GIPSIES AND THE PLAGUE.
ONE of the difficulties in making an effective beginning with the gipsy problem is in getting a large number of people to understand what it means. The great majority of the inhabitants of these islands go through their lives, doubt- less, without seeing a gipsy, certainly without finding gipsies a nuisance, and they are not disposed for that reason to pay any very great attention to the inconveniences of others. Yet the problem of the treatment of gipsies has become a really serious question ; it is a problem which becomes graver every year, and which may easily before long affect the health or the pockets of a very much larger number of people than those who are victimised to-day. At present the persons seho are chiefly concerned with the gipsy question are the inhabi- tants of counties like Surrey and Sussex, in which there are large areas of common land. In many places the gipsies have taken possession of these commons, which, instead of being free, open spaces of clean turf and heather, have been polluted by the rubbish and filth of clusters of camps a,nd caravans. It is not a question of an occasional caravan resting for a. night by the wayside; there are regular settlements and camping-places, and the land which ought to belong to the
commoners and the public, to walk over and find pure sunlight and blowing winds, has been appropriated by a community which pays no taxes, is bound by no ties of citizenship, and, in return for the hospitality which it assumes as a right, destroys and defiles wherever it goes. The surroundings of a gipsy camp are in the highest degree disgusting. Pots, empty meat- tins, broken earthenware, are scattered everywhere ; horse manure and human filth of every description litter the ground—old boots, old coats, old hats, old stays—the brushwood is broken and valuable timber is cut down to make the camp-fires. Protest is unavailing ; either the police will do nothing or they do not know what to do.
It is an astonishing fact that modern civilisation should have been successfully defied for so long by these strange people. It might be expected that there should be disputes as to the origin of the race and language of the nomad tribes which have swarmed over Western Europe since the fifteenth century ; and it would not seem unnatural that in countries outside Europe there should be no available statistics as to their numbers. But it is surely extraordinary that in England to-day there should be no official knowledge of any kind as to the numbers of gipsies settled among us. Nearly every European country appears to have made a better attempt at estimating the numbers of their gipsies than we have, though it is true that not all the statistics obtained can be trusted. Dr. Moses Gaster, writing on this subject in the edition just published of the " Eneycloptedia Britannica," says that the only European country which has reckoned the numbers of its gipsies exactly is Hungary. In 1893 there were 274,940 gipsies in Translei- thania., of whom 243,432 were settled, 20,406 only partly settled, and 8,938 nomads. The country next in numbers is Roumania, which held in 1895 between 200,000 and 250,000. Turkey in Europe counted 117,000 in 1903; Russia estimates the numbers at 58,000 and Poland at 15,000; Servia has 41,000, Bosnia and Herzegovina 18,060, Greece 10,000, and Austria 16,000. In .Southern and Western Europe the countries vary strangely. Italy has 32,000 and Spain 40,000 gipsies ; France possibly may have 5,000, Sweden and Norway 1,500, Denmark and Holland 5,000; Germany owns but 2,000, and Great Britain nobody knows anything about. Dr. Gaster says that some people think there may be 12,000, but there are no statistics to be had. Also, the number changes in England probably more rapidly than in any other country, owing to facilities of immigra- tion. For instance, in February, 1906, there were special instruc- tions issued in Prussia as to dealing with the gipsy nuisance. This was followed in 1907 by a sort of " drive " of gipsies, with the consequence that the numbers in this country were recruited by an irruption from Germany. Germany alone of the countries of Western Europe appears to have made a serious effort to deal with the problem, and in Germany, as in Austria, a special register is kept for tracing the movements of vagrant and sedentary gipsies.
In Germany, no doubt, the precautions taken against gipsies are strict because it is more fully realised by officials and by the public that their presence in any district is a serious menace to health. The grade of civilisation, if it can be called civilisation, attained by these wandering people is extremely low; sanitation means nothing to them ; their children die as children would be likely to die in such sur- roundings, and the mortality among the adults is very high : most of the deaths are from diseases of the lungs. But the danger to their surroundings is the important point. It has been found impossible to enforce attendance of gipsy children at elementary schools, not only because the parents may be here to-day and gone to-morrow, but because of the dirt the children bring with them. The risk of carrying contagious disease is one of the difficulties ; another is the unwillingness of other parents to have their children brought into contact with the gipsies. A clean and respectable working woman is naturally disgusted that her children should have to sit in the same room with vagrant children in the worst stages of neglect, and she very properly makes her protest. The question is whether something more than the protest of the parents of Tillage school-children will not be needed in the near future. Hitherto the possibilities of infection from dirty surroundings have been limited, so far as country districts have been con- cerned, to diseases within the ordinary knowledge and _practice of the country doctor. But suppose—we cannot, knowing all we do, • say that the supposition is wholly impossible—that there were once to break out in a gips),
encampment an epidemic of plague. If the plague again makes its appearance in this country, it will, doubtless, be in some such surroundings. It will attack human beings where they are huddled together under insanitary conditions, in the neighbourhood of places where rats are already infected, and where the rat-fleas can pass from rats to men. Gould any conditions be better fitted for propagating a disease common to rats and men than a gipsy encampment ? Hitherto the known cases of plague in East. Anglia have occurred in small cottages in the infected districts where there have been the readiest facilities for communication between rats and cottage- dwellers ; but in what respect, as regards that facility for communication of disease, is a gipsy caravan better situated than a cottage ? A caravan standing by a hedgerow at any time of the year later than April, when vast numbers of rats leave the neighbourhood of buildings for the fields and woods, is merely an addition to the rat-runs near it. The litter of food and refuse is an attraction to the rats, and the squalid condition of the interior of the cars is precisely that in which disease would be propagated most easily. It would be interesting to know whether the county police of Suffolk and Essex have any information as to the number of gipsies frequenting the district within a radius of, say, thirty miles from the mouth of the Orwell. If there are known to be any gipsy caravans within range of possible infection, it would seem to be mere ordinary prudence to arrange for their removal.
But that involves two other questions. The first has been asked before, and, so far as official or Governmental inquiry is concerned, we seem as far off an answer as ever. Where is the outer rim of the plague infection among the rats of East Anglia ? Is it still straching outwards ? Until we have definite information upon that point, it is difficult to see what precautions can be taken against the spread of the bacillus not only in East Anglia but in other districts to which diseased rats can be conveyed in a dozen different ways besides their own natural migrations. The second ques- tion, involved in any precautions taken against the spread of an epidemic which flourishes particularly in insanitary sur- roundings is, What measures can be taken to deal with the gipsy population of the country in case of another outbreak of plague, when they would obviously be a danger to the com- munity? The first necessity in attempting to find an answer to that question must surely be to determine the gipsies' numbers. It is not an impossible task. If, on an agreed-upon day, each parish in the Kingdom were required to make a re- turn of the number of gipsies known on that day to be within its borders, something at least would have been done towards dealing with the whole gipsy problem. A knowledge of num- bers is a prime necessity before the scope of any action can be even provisionally determined.
Previous page
