age, in the midst of a damp
atmosphere rising out of the ground, and impregnated with the sulphur of
their coke fires. Probably their flitting habits prevent detection. My
plan to improve their condition is not by prosecuting them and breaking
up their tents and vans and turning them into the roads pell-mell, but to
bring their habitations under the sanitary officers and their children
under the schoolmaster in a manner analogous to the Canal Boats Act, and
it has the approval of these wandering herds. The process will be slow
but effective, and without much inconvenience. Unless something be done
for them in the way I have indicated, they will drift into a state
similar to Darwin's forefathers and prove to the world that civilisation
and Christianity are a failure."

The following article appears in the _Christian World_, December 19th, by
Christopher Crayon (J. Ewing Ritchie), in which he says:--"The other day
I was witness to a spectacle which made me feel a doubt as to whether I
was living in the nineteenth century. I was, as it were, within the
shadow of that mighty London where Royalty resides, where the richest
Church in Christendom rejoices in its Abbey and Cathedral, and its
hundreds of churches, where an enlightened and energetic Dissent has not
only planted its temples in every district, but has sent forth its
missionary agents into every land, where the fierce light of public
opinion, aided by a Press which never slumbers, is a terror to them that
do evil, and a praise to them that do well; a city which we love to boast
heads the onward march of man; and yet the scene before me was as
intensely that of savage life, as if I had been in a Zulu kraal, and
savage life destitute of all that lends it picturesque attractions, or
ideal charms. I was standing in the midst of some twenty tents and vans,
inhabited by that wandering race of whose origin we know so little, and
of whose future we know less. The snow was on the ground, there was
frost in the very air. Within a few yards was a great Board school;
close by were factories and workshops, and the other concomitants of
organised industrial life. Yet in that small area the Gipsies held
undisputed sway. In or about London there are, it is calculated, some
two thousand of these dwellers in tents. In all England there are some
twenty thousand of these sons of Ishmael, with hands against every one,
or, perhaps to put it more truly, with every one's hands ag