brought about at all risks and inconveniences, or we may expect a blacker page in the social history of this country opening to our view than we have seen for many a long day.” The following leading article upon Gipsies and other tramps of a similar class appeared in the _Standard_, September 10th, 1879, and as it relates to the subject I have in hand I quote it in full:—“Not only in his ‘Uncommercial Traveller,’ but in many other scattered passages of his works, Dickens, who for many years lived in Kent, has described the intolerable nuisance inflicted by tramps upon residents in the home counties, and has sketched the natural history of the sturdy vagabond who infests our roads and highways from early spring to late autumn, with a minuteness and power of detail worthy of a Burton. The subject of vagabondage is not, however, confined in its interest to the Metropolis and its adjacent parts. In the United States the habitual beggar has become as serious a nuisance, and, indeed, source of positive danger, as he was once amongst ourselves; and in the State of Pennsylvania more especially it has been found necessary to pass what may be described as an Habitual Vagrants Act for his suppression. That the terms of this enactment should be excessively severe is hardly matter of astonishment, when we bear in mind the fate of little Charley Ross. Early in the year 1874 a couple of men who were travelling up and down the country in a waggon stole from the home of his parents in Germantown, Pennsylvania, a boy of some seven years named Charley Ross. They then sent letters demanding a large sum of money for his restoration. The ransom increased, until no less than twenty thousand dollars was insisted upon. While the parents, on the one hand, were attempting to raise the money, and while the police were endeavouring to arrest the kidnappers, all negotiations fell through. The two men believed to have been concerned in the abduction were shot down in the act of committing a burglary on Rhode Island, and from that day to this the fate of Charley Ross has remained a mystery. Under these circumstances, public opinion has naturally run high, and it has been provided that any habitual tramp making his way from place to place, without earning an honest livelihood, shall be liable to imprisonment with hard labour for a period of twelve months; and that tramps who enter dwellings without permission, who carry fire-arms, or other weapons, or who threaten to injure either persons or property, shall be put to work in the common penitentiary for a period of three years. Pennsylvania in this is but reverting to the old law of England in the Tudor days. In the time of Henry VIII. vagrants were whipped at the cart’s tail, without distinction of either sex or age. The whipping-post, together with the stocks, was a conspicuous ornament of every parish green, and it was not until the year 1791 that the whipping of women was expressly forbidden by statute.