246 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



but physique, bodily might, such as was packed into 

 this scene, counts high. An empire wants at its 

 bank a big standing balance of peasant manhood. 



We have more smallholders in our part of Eng- 

 land than some people imagine. A smallholder, 

 who has won and kept his bit of England by char- 

 acter and toil, is an aristocrat the strength of the 

 best in him. He will make his way not because 

 of Fortune, but despite her. Having known and 

 sympathised with this type of English villager all 

 my life, I say, with conviction, that we cannot create 

 him by laws and governments at least, not by any 

 direct process. We might as well set about creating 

 by law a good poet or successful doctor. Encourage- 

 ment by the State is another thing: the principle 

 of it no doubt is right, but the application, I think, 

 very difficult. 



The smallholder who has risen from plain farm- 

 worker to landowner or tenant-farmer in miniature 

 owes all to character; and character he owes to 

 up-bringing, environment in early years, and some- 

 thing, perhaps, to heredity or his forefathers : say 

 the finger of God picked him out. There is one I 

 have watched and talked to who lives in a hamlet 

 by a wood-edge, a place so trifling and out of the 

 beaten way that even in the Ordnance Survey, an 

 inch to the mile, it was marked only by a dot ; and, 

 in the ordinary road maps, the lane that leads to 

 this hamlet is not marked at all. I have watched 



