Without education, and without industry, they transmit their vagrant habits to generation after generation, and perpetuate all the vices of a lawless and nomadic life. “It is very easy to give a romantic and even a sentimental colouring to the wandering Romany. The ‘greenwood home,’ with its freedom from all the restraints of a conventional state of society, is not without its attractive side—in books and in ballads. Minor poets have told us that ‘the Gipsy’s life is a joyous life,’ and plays and operas have been written to illustrate the superiority of vagabondage over civilisation. But the pretty Gitana of the stage is altogether a different sort of being from the brown-faced, elf-locked, and tawdrily dressed female who haunts back entries with the ostensible object of selling clothes-pegs, but with the real motive of picking up whatever may be lying in her way. There is but small chance of Bohemian Girls finding themselves in drawing-rooms nowadays. The last experiment of the kind was made by the writer of a charming book on the Gipsies, who was so fascinated by one of their number that he married her; but the wild, restless spirit was untameable, and the divorce court proved that the supposed precept of fidelity, which is said to guide the conduct of Gipsy wives, is not without its exceptions. The Gipsies have nothing in common with our conventional ways and habits, and whether it is possible ever to remove the barrier that separates them from civilisation is a question which only experiment can satisfactorily answer. Mr. Smith’s scheme is not the first, by many, that has been made to improve the conditions of Gipsy life. Nearly half a century ago the Rev. Mr. Crabb, of Southampton, formed a society with the object of amalgamating the Gipsies with the general population, but the scheme was comparatively futile. Still, past failure is no reason why a new attempt should not be made. Mr. Smith says there cannot be less than 4,000 Gipsy men and women, and from 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsy children moving about the country, outside the educational laws and the pale of civilisation, and not five per cent. of them can either read or write. Their mode of life is such as ‘would shock the modesty of South African savages,’ for men, women, and grown-up sons and daughters lie huddled together, and in many cases they ‘live like pigs and die like dogs.’ There is certainly room enough here for education, and education is the only thing that is likely to have any practical results.