The _Illustrated London News_, October 4th, says:—“Among the papers to be read at Manchester is one on the condition of the Gipsy children and roadside ‘arabs’ in our midst, by Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, Leicester. Here, indeed, is a gentleman who is certainly neither a dealer in crotchets nor a rider of hobbies. Mr. Smith has done admirable service on behalf of the poor children on board our barges and canal-boats, and the even more pitiable boys and girls in our brick-fields; and to his philanthropic exertions are mainly due the recent amendments in the Factory Acts regulating the labour of young children. He has now taken the case of the juvenile ‘Romanies’ in hand; and I wish him well in his benevolent crusade. Mr. Smith has obligingly sent me a proof of his address, from which I gather that, owing to a superstitious dislike which the Gipsies entertain towards the Census, and the successfully cunning attempts on their part to baffle the enumerators, it is only by conjecture and guesswork that we can form any idea of the number of Bohemians in this country. The result of Mr. Smith’s diligent inquiries has led him to the assumption that there are not less than 4,000 Gipsy men and women, and from 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsy and ‘arab’—that is to say, tramp—children roaming about the country ‘outside the educational laws and the pale of civilisation.’” The following leading article, relating to my paper upon “The Condition of the Gipsy Children,” appears in the _Daily News_, October 6th:—“At the Social Science Congress Mr. George Smith, of Coalville, will to-morrow open a fresh campaign of philanthropy. The philanthropic Alexander is seldom in the unhappy condition of his Macedonian original, and generally has plenty of worlds remaining ready to be conquered. Brick-yards and canal-boats have not exhausted Mr. Smith’s energies, and the field he has now entered upon is wider and perhaps harder to work than either of these. Mr. Smith desires to bring the Gipsy children under the operation of the Education Act. Education and Gipsies seem at first sight to be words mutually contradictory. Amid the mass of imaginative fiction, idle speculation, and deliberate forgery that has been set afloat on the subject of the Gipsies, one thing has been made tolerably clear, and that is the intense aversion which the pure bred Gipsy has to any of the restraints of civilised life. Whether those restraints take the form of orderly and cleanly living in houses of brick and of stone, or of military service, or of school attendance, is pretty much a matter of indifference to him. Schools, indeed, may be regarded from the Gipsy point of view as not merely irksome, but useless institutions. Our most advanced places of technical education do not teach fortune-telling, or that interesting branch of the tinker’s art which enables the practitioner in mending one hole in a kettle to make two. Except for