The Government had their hands pretty full last year—Ireland and the Irish at the beginning, Ireland and the Irish in the middle, and Ireland and the Irish at the end—nearly altogether Irish, which no one grudges to make our Brothers and Sisters on the Emerald Isle contented, prosperous, and happy. God grant that her noble sons and daughters may go ahead, and her “Moonlighters” be swallowed up in the greater light that rules the day. This being so, I kept myself pretty well occupied in piloting, altering, and manœuvring my Canal Amending Bill through its initiatory stages, and had no time to deal with the gipsy problem other than to try “at every turn and twist” to find a niche, nook, or a peg in the Bill upon which to hang the gipsy question, which to me did not, and does not even now, seem at all a difficult thing to do. The more I go into the details of the canal and gipsy question the simpler they become. All that is required, as in the case of the brickyard children, is to take hold of them and to begin to deal with them in a business fashion, as other questions are dealt with.
The subject is studded with prickles, but immediately it is grasped the prickles become harmless. In the distance they look like drawn glistening daggers, which, as you approach nearer to them, are no more dreadful than rushes in the meadow. Unearth the Guy Fawkes gipsy monster, and we shall soon find out a way to deal with gipsy vagabonds and to reclaim their children. Standing by whimpering, sobbing, and sorrowing over the children will not pull them out of the gutter; nor will covering them with backwood gipsy nonsense and trash make them white. The gipsies and their children are dark and down, and to whiten and raise them the law and the gospel must come in: first, the law, schoolmaster, and sanitary officer; and second, the Christian minister and the gospel.
In bygone days, under the reign of Elizabeth and the Georges, the hangman’s hemp and the whipper’s thong were used as a cure for the gipsy social evil, but with worse than no results. Recently, in Hungary, measures of another kind were adopted to compel the gipsies to make themselves scarce. Innumerable complaints had at times reached the chief of the police from the townsfolk of Szegedin, in Lower Hungary, with whose portable chattels and goods the gipsies persisted in making free. The police official was sorely perplexed how to deal with the wandering ragamuffins. The gipsies in Hungary, as well as in other parts of the world, have masses of hair—our present race of English gipsies cannot boast of the raven black hair as formerly—so the chief of the police conceived the idea of barbering their pates of all their locks. The gipsies were taken into custody and the town barbers were summoned to clear the heads of the swarthy gipsies of their present adornments. The orders were obeyed to the letter, regardless of either sex or age. In a few minutes the whole tribe with pates as smooth as an ostrich’s egg were conveyed to the town gates in a state of indescribable discomfiture. I “guess,” as Jonathan says, they will not for a long time visit Szegedin again. There is a wide difference between the Hungarian authorities and the Nottingham town authorities. Not being able to attend the recent Nottingham goose fair, I wrote to the town clerk and the chief constable for a few particulars, relating to the condition of the vast numbers of poor neglected gipsy and other travelling children who attended the borough fair. The town clerk deigned not to descend from his high pinnacle to order a reply to my letter. The chief constable, after some days had passed over, said he would send me some facts, which, though I reminded him of his promise more than once, are not yet to hand. Gipsy children may live and gipsy children may die, but these officials, I suppose, think that they shall go on for ever, and in the end, as a writer in _The Christian Age_ says, they will