The Outcast Gypsy

1910

Now the Modern Ishmael Among Civilized Nations

England and the United States Now Turned Against Them — Efforts to Induce Them to Settle Down Unavailing

Washington. — Everywhere throughout the civilized world the hand of mankind seems to be raised against the gypsies. The last two refuges to which they betook themselves — the United States and England — have set their faces against them. Hereafter in England they are to be treated like common vagrants, without visible means of support, while in the United States the immigration laws serve to debar them as idle and dangerous nomads.

France decided some years ago that the gypsy was a public menace and, in the summary fashion of the republic when it makes up its mind to a thing, expelled him as relentlessly as it has expelled the monks.

Germany, which is a grim manufacturing establishment, after all, simply ordered its thousands of sentinels along its bayoneted border to turn back every gypsy who showed his nose at the line.

Wrathful and perplexed, the Romany moved on to Belgium; but hostile bayonets met them there. Desperate, for they hate water like so many wildcats, they took to the canals of placid Holland. But the phlegmatic Dutchmen, every tradition of their plodding industry outraged at sight of the gay wanderers, drove them out again.

Meanwhile, the Balkans, where the gypsy has ever roamed as free as any other bird of prey, have begun to feel the call of settled prosperity — if Balkan politics will ever give agriculture its chance — that attends the lowing kine and the importation of American reapers and binders. Sheep stealers and horse swindlers are impressing the fiery-souled mountaineers less than they used to, and the bars are being steadily raised against the gypsy, on the ground that he is a common tramp, who contributes nothing to the country and deserves nothing from it.

Transylvania, time out of mind, has been the gypsy's native heath. The hills and caves let him live the life of the early troglodyte, and the industrious among the population afforded him sustenance. But all Romany can't subsist on the loot of Transylvania, and Hungary and Austria received the first overflow.

Maria Theresa a hundred and fifty years ago had a brilliant idea for squelching the dangerous nomads. She provided dowries for all gypsy maidens who would marry her Austrian subjects. It was the most popular move any empress ever made, especially with the gypsy maidens.

They applied for the dowries in beautiful, bridal droves; got them; and ran off with their gypsy husbands and lovers day after day, until Maria Theresa concluded that gypsy maidens were likely to prove unprofitable investments.

Emperor Joseph II thought he had them fixed forever when he gave them houses and lands, seed, grain and farming implements. The seeds were promptly eaten; the houses became horse stables; the implements were sold, and the owners moved on.

There are believed to be 300,000 of them in Austria and Hungary still; 100,000 in Turkey; 150,000 in Russia; 200,000 in Spain and Portugal; 50,000 in Italy; 10,000 in the United States, and several thousand in South America, to whose broad pampas and rich plantations their nomad fancy has been turning for some years past. In all, the whole race of gypsies, as known to the white nations, numbers fewer than a million; and the whole mass of them is forever moving on.

The great traveler and ethnologist, Sir Richard Burton, whose translation of the Arabian Nights has immortalized him, is one of the few genuinely scientific men who have studied the origins of the gypsies in a genuinely scientific manner. He does not condemn them utterly, and is at pains to note that the race has, at times, produced men of real distinction. He quotes the families of the Hungarian Hunyadis, the Russian Tolstoys, the Scotch Melvilles, the Cassilis and the Contis in Franca under Louis XIV, and the famous gypsy chief, Thomas Pulgar, who, in 1496, gave Bishop Sigismund the help he needed to beat back the Turkish invader from Europe.