“LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD, WHITEHALL, _March_ 14, 1883.
“I have to thank you for the copy of the Bill you have sent to Sir Charles Dilke. In consequence of Mr. Ashton Dilke’s death he will not be present in the House of Commons this week.
“Mr. Mundella desires me to thank you for sending him a copy of your Canal Boats Act Amendment Bill enclosed in your letter of the 12th inst.
My days of hard work, and scores of letters written in relation to the questions put to Mr. Dodson and Mr. Mundella, have brought forth the usual molehill of “under consideration.” The political fields of moral and social progress are full of crotchets and molehills. Would to God that either John Bull with his horns or John Straw with his spade would level them to the ground.
At any rate those mountainous molehills, six inches high, which are checking the van of social progress, laden as it is—aye, heaped up—with blessings for the thirty thousand poor little gipsy children who are starving to death in our midst, in the mud, rotten straw, filth, and rags of a soul-perishing and body-killing nature, amidst which the poor gipsy child has to live.
The greatest difficulties I know of are the dung heaps scattered about by sensational trash backwood gipsy writers. I can almost imagine our imported and other Demetriuses and damsels calling out on the steps of St. Stephen’s, Westminster, “Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth.” “Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people.” “Our craft is in danger to be set at nought.” “Let us hang the devil.”
The registration official overcomes “difficulties” when he registers a gipsy hawker’s van in order that he may extract £4 from him; and the policeman overcomes “difficulties” when he brings to bay before a bench of magistrates a gipsy child for stealing a turnip, or a gipsy poacher for making too free with a partridge. There are seas of “difficulties” to be waded through, it would seem, before the gipsy children are to be led to the school doors, and the sanitary inspectors to their suffocating, immoral, and unhealthy homes. It is un-English, wicked, and unjust to deliver the gipsy and other travelling children over to the policeman, without ever having taught them to know right from wrong in day and Sunday schools. A terrible day of reckoning and vengeance awaits us for our wrongdoings towards our present-day English gipsy children, think about it as lightly as we may.