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.