1 1 6 Heredity. 



regard to his own impressions. He abandons himself to a 

 blind trust in fleeting emotions, just as, in the ordinary course of 

 life, he gives himself up to all the chances of vagabondage. One 

 impression is driven out by another. In him simple animalism is 

 supreme. Emotions of whatever kind, gross or poetical, grovel- 

 ling or exalted are the rule, and, as it were, the motive power of 

 his mind.' Their poetry, specimens of which Borrow gives, is 

 prosaic, rude, vulgar, and childish rather than artless. 



As their mind, so their manners : with childish ideas they have 

 a childish morality. If children had a morality of their own, it 

 would be a very bad morality. Hobbes was right when he said : 

 Homo malus, puer robustus. What specially characterizes the 

 Gypsy is his love, his inborn need, of vagabondage, and an 

 adventurous life. He abhors civilization as slavery, and despises 

 all sedentary and regular occupation. Marriage is but a temporary 

 union, concluded in presence of a few members of the tribe. 

 Gypsies usually live organized into corporations or tribes, under 

 the authority of an elective chief a very primitive form of polity. 

 Hating, as they do, all civilized peoples, they have certain vices to 

 which they cling as to an hereditary creed, and these they love and 

 uphold as a religion. Thus, their highest ambition is to steal from 

 the Christians ; and mothers teach their children thieving as the 

 noblest of virtues. They are, moreover, like children, less violent 

 than tricky, incapable of lofty thoughts, and unaffected in their 

 superstitions. Borrow having translated into Romany the 

 Gospel according to St. Luke, the Gypsies accepted the book, 

 and, regarding it as a talisman, carried it about their persons when 

 they went to thieve. 



This race offers a curious instance of a native incapacity, pre- 

 served and transmitted by heredity, for adaptation to civilized life. 

 The Gypsies are in our moral and social world what the dodo and 

 the ornithorhynchus are in our physical world, the survivors of a 

 past age. Civilization is a very complex condition, a moral atmo- 

 sphere to which man has to become acclimatized. There must be 

 a correspondence between the moral man and his moral condi- 

 tions, as between the physical man and his physical conditions. 

 Whoever cannot adapt himself to new conditions of social life 

 must die out gradually, perhaps, yet surely. If he disappears 



