A highly picturesque cross-reference. And also pejorative, conferring upon these people en masse  the status of thieves, vandals, and ne-er-do-wells. Undoubtedly, Gypsies--since the first of them left India in the 10th Century-- have pursued a waryfaring life. But whatever their faults, they cannot truthfully be characterized across-the-board as scoundrels or robbers, no more so than any other given people. In fact. contemporary Romanies, obeying their own cultural traditions, "earn a living how they can--dealing in scrap metal, selling flowers or lace, and sometimes, telling fortunes." Their original forebears, "acrobats, singers, dancers, fortune-tellers, woodworkers and horse dealers"--plied occupations "forbidden to their high-caste coountrymen." One Gypsy woman not log ago related to a British interviewer that "people really did still fear them--believed that they could cast spells, stop cows giving milk or hens laying, and sold babies." It seems that LC, too, still believes this. Indeed, the stereotype, as the interviewer mused, may spring from "a certain envy for the gypsies," an envy of that "freedom descried by one as 'the feeling of the dew underfoot in an orchard  on a summer's morning.'" "And the envious, he adds, "would deny to others what they themselves can't have."

This introduces a less "romantic" and positively sobering aspect of the Gypsies' treatment by their "hosts" through history: they have been systematically brutalized and repressed. "In 1596," as a single instance, "106 were condemned to death simply for being gypsies." Since  1530, according to one authority, "the English have persecuted their gypses with vigor." Today the persecutions continue in the form of evictions, together with other kinds of both private and official hostility. All this might be casually dismissed as but another manifestation of stupid prejudice and know-nothingism, albeit demanding correction, except for the central, overwhelming fact of 20th century Gypsy experience, conveniently ignored in the LC scheme, that the Nazis exterminated somewhere between 200,000 and 600,000 Romanies before the Third Reich concluded, first subjecting  numberless thousands to diabolical "medical experimentation". Well, who cares what befalls a pack of vile "rogues and vagabonds," of "habitual criminals and parasites"? If Gypsies be less than human, they make no claim on human compassion nor concern. What side are we on?

Remedy:
(a) delete "Rogues and vagabonds" as an "xx"
(b) Add the subhead --PERSECUTIONS with an "xx" for "Genocide".  

Sanford Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies, 1971.