To come back to Yetholm. The aches, pains, and wild visions of the night carried me almost over the wide, wide world, and had it not been for the power of Divine love and the rays of heavenly light I cannot tell where I might have got to ere this.
“The rougher the way, the shorter the stay,”
said Wesley. I paid my bill, and started homeward, and at St. Boswell’s station I made the acquaintance of Thomas Webster, Esq., and his two sweet, interesting little sons, Masters Thomas Scott Cliff and Harold Colin, of Oxenden Towers, Dunse. In the train we sat together, and chatted and whiled away time almost imperceptibly for several hours as we journeyed southward. At Hillfield we separated. He and his sons travelled westward, and I kept speeding along southward and homeward, I think a wiser man; certainly I know more of the gipsies in Scotland and at Yetholm than I ever knew before. I find, among other things, that there are a number of gipsies living among the rocks on the northern coasts of Scotland, more like wild animals than human beings, and as shaggy as winter-coated goats.
My visit to Yetholm brought out the fact more vividly to my mind than ever, that private flickering and fluttering missionary enterprise, apart from compulsory education, sanitation, and proper Government supervision, is powerless, and unable to reclaim our gipsies and their children from heathendom and its black midnight surroundings; and this I have stated all along in my letters, Congress papers, articles in the _Graphic_ and _Wesleyan Methodist Magazine_, and in my “Gipsy Life,” &c. The case of the poor brickyard girls and boys and canal children proves this in an unmistakable manner beyond all doubt; at any rate, to those who have their eyes and ears open, and hearts and hands ready to help forward the country’s welfare. { 329}
Some fifty years ago the Rev. John Baird, a godly minister at Yetholm, and a few warm hearted friends, commenced in right good earnest to reform the gipsies at Yetholm. A committee was formed, several hundreds of pounds were collected, steps taken to get the gipsy children to school, and for some years they issued encouraging reports concerning the gipsies. Plenty of proofs were forthcoming to show that the gipsy children could be made meet for heaven by the application of the laws of education, sanitation, and the gospel; they were, as a rule, as well conducted in school and church as other labouring-class children. In course of time the missionary zeal of the committee began to flag, and Mr. Baird handed them over to the magistrates, and he goes on to say: “Take the more respectable individual, and let him follow the occupation of the gipsy, and in a few years he will in all probability be as bad as any of them. It is almost folly and ignorance to say that a wandering gipsy may be a respectable character. The thing seems to be possible and, theoretically, not improbable; but practically the wandering gipsy is almost without exception a disreputable person. His wandering life leads to innumerable evils. In kindness to themselves, therefore, their occupation, were it even a useful one to society, should be put down; but it is not only useless, but positively injurious to themselves and others. Their life is one of petty crime; their death involved in all the gloom of ignorance and despair.”