THE SPANISH GYPSY. 285 



by virtue of their divinations and certain other services 

 which they rendered to the upper and ruling classes of 

 Spain, had secured friends, or at least neutrals, amongst 

 the very people in whose hands lay the administration of 

 the laws. They were thus able to annul, and even to 

 ridicule, the successive legal enactments formulated to 

 exterminate them. 



Among the various reasons for the remarkable vitality 

 of the Eommany sect in thus surviving centuries of 

 oppression, there stand out prominently the strong tribal 

 cohesion inter se of the Zincali : their marriage customs 

 and the aversion with which they regarded any alliance 

 with the Busne, or Gentile. A gitano might, in rare 

 instances, marry a Spanish female, but in no case did 

 a gitana consent to take a husband outside her own race. 

 Thus the errate — the " black blood " of the Eommany, 

 on which above all they prided themselves, was preserved 

 uncontaminated. Whether, had the repressive laws been 

 vigorously carried out, they would have met with better 

 results, is an open question. 



At length, in 1783, a fresh departure in policy was 

 inaugurated by Charles III., or perhaps it would be safer 

 to say, during the reign of that monarch, for he was more 

 of a Nimrod than a statesman, and appears to have occu- 

 pied himself with grand batidas for stags, wild boars, and 

 other game, rather than with the welfare of his people, and 

 this at the very time when the magnificent colonial empire 

 of Spain was gradually slipping from his grasp. Whoever 

 it may have been that inspired the new gypsy law of 1783, 

 its author at least recognized the failure of the penal 

 decrees of the three preceding centuries, and instituted in 

 their place a more humane method of dealing with the 

 nomads. 



Under the new law the gypsies were, in the first place, 

 declared " not to be so by nature or origin, nor to proceed 

 from an infected root." It was enacted that to such of 

 them as should abandon their distinctive mode of life, 

 dress, and language, the whole share of offices, employ- 

 ments, trades and occupations, should be open equally 



