It is a long stretch for a native family to trace its descent to people living in the time of Henry VIII., but a very short one for a semi-barbarous tribe as such, having so singular an origin as a tent, as applicable to all descending from it, however much part of their blood may be of the ordinary race; the origin of which is generally unknown to them. Thus they have no other sense of origin than a Gipsy one, and that “theirs is a Gipsy family,” of an arrival in England like that of yesterday, with words and signs, and a cast of mind peculiar to themselves, leading, by their associations and sympathies of race, to them generally, if not almost invariably, marrying among themselves, and perpetuating the race, as something distinct from the rest of the world, and scattered over its surface, in various stages of civilization and purity of blood.
Leaving out the tented or more primitive Gipsies, there is hardly anything about this people, when their blood has been mixed and their habits changed, to attract the _eye_ of the world; hence it becomes the subject of a _mental_ inquiry, so far as its _nature_ is concerned. And the human faculties being so limited in their powers, even when trained from early youth, it will be, at the best, a difficult matter to get the subject of the Gipsies understood; while it appears to be a desperate effort to get people beyond a certain age, or of a peculiar mind or training, to make anything of it, or even to listen to the mention of it, which almost seems to be offensive to them. On this account, if the subject of the Gipsy race, in all its mixtures of blood and aspects of meaning, can ever become one of interest, or even known, to the rest of the human family, it must be taken up, for the most part, by young people whose minds are open to receive information, as illustrated by what I wrote in connexion with Scotch university students:—
“At their time of life they are more easily impressed with the truth of what can be demonstrated, than after having acquired modes of thought and feeling in regard to it, which have to be modified or got rid of, after more or less trouble and sometimes pain.”
This subject does not in any way clash with what is generally held in dispute among men, but touches many traits of their common humanity. Its investigation illustrates the laws of evidence on whatever subject to which evidence may be applicable—that all questions should be settled by facts, and not by suppositions; and that no one has a right to maintain capriciously that anything is a truth until it is proved to be an untruth. As regards John Bunyan, it is not in dispute that he was an English _man_, but whether he was of the _native_ English race, or of the _Gipsy_ English one, or of both, and holding by the Gipsy connexion. What is necessary to be done is not merely to correct, but to create, and permanently establish a knowledge that has now no existence with people generally, in consequence of the habits of the original Gipsies leading to their legal and social proscription, and the naturally secretive nature of the race, which has been intensified by the way in which they were everywhere treated or regarded.