(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 consequentl