“It is proposed that the principles of the Canal Boats Act shall be applied to all movable habitations; that is, that all tents, shows, caravans, auctioneers’ vans, and like places used as dwellings, shall be registered and numbered, and put under proper sanitary supervision. Mr. Smith points out that when once a tent or van had been registered and numbered, it could be furnished with a book similar to a half-time book, in which the names of the children having first been entered, the attendances at school could be endorsed by the schoolmaster—for which extra trouble he should be compensated—as the children travelled about from place to place. By this means something tangible would be done to prevent the roadside waifs from growing up in the ignorance which is the parent of idleness. Why should these ten or fifteen thousand little nomads be allowed to remain in the neglected condition which has characterised their strange race for centuries? It is time that the spell was broken. There are no traditions of Gipsy life worth perpetuating; there is no sentimental halo around its history which it would be cruel to dispel. In past ages the Gipsies have been subjected to harsh laws and barbarous edicts; it remains for our more enlightened times to deal with them on a humaner plan. It is only by the expanding influence of education that the little minds of their children can gain a necessary experience of the utility and dignity of honest labour. When they have received some measure of instruction they will be fitter to emerge from the aimless and vagabond life of their forefathers, and break away from the squalor and precarious existence which has held so many generations of them in thrall. Mr. Smith’s idea is worthy the attention of legislators. It does not look so grand on paper, we admit, but it is a nobler thing to educate the young barbarian at home than to make war upon the unoffending barbarian abroad. The instincts and habits which have been transmitted from father to son for hundreds of years are not, of course, to be eradicated in a day, or even in a generation; but the time will, perhaps, eventually come when the Gipsies will cease to exist as a separate and distinct people, and become absorbed into the general population of the country. Whether that absorption takes place sooner or later, nothing can be lost by conferring on the young ‘Arabs’ of the tents the rudiments of an education which will hereafter be helpful to them if they are desirous of abandoning their squalor and indolence, and of earning an industrious livelihood. Their dread of fixed and continuous occupation may die out in time, and closer intimacy with the conditions of industrial life may teach them that civilisation has some compensations to offer for the sacrifice of their roaming propensities, and for taking away from them their ‘free mountains, their plains and woods, the sun, the stars, and the winds’ which are the companions of