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.

The Man Who Laughs