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 Mycenae 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
Christi