It is a black, burning shame and disgrace to see herds of healthy-looking girls and great strapping youths growing up in ignorance and idleness, not so much as exerting themselves to wash the filth off their bodies or make anything better than skewers. Their highest ambition is to learn slang, roll in the ditch, spread small-pox and fevers, threaten vengeance, and carry out revenge upon those who attempt to frustrate their evil designs. Excepting skewers, clothes-pegs, and a few other little things of this kind, they have not manufactured anything; the highest state of perfection they have arrived at is to be able to make and tie up a bundle of skewers, split a clothes-peg, tinker a kettle, mend a chair, see-saw on an old fiddle, rap their knuckles on a tambourine, clatter about with their feet, tickle the guitar, and make a squeaking noise through their teeth, that fiction and romance call singing. The most that can be said in their favour is, that a few of them have become respectable Christians and hard-working men and women, and have done something for the country’s good—and whose fault is it that there are not more? They have been the agents of hell, working out Satan’s designs, and we have stood by laughing and admiring their so-called pretty faces, scarlet cloaks, and “witching eyes.” For the life of me I can find no more bewitching beauty among them than can be found in our back slums any day, circumstances considered—and where does the blame lay?—upon our own shoulders for not paying more attention to the education and welfare of their children. It is truly horrible to think that we have had 15,000 to 20,000 young and old Gipsies at work, carrying out the designs of the infernal regions at the tip end of the roots of our national life, vigour, and Christianity. Only the other day the country was much shocked, and rightly so, at a hundred poor Russian emigrants landing upon our shores; and yet we have two hundred times this quantity of Gipsies among us, and we quietly stand by and take no notice of their wretched condition. The time will come, and that speedily, when we shall have the scales taken off our eyes, and the thin, flimsy veil of romance torn to shreds. Sitting by and admiring their “pretty faces” and “witching eyes” will not save their souls, educate their children, or put them in the way of earning an honest livelihood. It is not pity—whining, sycophantic pity—alone that will do them good. The Rev. Mr. Cobbin’s Gipsy’s petition, written fifty years ago, “Oh! ye who have tasted of mercy and love, And shared in the blessings of pardoning grace, Let us the kind fruits of your tenderness prove, And pity, oh! pity, the poor Gipsy race.”