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 circumsta