e 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 o