fiance of social, moral, civil, and natural law, a disgrace to
the legislature.--J. W. B."

In the _Hand and Heart_, September 19th of last year, the editor says,
with reference to our roadside arabs:--"Mr. George Smith, of Coalville,
whose efforts to better the condition of the wretched canal population
have met deserved success, draws attention to the state of another
neglected class. Parliament, he says, which has lately been reforming so
many things, would have done well to consider the case of the Gipsies,
'our roadside arabs.' Of the idleness, ignorance, heathenism, and
general misery prevailing among these strange people he gives some
curious instances. One old man, whose acquaintance Mr. Smith made,
calculates that 'there are about 250 families of Gipsies in ten of the
Midland counties, and thinks that a similar proportion will be found in
the rest of the United Kingdom. He has seen as many as ten tents of
Gipsies within a distance of five miles. He thinks there will be an
average of five children in each tent. He has seen as many as ten or
twelve children in some tents, and not many of them able to read or
write. His child of six months old--with his wife ill at the same time
in the tent--sickened, died, and was "laid out" by him, and it was also
buried out of one of those wretched abodes on the roadside at
Barrow-upon-Soar, last January. When the poor thing died he had not
sixpence in his pocket.' An old woman bore similar testimony. 'She said
that she had had sixteen children, fifteen of whom are alive, several of
them being born in a roadside tent. She says that she was married out of
one of these tents; and her brother died and was buried out of a tent at
Packington, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch. This poor woman knows about three
hundred families of Gipsies in eleven of the Midland and Eastern
counties, and has herself, so she says, four lots of Gipsies travelling
in Lincolnshire at the present time. She said she could not read
herself, and thinks that not one Gipsy in twenty can. She has travelled
all her life. Her mother, named Smith, of whom there are not a few, is
the mother of fifteen children, all of whom were born in a tent.' Mr.
Smith's conclusion (which will not be disputed) is that 'to have between
three and four thousand men and women, and eight or ten thousand children
classed in the Census as vagrants and vagabonds, roaming all over the
country, in ignorance and evil training that carr