142 THE LAND'S END 



and his playmates, fellow-students and companions 

 have been natives. Yet he assures me that he has 

 never been able to feel himself one of them, and 

 never been able to see anything eye to eye with even 

 his most intimate and dearest friends of that race. 

 It all seems to come to an ineradicable difference of 

 mind in the two races. There is no better and no 

 worse, and the only quarrel is when any one, Saxon or 

 Celt, is offended at another's inability to see eye to 

 eye with him, regarding it as a bad habit which ought 

 to be overcome, or a sheer piece of perversity on his 

 part. 



Then we have the complicated question of morality, 

 or rather of "immorality," by which some journalists, 

 authors and compilers of blue-books mean sexual 

 intercourse unsanctified by marriage. Norden, who 

 wrote nigh on three centuries before the nice modern 

 mind invented a new meaning for an old word, 

 described it as the " sweet synn " which was regarded 

 as venial in Cornwall. But Norden spoke of the 

 gentry ; the manners and morals of what he described 

 as the " baser sort of men," including rustics, miners, 

 mechanics, farmers and yeomen, did not interest his 

 lofty mind. But the sweet sin was also common 

 among Norden's " baser sort of men," and exists 

 to-day as it did in the past, and as it exists in the 

 Principality, and perhaps in Ireland, where the power 

 and vigilance of the priests are now able to keep it 

 dark. It is really not so much a vice as a custom of 

 the country, perhaps of the race, seeing that the illicit 

 intercourse usually ends in marriage. It has been 



