There are laws which disperse. The law acting against the Comprachicos
determined, not only the Comprachicos, but vagabonds of all sorts, on a
general flight.

It was the devil take the hindmost. The greater number of the
Comprachicos returned to Spain--many of them, as we have said, being
Basques.

The law for the protection of children had at first this strange result:
it caused many children to be abandoned.

The immediate effect of the penal statute was to produce a crowd of
children, found or rather lost. Nothing is easier to understand. Every
wandering gang containing a child was liable to suspicion. The mere fact
of the child's presence was in itself a denunciation.

"They are very likely Comprachicos." Such was the first idea of the
sheriff, of the bailiff, of the constable. Hence arrest and inquiry.
People simply unfortunate, reduced to wander and to beg, were seized
with a terror of being taken for Comprachicos although they were nothing
of the kind. But the weak have grave misgivings of possible errors in
justice. Besides, these vagabond families are very easily scared. The
accusation against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other
people's children. But the promiscuousness caused by poverty and
indigence is such that at times it might have been difficult for a
father and mother to prove a child their own.

How came you by this child? how were they to prove that they held it
from God? The child became a peril--they got rid of it. To fly