These differences between the inhabitants of neighbouring and of adjoining counties are doubtless in some measure due to local conditions, of soil, climate, { 222} food, customs, and so on, acting for long generations on a stay-at-home people: but the main differences are undoubtedly racial; and here we are on a subject in which we poor ordinary folk who want to know are like sheep wandering shepherdless in some wilderness, bleating in vain for guidance in a maze of fleece-tearing brambles. It is true that the ethnologists and anthropologists triumphantly point out that the Jute type of man may be recognised in the Isle of Wight, and in a less degree even in the Meon district; for the rest, with a wave of the hand to indicate the northern half of the county, they say that all that is or ought to be more or less Anglo-Saxon. That's all; since, as they tell us, the affinities of the South Hampshire people, of the New Forest district especially, have not yet been worked out. Not being an anthropologist I can't help them; and am even inclined to think that they have left undone some of the things which they ought to have done. The complaint was made in a former chapter that we had no monograph on fleas to help us; it may be made, too, with regard to the human race in Hampshire. The most that one can do in such a case, since man cannot be excluded from the subjects which concern the naturalist, is to record one's own poor little unscientific observations, and let them go for what they are worth.
There is little profit in looking at the townspeople. The big coast towns have a population quite as heterogeneous as that of the metropolis; even in a comparatively small rural inland town, like Winchester, { 223} one would be puzzled to say what the chief characteristics of the people were. You may feel in a vague way that they are unlike the people of, say, Guildford, or Canterbury, or Reading, or Dorchester, but the variety in forms and faces is too great to allow of any definite idea. The only time when the people even in a town can be studied to advantage in places like Winchester, Andover, etc., is on a market day, or on a Saturday afternoon, when the villagers come in to do their marketing. I have said, in writing of Somerset and its people, that the gentry, the landowners, and the wealthy residents generally, are always in a sense foreigners. The man may bear a name which has been for many generations in a county, but he is never racially one with the peasant; and, as John Bright once said, it is the people who live in cottages that make the nation. His parents and his grandparents and his ancestors for centuries have been mixing their blood with the blood of outsiders. It is well always to bear this in mind, and in the market-place or the High Street of the country town to see the carriage people, the gentry, and the important ones generally as though one saw them not, or saw them as shadows, and to fix the attention on those who in face and carriage and dress proclaim themselves true natives and children of the soil.