VI.

The laws against vagabonds have always been very rigorous in England.  England, in her Gothic legislation, seemed to be inspired with this principle, Homo errans fera errante pejor.  One of the special statutes classifies the man without a home as “more dangerous than the asp, dragon, lynx, or basilisk” (atrocior aspide, dracone, lynce, et basilico).  For a long time England troubled herself as much concerning the gipsies, of whom she wished to be rid as about the wolves of which she had been cleared.  In that the Englishman differed from the Irishman, who prayed to the saints for the health of the wolf, and called him “my godfather.”

English law, nevertheless, in the same way as (we have just seen) it tolerated the wolf, tamed, domesticated, and become in some sort a dog, tolerated the regular vagabond, become in some sort a subject.  It did not trouble itself about either the mountebank or the travelling barber, or the quack doctor, or the peddler, or the open-air scholar, as long as they had a trade to live by.  Further than this, and with these exceptions, the description of freedom which exists in the wanderer terrified the law.  A tramp was a possible public enemy.  That modern thing, the lounger, was then unknown; that ancient thing, the vagrant, was alone understood.  A suspicious appearance, that indescribable something which all understand and none can define, was sufficient reason that society should take a man by the collar.  “Where do you live?  How do you get your living?” And if he could not answer, harsh penalties awaited him.  Iron and fire were in the code:  the law practised the cauterization of vagrancy.

Hence, throughout English territory, a veritable “loi des suspects” was applicable to vagrants (who, it must be owned, readily became malefactors), and particularly to gipsies, whose expulsion has erroneously been compared to the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from Spain, and the Protestants from France.  As for us, we do not confound a battue with a persecution.

The Comprachicos, we insist, had nothing in common with the gipsies.  The gipsies were a nation; the Comprachicos were a compound of all nations—­the lees of a horrible vessel full of filthy waters.  The Comprachicos had not, like the gipsies, an idiom of their own; their jargon was a promiscuous collection of idioms:  all languages were mixed together in their language; they spoke a medley.  Like the gipsies, they had come to be a people winding through the peoples; but their common tie was association, not race.  At all epochs in history one finds in the vast liquid mass which constitutes humanity some of these streams of venomous men exuding poison around them.  The gipsies were a tribe; the Comprachicos a freemasonry—­a masonry having not a noble aim, but a hideous handicraft.  Finally, their religions differ—­the gipsies were Pagans, the Comprachicos were Christians, and more than that, good Christians, as became an association which, although a mixture of all nations, owed its birth to Spain, a devout land.