horses, nor spend any money for coal or wood. If they locate themselves on the margin of a wood, and make a prolonged sojourn, the uproar, the screams, the cries of ‘murder’ heard from their rendezvous

“‘Make night hideous.’

All this, and more, they do with impunity. ‘It is only the Gipsies quarrelling.’ No inspector of nuisances pays them a visit; the tax-gatherer knows not their whereabouts; the rate-collector troubles them not with any ‘demand note;’ their children are not provided with proper and necessary education, yet no school attendance officer serves them with a summons. Their existence is not known officially, saving the time a census is taken, when, at the expense of the house-dwellers, a registry is made of them. Not a farthing do they contribute to the government, imperial or local, though many of them are in a position to do it, and can, without inconvenience, find from £40 to £80; or £100 for a new-travelling van when they want one. Overcrowding and numerous indecencies exist in galore among them, yet no representative of the Board of Health troubles himself about the number of cubic feet of air per individual there may be in their tent or van. Is this neglect, indifference, obliviousness, or do the authorities believe that the impurities and unsanitary exhalements are sufficiently oxidised to prevent any disease? It is worthy of remark that they are not liable to the epidemics which afflict others. The loss of a

pony from a common simultaneously with their exodus is a suspicious fact occasionally. They live in defiance of social, moral, civil, and natural law, a disgrace to the legislature.—J. W. B.”

In the Hand and Heart, September 19th of last year, the editor says, with reference to our roadside arabs:—“Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, whose efforts to better the condition of the wretched canal population have met deserved success, draws attention to the state of another neglected class. Parliament, he says, which has lately been reforming so many things, would have done well to consider the case of the Gipsies, ‘our roadside arabs.’ Of the idleness, ignorance, heathenism, and general misery prevailing among these strange people he gives some curious instances. One old man, whose acquaintance Mr. Smith made, calculates that ‘there are about 250 families of Gipsies in ten of the Midland counties, and thinks that a similar proportion will be found in the rest of the United Kingdom. He has seen as many as ten tents of Gipsies within a distance of five miles. He thinks there will be an average of five children in each tent. He has seen as many as ten or twelve children in some tents, and not many of them able to read or write. His child of six months old—with his wife ill at the same time in the tent—sickened, died, and was “laid out” by him, and it was also buried out of one of those wretched abodes on the roadside at Barrow-upon-Soar, last January. When the poor thing died he had not sixpence in his pocket.’ An old woman bore similar testimony. ‘She said that she had had sixteen children, fifteen of whom are alive, several of them being born in a roadside tent. She says that she was married out of one of these tents; and her brother died and was buried out of a tent at Packington, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch. This poor woman knows about three hundred families of Gipsies in eleven of the Midland and Eastern counties, and has herself, so she says, four lots

of Gipsies travelling in Lincolnshire at the present time. She said she could not read herself, and thinks that not one Gipsy in twenty can. She has travelled all her life. Her mother, named Smith, of whom there are not a few, is the mother of fifteen children, all of whom were born in a tent.’ Mr. Smith’s conclusion (which will not be disputed) is that ‘to have between three and four thousand men and women, and eight or ten thousand children classed in the Census as vagrants and vagabonds, roaming all over the country, in ignorance and evil training that carries peril with it, is not a pleasant look-out for the future.’ He contends that ‘if these poor children, living in vans and tents and under old carts, are to be allowed to live in these places, they should be registered in a manner analogous to the Canal Boats Act of 1877, so that the children may be brought under the compulsory clauses of the Education Acts, and become Christianised and civilised as other children.’”

The Illustrated London News, October 4th, says:—“Among the papers to be read at Manchester is one on the condition of the Gipsy children and roadside ‘arabs’ in our midst, by Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, Leicester. Here, indeed, is a gentleman who is certainly neither a dealer in crotchets nor a rider of hobbies. Mr. Smith has done admirable service on behalf of the poor children on board our barges and canal-boats, and the even more pitiable boys and girls in our brick-fields; and to his philanthropic exertions are mainly due the recent amendments in the Factory Acts regulating the labour of young children. He has now taken the case of the juvenile ‘Romanies’ in hand; and I wish him well in his benevolent crusade. Mr. Smith has obligingly sent me a proof of his address, from which I gather that, owing to a superstitious dislike which the Gipsies entertain towards the Census, and the successfully cunning attempts on their part to baffle the enumerators, it is only by conjecture and guesswork that we can form any idea of the number of Bohemians in this country. The

result of Mr. Smith’s diligent inquiries has led him to the assumption that there are not less than 4,000 Gipsy men and women, and from 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsy and ‘arab’—that is to say, tramp—children roaming about the country ‘outside the educational laws and the pale of civilisation.’”

The following leading article, relating to my paper upon “The Condition of the Gipsy Children,” appears in the Daily News, October 6th:—“At the Social Science Congress Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, will to-morrow open a fresh campaign of philanthropy. The philanthropic Alexander is seldom in the unhappy condition of his Macedonian original, and generally has plenty of worlds remaining ready to be conquered. Brick-yards and canal-boats have not exhausted Mr. Smith’s energies, and the field he has now entered upon is wider and perhaps harder to work than either of these. Mr. Smith desires to bring the Gipsy children under the operation of the Education Act. Education and Gipsies seem at first sight to be words mutually contradictory. Amid the mass of imaginative fiction, idle speculation, and deliberate forgery that has been set afloat on the subject of the Gipsies, one thing has been made tolerably clear, and that is the intense aversion which the pure bred Gipsy has to any of the restraints of civilised life. Whether those restraints take the form of orderly and cleanly living in houses of brick and of stone, or of military service, or of school attendance, is pretty much a matter of indifference to him. Schools, indeed, may be regarded from the Gipsy point of view as not merely irksome, but useless institutions. Our most advanced places of technical education do not teach fortune-telling, or that interesting branch of the tinker’s art which enables the practitioner in mending one hole in a kettle to make two. Except for music the Gipsies do not seem to have much aptitude for the arts; they are more or less indifferent to literature; and business, except of certain dubious kinds, is a detestable thing to them. Their vagrant habits, on the other hand, enable them, without much difficulty, to evade

the great commandment which has gone forth, that all the English world shall be examined.

“The condition of the Gipsies is a sufficiently gloomy one. We may pass over those degenerate members of the race who have elected to pitch permanent tents in the slums and rookeries of great towns, because, in the first place, they are degenerate, and in the second, their children ought to be within reach of School Board visitors who do their duty diligently. It is only the Gipsy proper who has the opportunity of evading this vigilance. His opportunity is an excellent one, and he fully avails himself of it. Gipsy households, if they can be so called, are of the most fluid, not to say intangible character. The partnerships between men and women are rarely of a legal kind, and the constant habit of aliases and double names make identification still more difficult. As a rule, the race is remarkably prolific, and though the hardships to which young children are exposed thin it considerably, the proportion of children to adults is still very large. Hawking, their chief ostensible occupation, cannot legally be practised until the age of seventeen, and until that time the Gipsy child has nothing to do except to sprawl and loaf about the camp, and to indulge in his own devices. Idleness and ignorance, unless the whole race of moralists have combined to represent things falsely, are the parents of every sort of vice, and the average Gipsy child would appear to be brought up in a condition which is the ne plus ultra of both. It is true that Gipsies do not very often make their appearance in courts of justice, but this is partly owing to the cunning with which their peccadilloes are practised, partly to their well-known habit of sticking by one another, and still more to the mild but very definite terrorism which they exercise. Country residents, when a Gipsy encampment comes near them, know that a certain amount of blackmail in this way or that has to be paid, and that in their own time the strangers, if not interfered with, will go. Interference with them is apt to bring down a

visit from that very unpleasant fowl, the ‘red cock,’ whose crowings usually cost a good deal more than a stray chicken here and a vanished blanket there. So the Ishmaelites are left pretty much alone to wander about from roadside patch to roadside patch to pick up a living somehow or other, and to exist in the condition of undisturbed freedom and filth which appears to be all that they desire.

“The gloss has long been taken off the picture which imaginative persons used to varnish for themselves as to the Romany. Nor, perhaps is any country in Europe so little fitted for these gentry as ours. England is every year becoming more and more enclosed, and the spaces which are not enclosed are more and more carefully looked after. Whether in our climate open-air living was ever thoroughly satisfactory is a question not easy to answer. But even if we admit that it might have been merry in good greenwood under the conditions picturesquely described in ballads, the admission does not extend to the present day. There is no good greenwood now, except a few insignificant patches, which are pretty sharply preserved; and the killing of game, except on a small scale and at considerable risk, is difficult. The cheapness of modern manufactures has interfered a good deal with the various trades of mending, mankind having made up their minds that it is better to buy new things and throw them away when they fail than to have them patched and cobbled. Fortune-telling is a resource to some extent, but even this is meddled with by the Gorgio and his laws. The raison d’être of the vagabond Gipsy is getting smaller and smaller in England, and as this goes on the likelihood of his practices becoming more and more undisguisedly criminal is obvious. The best way to prevent this is, of course, to catch him young and educate him. A century or two ago the innate Bohemianism of the race might have made this difficult, if not impossible. But it is clear that even if the Gipsy blood has not been largely crossed during their four centuries of residence in England,

other influences have been sufficient to work upon them. If they can live in towns at all, they can live in them after the manner of civilised townsmen. A Gipsy at school suggests odd ideas, and one might expect that the pupils would imitate some day or other, though less tragically, the conduct of that promising South African prince who, the other day, solemnly took off his trousers (as a more decisive way of shaking our dust from his feet), and began vigorously to kill colonists. But it is by no means certain that this would be the case. The old order of Gipsy life has, in England, at any rate, become something of an impossibility and everything of a nuisance. It has ceased to be even picturesque.”

The following is a copy of my paper upon the “Condition of Gipsy Children,” as read by me before the Social Science Congress, held at Manchester on October 7th, 1879. Although it was at the “fag end” of the session, and the last paper but two, it was evident the announcement in the papers that my paper was to be read on Tuesday morning had created a little interest in the Gipsy children question, for immediately I began to read it in the large room, under the presidency of Dr. Haviland, it was manifest I was to be honoured with a large audience, so much so, that, before I had proceeded very far with it, the hall was nearly full of merchant princes—who could afford to leave their bags of gold and cotton—and ladies and gentlemen desirous of listening to my humble tale of neglected humanity, and the outcasts of society, commonly called “Gipsies’ children.” Dr. Gladstone, of the London School Board, opened the discussion and said that he could, from his own observation and knowledge of the persons I had quoted, testify to the truthfulness of my remarks. Dr. Fox, of London, Mr. H. H. Collins, Mr. Crofton, and other gentlemen took part in the discussion, and it was the unanimous feeling of those present that something should be done to remedy this sad state of things; and the chairman said that the result of my labours with regard to the Gipsies would be that something

would be done in the way of legislation. The paper caused some excitement in the country, and was copied lengthily into many of the daily papers, including the Leicester Daily Post, Leicester Daily Mercury, Nottingham Guardian, Nottingham Journal, Sunday School Chronicle, Record, and others nearly in full, and was read as follows:—

“As it is not in my power to open out a painful subject in the flowery language of fiction, romance, and imagery, in musical sounds of the highest pitch of refinement, culture, and sentiment, I purpose following out very briefly the same course on the present occasion as I adopted on the three times I have had the honour to address the Social Science Congress with reference to the brick-yard and canal-boat children—viz., that of attempting to place a few serious, hard, broad dark facts in a plain, practical, common-sense view, so as to permeate your nature till they have reached your hearts and consciences, and compelled you to extend the hand of sympathy and help to rescue my young clients from the dreadful and perilous condition into which they have fallen through long years of neglect.

“Owing to a superstitious regard and dislike the Gipsies had towards the Census, and their endeavours to evade being taken, no correct number has been arrived at; and it is only by guess work and conjecture we can form any idea of the number of Gipsies there are in this country. The Census puts the number at between 4,000 and 5,000. A gentleman who has lived and moved among them many years writes me to say that there cannot be less than 2,000 in the neighbourhood of London, whose Paradises are in the neighbourhood of Wormwood Scrubs, Notting Hill Pottery, New Found Out, Kensal Green, Battersea, Dulwich Common, Lordship Lane, Mitcham Common, Barnes Common, Epping Forest, Cherry Island, and like places. A gentleman told me some time since that he gave a tea to over 150 Gipsies residing in the neighbourhood of Kensal Green. A Gipsy woman who has moved about all her life says she knows about 300 families

in ten of the Midland counties. Another Gipsy, in a different part of England, tells me a similar story, and says the same proportion will be borne out all over the country. Of hawkers, auctioneers, showmen, and others who live in caravans with their families, there would be, at a rough calculation, not less than 3,000 children; taking these things along with others, and the number given in the Census, it may be fairly assumed that I am under the mark when I state that there are not less than 4,000 Gipsy men and women, and 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsy and other children moving about the country outside the educational laws and the pale of civilisation.

“Some few Gipsies who have arrived at what they consider the highest state of a respectable and civilised life, reside in houses which, in 99 cases out of 100, are in the lowest and most degraded part of the towns, among the scum and offscouring of all nations, and like locusts they leave a blight behind them wherever they have been. Others have their tents and vans, and there are many others who I have tents only. A tent as a rule is about 7ft. 6in. wide, 16ft. long, and 4ft. 6in. high at the top. They are covered with pieces of old cloth, sacking, &c., to keep the rain and snow out; the opening to allow the Gipsies to go in and out of their tent is covered with a kind of coverlet. The fire by which they cook their meals is placed in a kind of tin bucket pierced with holes, and stands on the damp ground. Some of the smoke or sulphur arising from the sticks or coke finds its way through an opening at the top of the tent about 2ft. in diameter. The other part of the smoke helps to keep their faces and hands the proper Gipsy colour. Their beds consist of a layer of straw upon the damp ground, covered with a sack or sheet, as the case may be. An old soapbox or tea-chest serves as a chest of drawers, drawing-room table, and clothes-box. In these places children are born, live, and die; men, women, grown-up sons and daughters, lie huddled together in such a state as would shock the

modesty of South African savages, to whom we send missionaries to show them the blessings of Christianity. As in other cases where idleness and filth abounds, what little washing they do is generally done on the Saturday afternoons; but this is a business they do not indulge in too often. They are not overdone with cooking utensils, and the knives and forks they principally use are of the kind Adam used, and sensitive when applied to hot water. They take their meals and do their washing squatting upon the ground like tailors and Zulus. Lying, begging, thieving, cheating, and every other abominable, low, cunning craft that ignorance and idleness can devise, they practise. In some instances these things are carried out to such a pitch as to render them more like imbeciles than human beings endowed with reason. Chair-mending, tinkering, and hawking are in many instances used only as a ‘blind;’ while the women and children go about the country begging and fortune-telling, bringing to their heathenish tents sufficient to keep the family. The poor women are the slaves and tools for the whole family, and can be seen very often with a child upon their backs, another in their arms, and a heavily-laden basket by their side. Upon the shoulders of the women rests the responsibility of providing for the herds of ditch-dwelling heathens. Many of the women enjoy their short pipes quite as much as the men.

“Judging from the conversations I have had with the Gipsies in various parts of the country, not more than half living as men and wives are married. No form or ceremony has been gone through, not even ‘jumping the broomstick,’ as has been reported of them; and taking the words of a respectable Gipsy woman, ‘they go together, take each other’s words, and there is an end of it.’ I am also assured by Levi Boswell, a real respectable Gipsy, and a Mrs. Eastwood, a Christian woman and a Gipsy, who preaches occasionally, that not half the Gipsies who are living as men and wives are married. When once a Gipsy woman has

been ill-used, she becomes fearful, and as one said to me a few days since, ‘we are either like devils or like lambs.’ In the case of some of the adult Gipsies living on the outskirts of London an improvement has taken place. There is some good among them as with others. A Gipsy in Wiltshire has built himself a house at the cost of £600. Considerable difficulty is experienced sometimes in finding them out, as many of the women go by two names; but in vain do I look for any improvement among the children. Owing to the act relating to pedlars and hawkers prohibiting the granting of licences for hawking to the youths of both sexes under seventeen, and the Education Acts not being sufficiently strong to lay hold of their dirty, idle, travelling tribes to educate them—except in rare cases—they are allowed to skulk about in ignorance and evil training, without being taught how to get an honest living. No ray of hope enters their breast, their highest ambition is to live and loll about so long as the food comes, no matter by whom or how it comes so that they get it. In many instances they live like pigs, and die like dogs. The real old-fashioned Gipsy has become more lewd and demoralised—if such a thing could be—by allowing his sons and daughters to mix up with the scamps, vagabonds, ‘rodneys,’ and gaol birds, who now and then take their flight from the ‘stone cup’ and settle among them as they are camping on the ditch banks; the consequence is our lanes are being infested with a lot of dirty ignorant Gipsies, who, with their tribes of squalid children, have been encouraged by servant girls and farmers—by supplying their wants with eggs, bacon, milk, potatoes, the men helping themselves to game—to locate in the neighbourhood until they have received the tip from the farmer to pass on to his neighbours. Children born under such circumstances, unless taken hold of by the State, will turn out to be a class of most dangerous characters. Very much, up to the present, the wants of the women and children have been supplied through gulling the large-hearted and liberal-minded they

have been brought in contact with, and the result has been that but few of the real Gipsies have found their way into gaols. This is a redeeming feature in their character; probably their offences may have been winked at by the farmers and others who do not like the idea of having their stacks fired and property destroyed, and have given the Gipsies a wide berth. Gipsies, as a rule, have very large families, generally between eight and sixteen children are born in their tents. Owing to their exposure to the damp and cold ground they suffer much from chest and throat complaints. Large numbers of the children die young before they are ‘broken’ in.’ And it is a ‘breaking in’ in a tremendous sense, fraught with fearful consequences. With regard to their education, the following cases, selected from different parts of the country, may be fairly taken as representative of the entire Gipsy community. Boswell, a respectable Gipsy, says he has had nine sons and daughters (six of whom are alive), and nineteen grandchildren, and none of them can read or write; and he also thinks that about half the Gipsy men and women living as husbands and wives are unmarried. Mrs. Simpson, a Gipsy woman and a Christian, says she has six sons and daughters and sixteen grandchildren, and only two can read and write a little. Mrs. Eastwood says she has nine brothers and sisters. Mr. Eastwood, a Christian and a Gipsy, has eight brothers and sisters, many among them have large families, making a total of adults and children of about fifty of all ages, and there is scarcely one among them who can tell a letter or read a sentence; in addition to this number they have between them from 130 to 150 first and second cousins, among whom there are not more than two who can read or write, and that but very little indeed, and Mr. Eastwood thinks this proportion will apply to other Gipsies. Mrs. Trayleer has six brothers and sisters, all Gipsies, and not one can read or write. A Gipsy woman, whose head-quarters are near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, has fifteen brothers and sisters, some

of whom have large families. She herself has fifteen sons and daughters alive, some of whom are married. But of the whole of these brothers and sisters, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, &c., numbering not less than 100 of all ages, not more than three or four can read or write, and they who can but very imperfectly. Mrs. Matthews has a family of seven children, nearly all grown-up, and not one out of the whole of these can read or write; thus it will be seen that I shall be under the mark when I state that not five per cent. of the Gipsies, &c., travelling about the country in tents and vans can either read or write; and I have not found one Gipsy but what thinks it would be a good thing if their tents and vans were registered, and the children compelled to go to school—in fact, many of them are anxious for such a thing to be brought about. In the case of the brick-yard and canal-boat children, they were over-worked as well as ignorant. In the case of the Gipsy children, these children and roadside arabs, for the want of education, ambition, animation, and push, are indulging in practices that are fast working their own destruction and those they are brought into contact with, and a great deal of this may lay at the door of flattery, twaddle, petting, and fear.

“The plan I would adopt to remedy this sad state of things is to apply the principles of the Canal Boats Act of 1877 to all movable habitations—i.e., I would have all tents, shows, caravans, auctioneers’ vans, and like places used as dwellings registered and numbered, and under proper sanitary arrangements and supervision of the sanitary inspectors and School Board officers in every town and village. With regard to the education of the children when once the tent or van is registered and numbered, the children, whether travelling as Gipsies, auctioneers, &c., are mostly idle during the day; consequently, a book similar to the half-time book, in which their names and attendance at school could be entered, they could take from place to place as they travel about, and it could be endorsed by the schoolmaster

showing that the child was attending school. The education obtained in this way would not be of the highest order; but through the kindness of the schoolmaster—for which extra trouble he should be compensated, as he ought to be under the Canal Boats Act—and the vigilance of the School Board visitor, a plain, practical, and sound education could be imparted to, and obtained by, these poor little Gipsy children and roadside arabs, who, if we do our duty, will be qualified to fill the places of those of our best artisans who are leaving the country to seek their fortunes abroad.”

The following is a leading article in the Birmingham Daily Mail, October 8th:—“Mr. George Smith, whose exertions on behalf of the canal population and the children employed in brick-yards have been accompanied with so much success, is now turning his attention to the education of the Gipsies. He read a paper on this subject at the Social Science Congress, yesterday, suggesting that the same plan of registration which had proved advantageous in the case of the canal-boatmen and their families should be adopted for the more nomadic class who roam from place to place, with no settled home and no local habitation. The Gipsies are a strange race, with a romantic history, and their vagabond life is surrounded with enough of the mysterious to give them at all times a special and curious interest. In the days of our infancy we are frightened with tales of their child-thieving propensities, and even when years and reason have asserted their influence we are apt to regard with a survival of our childish awe the wandering ‘diviners and wicked heathens’ who roam about the country, living in a mysterious aloofness from their fellow-men. Scores of theories have been propounded as to the origin of the Gipsy race, whence they sprang, and how they came to be so largely scattered over three of the four quarters of the globe. Opinion, following in the wake of the learned Rudiger, has finally settled down to the view that they came

from India, but whether they are the Tshandalas referred to in the laws of Menou, or kinsmen of the Bazeegars of Calcutta, or are descended from the robbers of the Indus, or are identical with the Nuts and Djatts of Northern India, has not been ascertained with any degree of certainty. The Gyptologists are not yet agreed upon the ancestry of this ancient but obscure race, and possibly they never will be. We know, however, that the Gipsies have wandered up and down Europe since the eleventh century, if not from a still earlier period, and that they have preserved their Bohemian characteristics, their language—which is a sort of daughter of the old Sanscrit—their traditions, and the mysteries of their religion during a long career of restless movement and frequent persecution. And they have kept, too, their indolent, and not too creditable habits. Early in the twelfth century an Austrian monk described them as ‘Ishmaelites and braziers, who go peddling through the wide world, having neither house, nor home, cheating the people with their tricks, and deceiving mankind, but not openly.’ That description would hold good at the present day. The Gipsies are still a lazy, thieving set of rogues, who get their living by robbing hen-roosts, telling fortunes, and ‘snapping up unconsidered trifles’ like Autolycus of old. Pilfering, varied with a rude sort of magic, and the swindling arts of divination and chiromancy for the special behoof of credulous servant-girls, are the stock-in-trade of the modern Zingaris. Without education, and without industry, they transmit their vagrant habits to generation after generation, and perpetuate all the vices of a lawless and nomadic life.

“It is very easy to give a romantic and even a sentimental colouring to the wandering Romany. The ‘greenwood home,’ with its freedom from all the restraints of a conventional state of society, is not without its attractive side—in books and in ballads. Minor poets have told us that ‘the Gipsy’s life is a joyous life,’ and plays and operas have been

written to illustrate the superiority of vagabondage over civilisation. But the pretty Gitana of the stage is altogether a different sort of being from the brown-faced, elf-locked, and tawdrily dressed female who haunts back entries with the ostensible object of selling clothes-pegs, but with the real motive of picking up whatever may be lying in her way. There is but small chance of Bohemian Girls finding themselves in drawing-rooms nowadays. The last experiment of the kind was made by the writer of a charming book on the Gipsies, who was so fascinated by one of their number that he married her; but the wild, restless spirit was untameable, and the divorce court proved that the supposed precept of fidelity, which is said to guide the conduct of Gipsy wives, is not without its exceptions. The Gipsies have nothing in common with our conventional ways and habits, and whether it is possible ever to remove the barrier that separates them from civilisation is a question which only experiment can satisfactorily answer. Mr. Smith’s scheme is not the first, by many, that has been made to improve the conditions of Gipsy life. Nearly half a century ago the Rev. Mr. Crabb, of Southampton, formed a society with the object of amalgamating the Gipsies with the general population, but the scheme was comparatively futile. Still, past failure is no reason why a new attempt should not be made. Mr. Smith says there cannot be less than 4,000 Gipsy men and women, and from 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsy children moving about the country, outside the educational laws and the pale of civilisation, and not five per cent. of them can either read or write. Their mode of life is such as ‘would shock the modesty of South African savages,’ for men, women, and grown-up sons and daughters lie huddled together, and in many cases they ‘live like pigs and die like dogs.’ There is certainly room enough here for education, and education is the only thing that is likely to have any practical results.

“It is proposed that the principles of the Canal Boats

Act shall be applied to all movable habitations; that is, that all tents, shows, caravans, auctioneers’ vans, and like places used as dwellings, shall be registered and numbered, and put under proper sanitary supervision. Mr. Smith points out that when once a tent or van had been registered and numbered, it could be furnished with a book similar to a half-time book, in which the names of the children having first been entered, the attendances at school could be endorsed by the schoolmaster—for which extra trouble he should be compensated—as the children travelled about from place to place. By this means something tangible would be done to prevent the roadside waifs from growing up in the ignorance which is the parent of idleness. Why should these ten or fifteen thousand little nomads be allowed to remain in the neglected condition which has characterised their strange race for centuries? It is time that the spell was broken. There are no traditions of Gipsy life worth perpetuating; there is no sentimental halo around its history which it would be cruel to dispel. In past ages the Gipsies have been subjected to harsh laws and barbarous edicts; it remains for our more enlightened times to deal with them on a humaner plan. It is only by the expanding influence of education that the little minds of their children can gain a necessary experience of the utility and dignity of honest labour. When they have received some measure of instruction they will be fitter to emerge from the aimless and vagabond life of their forefathers, and break away from the squalor and precarious existence which has held so many generations of them in thrall. Mr. Smith’s idea is worthy the attention of legislators. It does not look so grand on paper, we admit, but it is a nobler thing to educate the young barbarian at home than to make war upon the unoffending barbarian abroad. The instincts and habits which have been transmitted from father to son for hundreds of years are not, of course, to be eradicated in a day, or even in a generation; but the time will, perhaps, eventually

come when the Gipsies will cease to exist as a separate and distinct people, and become absorbed into the general population of the country. Whether that absorption takes place sooner or later, nothing can be lost by conferring on the young ‘Arabs’ of the tents the rudiments of an education which will hereafter be helpful to them if they are desirous of abandoning their squalor and indolence, and of earning an industrious livelihood. Their dread of fixed and continuous occupation may die out in time, and closer intimacy with the conditions of industrial life may teach them that civilisation has some compensations to offer for the sacrifice of their roaming propensities, and for taking away from them their ‘free mountains, their plains and woods, the sun, the stars, and the winds’ which are the companions of their free and unfettered, but wasted and purposeless lives.”

The Weekly Dispatch, in a leading article, October 13th, says:—“Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, has an eye for the nomads of the country. His name must already be unfavourably known throughout most of the canal barges of the United Kingdom. If he is not the Croquemitaine of every floating nursery journeying inland from the metropolis he ought to be, for it was mainly he who thrust a half-time book into the hands of the bargee and compelled him, by the Canal Boats Act of 1877, to soap his infants’ faces and put primers in their way. With Smith of Coalville, therefore, it may be expected that each juvenile of the wharves and locks now associates his most unhappy moments. The half-time book of the act comes between him and the blessed state of his previous ignorance. Registered and numbered, supervised and inspected, he has been put on the road to know things that must necessarily disillusionise him of the black enchantments of life on the water highway. It is allowable to hope, however, that having recovered from the first discomforts of civilising soap and primers, he will yet live to appreciate Mr. Smith’s name as one associated

with kindly intent and generous aspirations in his behalf. A generation of bargemen who had a less uncompromising vocabulary of oaths, who could beguile some of the tedium of their voyaging with reading, and who in other important respects showed the influences of half-time, would be a smiling reward of philanthropy and an important addition to our civilisation. That Mr. Smith anticipates some such reward is evident from the eagerness with which he has been pushing the principle in another quarter. At the Social Science Congress he has just propounded a scheme of educational annexation for Gipsy children similar in every respect to that applied to the occupants of the canal-boats. That is, he would have every tent and van numbered and furnished with a half-time book, and he would ordain it as the duty of School Board visitors to see that the Gipsies render their children amenable to the terms of the act to the extent of their wandering ability, under threat of the usual penalties. The prospect which he foresees from such treatment is that a body of wanderers numbering not much below 20,000 will be rescued from a position which, he says, would at present shock South African savages, and will thus be brought in to honest industry and ‘qualified to fill the places of our best artisans, who are leaving the country to seek their fortunes abroad.’ It is impossible not to wish Mr. Smith’s scheme well, especially as he contends that the Gipsies themselves are not averse to having their children educated; but it is equally impossible to be sanguine as to results. The true Gipsy, who is not to be confounded with the desultory hawker of English origin, has many arteries of untameable blood within him. He has never as yet shown the slightest concern about the English phases of civilisation which Mr. Smith would like to press upon his notice. Such ideas as those of God, immortality, and marriage are as unknown to him as the commonest distinction between mine and thine. He is a well-looking artistic vagabond, to whom a half-time book and a penalty will in all probability

be no better than a standing joke to be cracked with impunity at the expense of the rural School Boards.”

The Sportsman of October 16th, 1879, has the following notice:—“Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, whose philanthropic efforts on behalf of ‘our canal-boat population’ are well known, has lately turned his attention to the wandering Gipsy tribes who infest the roadside, with the view to procuring at least a modicum of education for their children. He says that the Gipsies are lamentably ignorant, few of them being able even to write their names. By certain proceedings which took place at Christchurch Police-court on Tuesday, it would almost seem that some of the dark-faced wanderers already are educated a little too much. At all events, they occasionally manifest an ability to ‘take a stave’ out of the rest of the community. At the court in question a Gipsy woman named Emma Barney was brought to task for ‘imposing by subtle craft to extort money’ from a Bournemouth shopkeeper named Richard Oliver. It seems that Oliver is troubled with pimples on his face, and that Emma Barney—not an inappropriate name, by the way—said she could cure these by means of a certain herb, the name of which she would divulge ‘for a consideration.’ Before doing so, however, she required Richard’s coat and waistcoat, and some silver to ‘steam in hot water,’ after which the name of the herb would be given—on the following day. It is needless to say that the coat, waistcoat, and silver did not return to the Oliver home, and that the pimples did not depart from the Oliver face. The ‘Gipsy’s home’ for the next two months will be in the county gaol. It is a curious reflection, however, that such strange credulity as that displayed by the Bournemouth shopkeeper in this case can be found in the present year of grace, with its gigantic machinery for educating the masses.”

The following leading article, taken from the Daily Telegraph, under date October 17th of last year, will show that crime is far from abating among the classes of the Gipsy

fraternity:—“The melancholy truth that there exists a ‘breed’ of criminals in all societies was well illustrated at Exeter this week. Sir John Duckworth, as Chairman of the Devon Quarter Sessions, in charging the grand jury, had to tell them that the calendar was very heavy, the heaviest, in fact, known for many years. There were forty-five prisoners for trial, whereas the average number is twenty-five, taking the last five years. Sir John could assign no particular reason for such a lamentable increase, though he supposed the prevailing depression of trade might have had something to do with it. But he pointed out a very notable fact indeed, which sprang from an examination of the gaol delivery, and this was that out of the forty-five prisoners twenty had been previously convicted. Such a percentage goes far to prove that the criminal propensity is innate, and to a certain degree ineradicable by punishments; and this only enhances the immense importance of national education, by which alone society can hope to conquer the predatory tendency in certain baser blood, and to supply it with the means and the instincts of industry. In justice, however, to the existing generation of criminals, we ought also to remember that such serious figures further prove the difficulty encountered by released prisoners in living honestly. A rat will not steal where traps are set if it can only find food in the open, and some of these twice-captured vermin of our community might tell a piteous tale of the obstacles that lie in the way of honesty.”

The Weekly Times, under date October 26th, 1879, has the following article upon the Gipsies near London. The locality described is not one hundred miles from Mary’s Place and Notting Hill Potteries. The writer goes on to say that “There are at the present time upwards of two thousand people—men, women, and children, members of the Gipsy tribe—camped in the outlying districts of London. They are settled upon waste places of every kind. Bits of ground that will ere long be occupied by houses, waste corners that

seem to be of no good for anything, yards belonging to public-houses, or pieces of ‘common’ over which no authority claims any rights; or if there are rights, the authority is too obscure to interfere with such poor settlers as Gipsies, who will move away again before an authoritative opinion can be pronounced upon any question affecting them. The Gipsies, in the winter, certainly cause very few inconveniences in such places as the metropolis. They do not cause rents to rise. They are satisfied to put up their tent where a Londoner would only accommodate his pig or his dog, and they certainly do not affect the balance of labour, few of them being ever guilty of robbing a man of an honest day’s work. Yet, with all their failings, the Gipsies have always found friends ready to take their part in times of trouble, and crave a sufferance on account of their hard lot, and the scanty measure with which the good things of this life have been, and still are, meted out to them. Constrained by an irresistible force to keep ever moving, they fulfil the fate imposed upon them with a degree of cheerfulness which no other class of people would exhibit. As the approach of winter reduces outdoor pursuits to the fewest possible number, the farm labourer finds it difficult to employ the whole of his time profitably, and those who only follow an outdoor life for the pleasures it yields naturally gravitate towards the shelter of large towns in which to spend the winter months of every year. So when the cold winds begin to blow, and the leaves are falling, the Gipsies come to town, and settle upon the odd nooks and corners, and fill up the unused yards, and eat and drink, and bring up children, in the very places where their fathers and grandfathers have done the same before them. The young men get a day’s work where they can; the young women hawk wool mats, laces, or other women’s vanities; while the more skilful go round with rope mats, and every form of chair or stool that can be made of rushes and canes. The old folks do a little grinding of knives, or tinker pots and pans; and, if a fine

day or a pleasure fair calls forth all the useful mouths and hands from their tents and caravans, the babies will take care of themselves in the straw which makes the pony’s bed until some member of the camp returns home in the evening. So the winter months pass away, and in the spring, when the cuckoo begins to call, these restless-footed people, whose origin no man is acquainted with, go forth again, and in the lanes and woods, or on the commons of the country, pass their summer, earning a precarious subsistance—honestly if they can—content with hard food and poor clothes, so that they may feel the free air of heaven blowing about them night and day, while the sun paints their cheeks the colour of the ancient Egyptians. Our Gipsies have always been a favourite study with ethnological folk; poets have sung their wild, free life, and painters have taken them as types of the happy, if the careless; while philanthropists have occasionally gone amongst them, and told pitiful tales of their degradation, ignorance, and misery. It was not from any feeling of romance or pity that we were induced the other day to accept an invitation from Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, to spend a few hours amongst some of these people. Mr. George Smith’s life has been devoted to the amelioration of the condition of many very poor and almost entirely neglected classes of the community, and it was pleasant to have the opportunity of going with such a simple-hearted hero amongst those in whom he takes a deep interest. Having devoted many years of his life to the poor brick-yard children, and afterwards to the children labouring in canal-boats, he has found one more class still left outside every Act of Parliament, and beyond every chance of being helped in the right way to earn an honest living and become industrious members of society. These are the Gipsies and their children, who have been let alone so severely by all so-called right-thinking men and women that there is great danger of their becoming a sore evil in our midst. Unable to read or write—their powers of thought

thereby cramped—with no one to look after them, separated from the people in whose midst they live, there can be little wonder that they should grow up with certain loose notions about right and wrong, and a manner of life the reverse of that which prevails amongst Christian people; but, now that Mr. George Smith has got his eyes and his heart fixed upon them, there will surely be something done which, in the near future, will redeem these people from many of the disadvantages under which they labour, and add to the body corporate a tribe possessed of many amiable characteristics. Mr. Smith never takes up more than one thing at a time, and upon the accomplishment of it he concentrates all his energies. This attribute is the one which has enabled him to carry to successful conclusions the acts for the relief of the brick-yard and the canal-boat children; but while he is about a work he becomes thoroughly possessed by his subject, and the most important event that may happen for the country, or for the world, loses all value in his eyes unless it bears directly upon the accomplishment of the object in hand. Thus it happened that, from the time we sallied out together in search of a Gipsy camp, until the moment we parted at night, Mr. Smith thought of nothing, spoke of nothing, remembered nothing, saw nothing, but what had some relation to the Gipsies and their mode of life. The Zulus were to be pitied because theirs was a sort of Gipsy life; and the Gipsies’ tents were nothing more than kraals. All his stories were of what Gipsies he had met, and what they had said; and even our fellow-travellers in the train were only noticeable because they looked like some Gipsy man or woman whom he had met elsewhere. We had a short ride by rail, and a tramp through a densely-populated district, and then we came to the camping-ground we wanted. It was a spacious yard, entered through a gate, and surrounded with houses, whose back yards formed the enclosure. There were three caravans and three kraals erected there, and as it was Sunday afternoon nearly all the inhabitants

were at home. Those who were absent were a few children able to go to Sunday-school, whither they went of their own free will and with the approval of their parents. The kraals were not all constructed on the same pattern—two were circular in form and the third was square. This was on the right hand at entering, and had at one time been a tumble-down shelter for a calf, who had many years before gone the way of all beef—into a butcher’s shop. There were tiles on the low roof—in places—but plenty of openings were left for the rain to come in, and for the smoke from the fire in the bucket to find a way out if it chose. The floor was common earth, and very uneven in places. Alice, the mistress of this abode, was a woman over fifty, with a face the colour of leather, and vigour enough to do any amount of work. As we entered, she told Mr. Smith a piteous tale of the loss of her spectacles, without which she solemnly declared she could not read a line. She left the spectacles one day when she was going ‘hopping,’ hidden under a tile above her head, and when she returned the case was there, but the spectacles were gone. She carried her licence to hawk in her spectacle-case, until the time came when she could happily beg the gift of a pair of new ones. Her husband, a white-haired old man, with a look of innocent wonder in his face, sat on a lump of wood, warming his hands over the fire. He said little—his wife scarcely allowing an opportunity for any one else to speak—but seemed to consider that he was a fortunate man in having such a remarkable wife. There was a handsome young woman sitting in the only chair in the place, daughter of the old couple; and her brother lay extended on a bed made of indescribable things in one portion of the cabin, where the tiles in the roof showed no openings to the sky. His wife, a thoroughbred Gipsy, sat nursing a baby—their first-born—on the edge of the bed. The wood walls were covered with old clothes, sacking, and a variety of odd things, fastened in their places by wooden skewers, and adorned with a few pots and pans

used in cooking. Here, for six or seven winters, this family had resided, defying alike the frosts and snows and rains of the most severe winters. Nor could they be made to admit that a cottage would be more comfortable; that hut had served them well enough so many years, and would be good enough as long as they lived. Besides, said Alice, the rent was a consideration, and the whole yard only cost 2s. a week. This woman was the mother of eighteen children, of whom eleven were living. Drawn up close by was a caravan, in the occupation at the time of two young women, thorough Gipsies in face and tongue, who chaffed us as to the object of our visit, and begged hard for some kind of remembrance to be left with them. But we did not accept their invitation to walk up, but passed down the yard, by heaps of manure and refuse of all kinds, by another kraal, where a bucket containing coal was burning, and a young man lay stretched on a dirty mattress, and a little bantam kept watch beside him, to the steps of another caravan, where, from the sounds we heard, high jinks were going on with some children. At the sound of a tap on the door there was an instant hush, and then a girl of nineteen, who had a baby in her arms, asked us to come in. We looked up in amazement; the girl’s face appeared like an apparition—so fair, so beautiful, so like some face we had seen elsewhere, that we were confused and puzzled. In a moment the mystery was solved; we had seen that face before in several of the choicest canvases that have hung in recent years upon the walls of the Academy; we had met with the fairest Gipsy model that ever stood before the students of the Academy, the favourite alike of the young artist and the head of his profession. It can only fall to the lot of a few to see Annie, the Gipsy model; but the curious may look upon her counterpart, only of heroic size, in Clytie, at the British Museum. Annie has a face of exquisite Grecian form, and a hand so delicate that it has been painted more than once in the ‘portrait of a titled lady.’

When she was a very little girl, she told us, hawking laces in a basket one day, a gentleman met her at the West-end who was a painter, and from that day to the present Annie has earned a living—and at times of great distress maintained all the family—by the fees she received as a model. Her mother had had nine children, of whom eight were living; and three of the family are constantly employed as models. Annie is one, the young fellow who was watched over by the bantam was another, and a boy of four was the third. The father is of pure Gipsy blood, but the mother is an Oxfordshire woman, and neither of them possess any striking characteristic in their faces; yet all their girls are singularly beautiful, and their sons handsome fellows. They have got a reputation for beauty now, and ladies have, but without success, tried to negotiate for the possession of the youngest. Never before had we seen such fair faces, such dainty limbs, such exquisite eyes, as were possessed by the Gipsy occupants of that caravan. Annie was as modest and gentle-voiced and mannered as she was beautiful; and there came a flush of trouble over her fair face as she told us that not being able to read or write had ‘been against’ her all her life. There was more refinement about Annie and her mother than we had discovered amongst others with whom we had conversed. Thus, Annie, speaking of her grandfather, laid great emphasis on the assertion that he was a fine man. He lived to be 104, she said, and walked as upright as a young man to his death. He went about crying ‘chairs to mend,’ in that very locality, up to within a short time of his death, and all the old ladies employed him because he was so handsome. She was playing with a baby girl as she talked with us, and the child fixed her black eyes upon her sister’s face, and crooned with baby pleasure. ‘What is baby’s name,’ we asked? ‘Comfort,’ replied Annie. ‘We were hopping one year’ said the mother, ‘and there was a young woman in the party I took to very much, and her name was Comfort. Coming away

from the hop grounds, the caravans had to cross a river, and while we were in the water one day the river suddenly rose, the caravans were upset, and eleven were drowned, Comfort amongst the number. So I christened baby after her in remembrance.’ All the family were neatly dressed, and once, when Annie opened the cupboard door for an instant, we caught sight of a dish of small currant puddings.”

A visit to a batch of Gipsy wigwams, Wardlow Street, Garrett Lane, Wandsworth, induced me to send the following letter to the London and country daily papers, and it appeared in the Daily Chronicle and Daily News, November 20th, as under:—“The following touching incident may slightly show the thorough heartfelt desire there is—but lacking the power—among the Gipsies to be partakers of some of the sanitary and educational advantages the Gorgios or Gentiles are the recipients of. A few days since I wended my way to a large number of Gipsies located in tents, huts, and vans near Wandsworth Common, to behold the pitiable spectacle of some sixty half-naked, poor Gipsy children, and thirty Gipsy men and women, living in a state of indescribable ignorance, dirt, filth, and misery, mostly squatting upon the ground, making their beds upon peg shavings and straw, and divested of the last tinge of romantical nonsense, which is little better in this case—used as a deal of it is—than paper pasted upon the windows, to hide from public view the mass of human corruption which has been festering in our midst for centuries, breeding all kinds of sin and impurities, except in the eyes of those who see beautiful colours and delights in the aroma of stagnant pools and beauty in the sparkling hues of the gutter, and revel in adding tints and pictures to the life and death of a weasel, lending enchantment to the life of a vagabond, and admire the non-intellectual development of beings many of whom are only one step from that of animals, if I may judge from the amount of good the 20,000 Gipsies have accomplished in the

world during the last three or four centuries. Connected with this encampment not more than four or five of the poor creatures could read a sentence or write a letter. In creeping almost upon ‘all-fours,’ into one of the tents, I came across a real, antiquated, live, good kind of Gipsy woman named Britannia Lee, who boasted that she was a Lee of the fourth generation; and in sitting down upon a seat that brought my knees upon a level with my chin, I entered into conversation with the family about the objects of my inquiries—of which they said they had heard all about—viz., to get all the Gipsy tents, vans, and other movable habitations in the country registered and under proper sanitary arrangements, and the children compelled to attend school wherever they may be temporarily located, and to receive an education which will in some degree help to get these poor unfortunate people out of the heartrending and desponding condition into which they have been allowed to sink. Although Mrs. Lee was ill and poor, her face beamed with gladness to find that I was trying in my humble way to do the Gipsy children good; and in a kind of maternal feeling she said she should be pleased to show her deep interest in my work, and asked me if I would accept all the money she had in the world, viz., one penny and two farthings? With much persuasion and hesitation, and under fear of offending her, I accepted them, which I purpose keeping as a token of a woman’s desire to do something towards improving her ‘kith and kin.’ She said that Providence would see that she was no loser for the mite she had given to me. He once sent her, in her extremity, a shilling in the middle of a potato, which she found when cooking. With many expressions of ‘God bless you in your work among the children! You will be rewarded some day for all your time, trouble, and expense,’ we parted.”

The London correspondent of the Croydon Chronicle writes as under, on November 22nd, touching a visit we both made to a number of poor Gipsy children squatting

about upon Mitcham Common. Among other things he says:—“I have had a day in your neighbourhood with George Smith, of Coalville. He is visiting all the Gipsy grounds he can find and reach, for the purpose of gaining information as to the condition of the swarms of children who live in squalor and ignorance under tents. He is of opinion that he will be able to get them into schools, and do as much for them generally as he has done for the brick-field and canal children; and I have no doubt myself that he will succeed. Well, the other day he asked me to have a run round with him, and we went to Mitcham Common to see some of the families there. He told me that one of the Gipsy women had been confined, and that she wanted him to give the child a name. He did not know what to call it, so we had to put our heads together and settle the matter. After a great deal of careful deliberation he decided that when we reached the common the child should be called ‘Deliverance.’ I have been told that this sounds like the name of a new ironclad, and perhaps it would have done as well for one as for the other. The tents were much of a character—some kind of stitched-together rags thrown over sticks. Our visit was made on a fine day, when it was not particularly cold, and the first tent we came to had been opened at the top. We looked over (these tents are only about five feet high), and beheld six children, the eldest being a girl of about eight or ten. The father was anywhere to suit the imagination, and the mother was away hawking. These children, sitting on the ground with a fire in the middle of them, were making clothes-pegs. The process seemed simple. The sticks are chopped into the necessary lengths and put into a pan of hot water. This I suppose swells the wood and loosens the bark. A child on the other side takes out the sticks as they are done and bites off the bark with its teeth. Then there is a boy who puts tin round them, and so the work goes on. When the day is done they look for the mother coming home from

hawking with anything she may have picked up. When they have devoured such scraps and pickings as are brought, they lie down where they have worked and as they are, and go to sleep. It is a wonderful and mysterious arrangement of Providence that they can sleep. They have only a rag between them and the snow. A good wind would blow their homes over the trees. I do not wish to make any particularly violent remarks, but I should like some of the comfortable clergymen of your neighbourhood, when they have done buying their toys and presents for young friends at Christmas, to walk to Mitcham Common and see how the children are there. They would then find out what humbugs they are, and how it is they do the work of the Master. One tent is very much like another. We visited about half-a-dozen, and we then went to name the child. We stayed in this tent for about ten minutes. It was inhabited by two families, numbering in all about twenty. I talked a little time with the woman lying on the ground, and she uncovered the baby to show it to me. I do not know whether it is a boy or a girl, but ‘Deliverance’ will do for either one or the other. She asked me to write the name on a piece of paper, and I did so. With a few words, as jolly as we could make them, we crawled out, thanks and blessings following George Smith, as they always do.”

Leading article in the Primitive Methodist, November 27th:—“Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, is endeavouring to do a work for the children of Gipsies similar to that he has done for the children employed in brick-yards and the children of canal-boatmen—that is, bring them under some sort of supervision, so that they may secure at least a small share in the educational advantages of the country. Recently he published an account of a visit to an encampment of the Gipsies near Wandsworth Common, and it is evident that these wanderers without any settled place of abode look on his efforts with some considerable approval. The encampment was made up of a number of tents, huts, and

vans, and contained some sixty half-naked poor Gipsy children and thirty Gipsy men and women, living in an indescribable state of ignorance, dirt, filth, and misery, mostly squatting upon the ground, or otherwise making their beds upon peg shavings and straw; and it turned out upon inquiry that not more than four of these poor creatures could read a sentence or write a letter. They are, however, not indisposed to be subject to regulations that will contribute to their partial education, if to nothing more. In passing from one of these miserable habitations to another, Mr. Smith found an old Gipsy woman proud of her name and descent, for she was a Lee, and a Lee of the fourth generation. To this old woman he explained his purpose, sitting on a low seat under the cover of the tent with his knees on a level with his chin. He wanted, he said, ‘to get all the Gipsy tents and vans, and other movable habitations in the country, registered and under proper sanitary arrangements, and the children compelled to attend school wherever they may be temporarily located, and to receive an education which will in some degree help to get them out of the low, heartrending condition into which they have been allowed to sink.’ Mrs. Lee listened with pleasure to this narration of Mr. Smith’s purpose, and, though in great poverty, desired to aid this good work. Her stock of cash amounted to three-halfpence; but this she insisted upon giving, so that she might contribute a little, at any rate, towards the improvement of her people. We hope Mr. Smith may succeed in his work, and succeed speedily, so that these Gipsy children, who are trained up to a vagabond life, may have a chance of learning something better. And evidently, from Mr. Smith’s experience, there is no hostility to such a measure as he wishes to have made law among the Gipsies themselves.”

Owing to my letters, papers, articles and paragraphs, and efforts in other directions during the last several months, the Gipsy subject might now be fairly considered to

have made good headway, consequently the proprietor of the Illustrated London News, without any difficulty, was induced—in fact, with pleasure—to have a series of sketches of Gipsy life in his journal, the first appearing November 29th, connected with which was the following notice, and in which he says:—“Our illustrations, from a sketch taken by one of our artists in the neighbourhood of Latimer Road, Notting Hill, which is not far from Wormwood Scrubs, show the habits of living folk who are to be found as well in the outskirts of London, where there are many chances of picking up a stray bit of irregular gain, as in more rural parts of the country. The figure of a gentleman introduced into this sketch, who appears to be conversing with the Gipsies in their waggon encampment, is that of Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, Leicester, the well-known benevolent promoter of social reform and legislative protection for the long-neglected class of people employed on canal-barges, whose families, often living on board these vessels, are sadly in want of domestic comfort and of education for the children.” The editor also inserted my Congress paper fully. The following week another sketch of Gipsy life appeared in the same journal, connected with which were the following remarks:—“Another sketch of the wild and squalid habits of life still retained by vagrant parties or clans of this singular race of people, often met with in the neighbourhood of suburban villages and other places around London, will be found in our journal. We may again direct the reader’s attention to the account of them which was contributed by Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, Leicester, to the late Social Science Congress at Manchester, and which was reprinted in our last week’s publication. That well-known advocate of social reform and legal protection for the neglected vagrant classes of our population reckons the total number of Gipsies in this country at three or four thousand men and women and ten thousand children. He is now seeking to have all movable habitations—i.e., tents, vans, shows, &c.—in which the

families live who are earning a living by travelling from place to place, registered and numbered, as in the case of canal-boats, and the parents compelled to send their children to school at the place wherever they may be temporarily located, be it National, British, or Board school. The following is Mr. Smith’s note upon what was to be seen in the Gipsies’ tent on Mitcham Common:—

“‘Inside this tent—with no other home—there were two men, their wives, and about fourteen children of all ages: two or three of these were almost men and women. The wife of one of the men had been confined of a baby the day before I called—her bed consisting of a layer of straw upon the damp ground. Such was the wretched and miserable condition they were in that I could not do otherwise than help the poor woman, and gave her a little money. But, in her feelings of gratitude to me for this simple act of kindness, she said she would name the baby anything I would like to chose; and, knowing that Gipsies are fond of outlandish names, I was in a difficulty. After turning the thing over in my mind for a few hours, I could think of nothing but “Deliverance.” This seemed to please the poor woman very much; and the poor child is named Deliverance G---. Strange to say, the next older child is named “Moses.”’”

On December 13th, an additional sketch, showing the inside of a van, was given, to which were added the following remarks:—“Another sketch of the singular habits and rather deplorable condition of these vagrant people, who hang about, as the parasites of civilisation, close on the suburban outskirts of our wealthy metropolis, is presented by our artist, following those which have appeared in the last two weeks. Mr. G. Smith, of Coalville, Leicester, having taken in hand the question of providing due supervision and police regulation for the Gipsies, with compulsory education for their children, we readily dedicate these local illustrations to the furtherance of his good work. The ugliest place we know in the neighbourhood of London, the most dismal

and forlorn, is not Hackney Marshes, or those of the Lea, beyond Old Ford, at the East-end; but it is the tract of land, half torn up for brick-field clay, half consisting of fields laid waste in expectation of the house-builder, which lies just outside of Shepherd’s Bush and Notting Hill. There it is that the Gipsy encampment may be found, squatting within an hour’s walk of the Royal palaces and of the luxurious town mansions of our nobility and opulent classes, to the very west of the fashionable West-end, beyond the gentility of Bayswater and Whiteley’s avenue of universal shopping. It is a curious spectacle in that situation, and might suggest a few serious reflections upon social contrasts at the centre and capital of the mighty British nation, which takes upon itself the correction of every savage tribe in South and West Africa and Central Asia. The encampment is usually formed of two or three vans and a rude cabin or a tent, placed on some piece of waste ground, for which the Gipsy party have to pay a few shillings a week of rent. This may be situated at the back of a row of respectable houses, and in full view of their bedroom or parlour windows, not much to the satisfaction of the quiet inhabitants. The interior of one of the vans, furnished as a dwelling-room, which is shown in our artist’s sketch, does not look very miserable; but Mr. Smith informs us that these receptacles of vagabond humanity are often sadly overcrowded. Besides a man, his wife, and their own children, the little ones stowed in bunks or cupboards, there will be several adult persons taken in as lodgers. The total number of Gipsies now estimated to be living in the metropolitan district is not less than 2,000. Among these are doubtless not a small proportion of idle runaways or ‘losels’ from the more settled classes of our people. It would seem to be the duty of somebody at the Home Office, for the sake of public health and good order, to call upon some local authorities of the county or the parish to look after these eccentricities of Gipsy life.”

On January 3rd, 1880, additional illustrations were given in the Illustrated London News. 1. Tent at Hackney; 2. Tent at Hackney; 3. Sketch near Latimer Road, Notting Hill; 4. A Bachelor’s Bedroom, Mitcham Common; 5. Encampment at Mitcham Common; 6. A Knife-grinder at Hackney Wick; 7. A Tent at Hackney Marshes. “A few additional sketches, continuing those of this subject which have appeared in our journal, are engraved for the present number. It is estimated by Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, Leicester, who has recently been exploring the queer outcast world of Gipsydom in different parts of England, that some 2,000 people called by that name, but of very mixed race, living in the manner of Zulu Kaffirs rather than of European citizens, frequent the neighbourhood of London. They are not all thieves, not even all beggars and impostors, and they escape the law of vagrancy by paying a few shillings of weekly rent for pitching their tents or booths, and standing their waggons or wheeled cabins, on pieces of waste ground. The western side of Notting Hill, where the railway passenger going to Shepherd’s Bush or Hammersmith sees a vast quantity of family linen hung out to dry in the gardens and courtyards of small dwelling-houses, bordered towards Wormwood Scrubs by a dismal expanse of brick-fields, might tempt the Gipsies so inclined to take a clean shirt or petticoat—certainly not for their own wearing. But we are not aware that the police inspectors and magistrates of that district have found such charges more numerous in their official record than has been experienced in other quarters of London; and it is possible that honest men and women, though of irregular and slovenly habits, may exist among this odd fragment of our motley population. It is for the sake of their children, who ought to be, at least equally with those of the English labouring classes, since they cannot get it from their parents, provided with means of decent Christian education, that Mr. George Smith has brought this subject under public notice.

The Gipsies, so long as they refrain from picking and stealing, and do not obstruct the highways, should not be persecuted; for they are a less active nuisance than the Italian organ-grinders in our city streets, whose tormenting presence we are content to suffer, to the sore interruption both of our daily work and our repose. But it is expedient that there should be an Act of Parliament, if the Home Secretary has not already sufficient legal powers, to establish compulsory registration of the travelling Gipsy families, and a strict licensing system, with constant police supervision, for their temporary encampments, while their children should be looked after by the local School Board. These measures, combined with judicious offers of industrial help for the adults and industrial training for the juniors, with the special exercise of Poor-Law Guardian administration, and some parochial or missionary religious efforts, might put an end to vagabond Gipsy life in England before the commencement of the twentieth century, or within one generation. We hope to see the matter discussed in the House of Lords or the House of Commons during the ensuing session; for it actually concerns the moral and social welfare of more than thirty thousand people in our own country, which is an interest quite as considerable as that we have in Natal or the Transvaal, among Zulus and Basutos, and the rest of Kaffirdom. The sketches we now present in illustration of this subject are designed to show the squalid and savage aspect of Gipsy habitations in the suburban districts, at Hackney and Hackney Wick, north-east of London; where the marsh-meadows of the river Lea, unsuitable for building-land, seem to forbid the extension of town streets and blocks of brick or stuccoed terraces; where the pleasant wooded hills of Epping and Hainault Forest appear in the distance, inviting the jaded townsman, on summer holidays, to saunter in the Royal Chace of the old English kings and queens; where genuine ruralities still lie within an hour’s walk, of which the fashionable West-ender knoweth nought.

There lurks the free and fearless Gipsy scamp, if scamp he truly be, with his squaw and his piccaninnies, in a wigwam hastily constructed of hoops and poles and blankets, or perhaps, if he be the wealthy sheikh of his wild Bedouin tribe, in a caravan drawn from place to place by some lost and strayed plough-horse, the lawful owner of which is a farmer in Northamptonshire. Far be it from us to say or suspect that the Gipsy stole the horse; ‘convey, the wise it call;’ and if horse or donkey, dog, or pig, or cow, if cock and hen, duck or turkey, be permitted to escape from field or farmyard, these fascinated creatures will sometimes follow the merry troop of ‘Romany Rye’ quite of their own accord, such is the magic of Egyptian craft and the innate superiority of an Oriental race. These Gipsies, Zingari, Bohemians, whatever they be called in the kingdoms of Europe, are masters of a secret science of mysterious acquisition, as remote from proved crime of theft or fraud as from the ways of earning or winning by ordinary industry and trade. There is many a rich and splendid establishment at the West-end supported by a different application of the same mysterious craft. Solicitors and stockbrokers may have seen it in action. It is that of silently appropriating what no other person may be quite prepared to claim.”

The following remarks appeared in the December number of The Quiver:—“Mr. George Smith, who has earned a much-respected and worthy name by his interest in and persevering efforts for the well-being of our canal population, is bent on doing similar service for the Gipsy children and roadside arabs, who are sadly too numerous in the suburban and rural districts of the land. By securing the registration of canal-boats as human domiciles, he has brought quite a host of poor little outcasts within the pale of society and the beneficent influence of the various educational machineries of the age. By bringing the multitudinous tents, vans, shows, and their peripatetic lodgers under some similar arrangements,

he hopes to put civilisation, education, and Christianity within reach, of the thousand ragged Ishmaelites who are at present left to grow up in ignorance and degradation. These vagrant juveniles are growing up to strengthen the ranks of the unproductive and criminal classes; and policy, philanthropy, and Christianity alike demand that the nomadic waifs should be encircled by the arms of an ameliorating law which will give them a chance of escaping from the life of semi-barbarity to which untoward circumstances have consigned them, and to place them in a position to make something better of the life that now is, and to secure some fitting preparation for the life that is to come. It is evidently high time that something should be done, otherwise we must sooner or later be faced with more serious difficulties than even now exist. Our sympathies are strongly with the warm-hearted philanthropist; and we trust that in taking to this new field of effort he will win all needful aid, and that his endeavours to rescue from a life of crime and vagabondage these hitherto much-neglected little ones will be crowned with success.

“‘The glories of our mortal state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate—
Death lays its icy hands on kings:
Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade:
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.’—Shirley.”

The following is my letter, relating to the poor little Gipsy children’s homes, as it appeared in the Daily News, Daily Chronicle, and other London and country daily papers, December 2nd:—“Amongst some of the sorrowful features of Gipsy life I have noticed lately, none call more loudly for Government help, assistance, and supervision than the

wretched little rag and stick hovels, scarcely large enough to hold a costermonger’s wheelbarrow, in which the poor Gipsy women and children are born, pig, and die—aye, and men too, if they can be called Gipsies, with three-fourths, excepting the faintest cheering tint, of the blood of English scamps and vagabonds in their reins, and the remainder consisting of the blood of the vilest rascals from India and other nations. A real Gipsy of the old type, of which there are but few, will tell you a lie and look straight at you with a chuckle and grin; the so-called Gipsy now will tell you a lie and look a thousand other ways while doing so. In their own interest, and without mincing matters, it is time the plain facts of their dark lives were brought to daylight, so that the brightening and elevating effects of public opinion, law, and the Bible may have their influence upon the character of the little ones about to become in our midst the men and women of the future. Outside their hovels or sack huts, poetically called ‘tents’ and ‘encampments,’ but in reality schools for teaching their children how to gild double-dyed lies,—sugar-coat deception, gloss idleness and filth, paint immorality with Asiatic ideas, notions, and hues, and put a pleasant and cheerful aspect upon taking things that do not belong to them, may be seen thousands of ragged, half-naked, dirty, ignorant and wretched Gipsy children, and the men loitering about mostly in idleness. Inside their sack hovels are to be found man, wife, and six or seven children of all ages, not one of them able to read or write, squatting or sleeping upon a bed of straw, which through the wet and damp is often little better than a manure-heap, in fact sometimes completely rotten, and as a Gipsy woman told me last week, ‘it is not fit to be handled with the hands.’ In noticing that many of the Gipsy children have a kind of eye-disease, I am told by the women that it is owing to the sulphur arising from the coke fire they have upon the ground in their midst, and which at times also causes the children to turn pale and sickly. The sulphur affects the men and

women in various ways, sometimes causing a kind of stupor to come over them. I have noticed farther that many of the adults are much pitted with small-pox. It is a wonder to me that there is not more disease among them than there appears to be, considering that they are huddled together, regardless of sex or age, in the midst of a damp atmosphere rising out of the ground, and impregnated with the sulphur of their coke fires. Probably their flitting habits prevent detection. My plan to improve their condition is not by prosecuting them and breaking up their tents and vans and turning them into the roads pell-mell, but to bring their habitations under the sanitary officers and their children under the schoolmaster in a manner analogous to the Canal Boats Act, and it has the approval of these wandering herds. The process will be slow but effective, and without much inconvenience. Unless something be done for them in the way I have indicated, they will drift into a state similar to Darwin’s forefathers and prove to the world that civilisation and Christianity are a failure.”

The following article appears in the Christian World, December 19th, by Christopher Crayon (J. Ewing Ritchie), in which he says:—“The other day I was witness to a spectacle which made me feel a doubt as to whether I was living in the nineteenth century. I was, as it were, within the shadow of that mighty London where Royalty resides, where the richest Church in Christendom rejoices in its Abbey and Cathedral, and its hundreds of churches, where an enlightened and energetic Dissent has not only planted its temples in every district, but has sent forth its missionary agents into every land, where the fierce light of public opinion, aided by a Press which never slumbers, is a terror to them that do evil, and a praise to them that do well; a city which we love to boast heads the onward march of man; and yet the scene before me was as intensely that of savage life, as if I had been in a Zulu kraal, and savage life destitute of all that lends it picturesque attractions, or ideal charms. I was standing in

the midst of some twenty tents and vans, inhabited by that wandering race of whose origin we know so little, and of whose future we know less. The snow was on the ground, there was frost in the very air. Within a few yards was a great Board school; close by were factories and workshops, and the other concomitants of organised industrial life. Yet in that small area the Gipsies held undisputed sway. In or about London there are, it is calculated, some two thousand of these dwellers in tents. In all England there are some twenty thousand of these sons of Ishmael, with hands against every one, or, perhaps to put it more truly, with every one’s hands against them. In summer-time their lot is by no means to be envied; in winter their state is deplorable indeed.

“We entered, Mr. George Smith and I, and were received as friends. Had I gone by myself, I question whether my reception would have been a pleasant one. As Gipsies pay no taxes, they can keep any number of dogs, and these dogs have a way of sniffing and snarling, anything but agreeable to an unbidden guest. The poor people complained to me no one ever came to see them. I should be surprised if any one did; but Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, is no common man, and having secured fair play for the poor children of the brick-fields—he himself was brought up in a brick-yard—and for the poor, and sadly-neglected, inmates of the canal-boats, he has now turned his attention to the Gipsies. His idea is—and it is a good one—that an Act of Parliament should be passed for their benefit—something similar to that he has been the means of carrying for the canal and brick-field children. In a paper read before the Social Science Congress at Manchester, Mr. Smith argued that all tents, shows, caravans, auctioneer vans, and like places used as dwellings should be registered and numbered, and under proper sanitary arrangements, with sanitary inspectors and School Board officers, in every town and village. Thus in every district the children would have their names and

attendance registered in a book, which they could take with them from place to place, and when endorsed by the schoolmaster, it would show that the children were attending school. In carrying out this idea, it is a pity that Mr. Smith should have to bear all the burden. As it is, he has suffered greatly in his pocket by his philanthropic effort. . . .

“It is no joke going into a Gipsy yard, and it is still less so when you go down on your hands and knees, and crawl into the Gipsy’s wigwam; but the worst of it is, when you have done so, there is little to see after all. In the middle, on a few bricks, is a stove or fireplace of some kind. On the ground is a floor of wood-chips, or straw, or shavings, and on this squat some two or three big, burly men, who make linen-pegs and skewers, and mend chairs and various articles, the tribe, as they wander along, seek to sell. The women are away, for it is they who bring the grist to the mill, as they tell fortunes, or sell their wares, or follow their doubtful trade; but the place swarms with children; and it was wonderful to see with what avidity they stretched out the dirtiest little hand imaginable as Mr. Smith prepared to distribute some sweets he had brought with him for that purpose. As we entered, all the vans were shut up, and the tents only were occupied, the vans being apparently deserted but presently a door was opened half-way, and out popped a little Gipsy head, with sparkling eyes and curly hair; and then another door opened, and a similar spectacle was to be seen. Let us look into the van, about the size of a tiny cabin, and chock full, in the first place, with a cooking-stove; and then with shelves, with curtains and some kind of bedding, apparently not very clean, on which the family repose. It is a piteous life, even at the best, in that van; even when the cooking pot is filled with something more savoury than cabbages or potatoes; the usual fare; but the children seem happy, nevertheless, in their dirty rags, and with their luxurious heads of curly hair. All of them are as ignorant as Hottentots, and lead a life horrible to think of.

I only saw one woman in the camp, and I only saw her by uncovering the top and looking into the tent in which she resides. She is terribly poor, she says, and pleads earnestly for a few coppers; and I can well believe she wants them, for in this England of ours, and especially in the outskirts of London, the Gipsy is not a little out of place. Around us are some strapping girls, one with a wonderfully sweet smile on her face, who, if they could be trained to domestic service, would have a far happier life than they can ever hope to lead. The cold and wet seem to affect them not, nor the poor diet, nor the smoke and bad air of their cabins, in which they crowd, while the men lazily work, and the mothers are far away. The leading lady in this camp is absent on business; but she is a firm adherent of Mr. George Smith, and wishes to see the children educated; and as she is a Lee, and as a Lee in Gipsy annals take the same rank as a Norfolk Howard in aristocratic circles, that says a good deal; but, then, if you educate a Gipsy girl, she will want to have her hands and face, at any rate, clean; and a Gipsy boy, when he learns to read, will feel that he is born for a nobler end than to dwell in a stinking wigwam, to lead a lawless life, to herd with questionable characters, and to pick up a precarious existence at fairs and races; and our poets and novelists and artists will not like that. However, just now, by means of letters in the newspapers, and engravings in the illustrated journals, a good deal of attention is paid to the Gipsies, and if they can be reclaimed and turned into decent men and women a good many farmers’ wives will sleep comfortably at night, especially when geese and turkeys are being fattened for Christmas fare; and a desirable impulse will be given to the trade in soap.”

In the Sunday School Chronicle, December 19th, the kind-hearted editor makes the following allusions:—“Mr. George Smith stirs every feeling of pity and compassion in our hearts by his descriptions of the Gipsy Children’s Homes. It is one of the curious things of English life that the

distinct Gipsy race should dwell among us, and, neither socially nor politically, nor religiously, do we take any notice of them. No portion of our population may so earnestly plead, ‘No man careth for our souls.’ The chief interest of them, to many of us, is that they are used to give point, and plot, to novels. But can nothing be done for the Gipsy children? Christian enterprise is seldom found wanting when a sphere is suggested for it; and those who live in the neighbourhood of Gipsy haunts should be especially concerned for their well-being. What must the children be, morally and religiously, who bide, we cannot say dwell, in such homes as Mr. George Smith describes?

“‘In their own interest, and without mincing matters, it is time the plain facts of their dark lives were brought to daylight, so that the brightening and elevating effects of public opinion, law, and the Bible may have their influence upon the character of the little ones about to become in our midst the men and women of the future. Outside their hovels or sack huts, poetically called “tents” and “encampments,” but in reality schools for teaching their children how to gild double-dyed lies, sugar-coat deception, gloss idleness and filth, and put a pleasant and cheerful aspect upon taking things that do not belong to them, may be seen thousands of ragged, half-naked, dirty, ignorant, and wretched Gipsy children, and the men loitering about mostly in idleness. Inside their sack hovels are to be found man, wife, and six or seven children of all ages, not one of them able to read or write, squatting or sleeping upon a bed of straw, which through the wet and damp is often little better than a manure-heap, in fact sometimes it is completely rotten, and as a Gipsy woman told me last week, “it is not fit to be handled with the hands.” In noticing that many of the Gipsy children have a kind of eye disease, I am told by the women that it is owing to the sulphur arising from the coke fire they have upon the ground in their midst, and which at times also causes the children to turn pale and sickly.’”

The following brief account of the Hungarian Gipsies of the present day, as seen by a writer under the initials “A. C.,” who visited the Unitarian Synod in Hungary last summer, is taken from the Unitarian Herald, bearing date January 9th, 1880, and in which the author says:—“Not far from Rugonfalva we came on a colony of exceedingly squalid Gipsies, living in huts which a respectable Zulu would utterly despise. Their appearance reminded me of Cowper’s graphic sketch, which I am tempted to quote:—

“‘I see a column of slow-rising smoke
O’ertop the lofty wood that skirts the wild.
A vagabond and useless tribe there eat
Their miserable meal. A kettle, flung
Between two poles upon a stick transverse,
Receives the morsel—flesh obscene of dog,
Or vermin, or, at best, of cock purloined
From his accustomed perch. Hard-faring race,
They pick their fuel out of every hedge,
Which, kindled with dry leaves, just saves unqueuched
The spark of life. The sportive wind blows wide
Their fluttering rags, and shows a tawny skin,
The vellum of the livery they claim.’

“Transylvania is one great museum of human as well as natural products, and this singular race forms an interesting element of its motley population. It is supposed that the tribe found its way to Hungary in the beginning of the fifteenth century, having fled from Central Asia or India during the Mongol reign of terror. About the close of last century Pastor Benedict, of Debreczin, mastered their language, and on visiting England found that the Gipsies in this country understood him very well. There are now about eighty thousand of them in Transylvania, but three-fourths of this number have settled homes, and caste distinctions are so strong that the higher grades would not drink from a cup used by one of their half-savage brethren. On reaching the mansion of Mr. Jakabházi, at Siménfalva, who employs about one hundred and forty civilised Gipsies

on his estate, we had an opportunity after dinner of seeing them return in a long procession from the fields. Some of the women carried small brown babies, that appeared able to find footing anywhere on their mothers’ shoulders, backs, or breasts. These labourers are almost entirely paid in food and other necessaries, and if kindly treated are very honourable towards their master, and generally adopt his religion. When smarting under any grievance, they, on the contrary, sometimes change their faith en masse, and when conciliated undergo as speedy a re-conversion. The women are, as a rule, very fond of ornaments, and the men are, above all things, proud of a horse or a pair of scarlet breeches. Of late years they have in a few districts began to intermarry with the Wallachs, and the sharp distinction between them and the other races in Hungary will, no doubt, gradually disappear.”

The Weekly Times again takes up the subject, and the following appears on January 9th, 1880:—“We made a second expedition, with Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, on Sunday, in search of a Gipsy encampment; and though the way was long and tedious, and we were both lamed with walking before we returned at night, yet we had not gone one step out of our way. There is no encampment of these ancient and interesting people in the neighbourhood of the hundred odd square miles which composes the site of the metropolis, with which Mr. Smith is not acquainted, and to which we verily believe he could lead a friend if he was blindfolded. The way we went must remain somewhat of a secret, because the Gipsies do not care to see many visitors on the only day of the week which is one of absolute rest to them. All that we shall disclose about the way is, that we skirted Mount Nod, and for a short distance looked upon the face of an ancient river, then up-hill we clambered for many longish miles, until we turned out of a certain lane into the encampment. There was a rude picturesqueness in the gaping of the vans and tents. In

the foreground were the vans, to the rear the cloth kraals, with their smoky coverings stretched over poles; from a hole in the centre the smoke ascended, furnishing evidence that the open brazier was burning within. The vans protected the approach to the camp, just in the same way that artillery are planted to keep the road to a military encampment. Mr. Smith’s face seemed to be well known to these strange people, and we no sooner appeared in sight than the swinging door of every van was edged with faces, and forth from the strange kraals there crept child and woman, youth and dog, to say a kindly word, or bark a welcome to the visitors. But for the Gipsies’ welcome we might have had an unpleasant reception from the dogs. They were evidently dubious as to our character, their training inclining them to bite, if they get a chance, any leg wearing black cloth, but to give the ragged-trousered visitors a fawning welcome; so they sniffed again and again, and growled, until driven away by the voices of their owners. Perchance, during the remainder of the day, they were revolving in their intelligent minds how it had come to pass that the black cloth legs were received with evident marks of favour. Nor were they able to settle the point easily, for whenever we happened to look round the encampment during the afternoon, from the raised door-way of a kraal where we happened to be couched, we noticed the eyes of one or other of the four-footed guardians fixed intently on us. There were about twenty vans and tents in all; and each paid one shilling a week to the ground landlord. That money, with whatever else was required for food, was obtained by hawking at this season of the year, and trade was very bad. Winter must be a fearful experience for these children of the air, and the field, the summer sun, the wild flowers, and the fruits of harvest. Such rains as have descended, such snows as have been falling, such cold winds as have been blowing, must discount fearfully the joys of the three happier seasons of the year.