Socially and financially beneath these country gentlemen, though politically their equals, and in intelligence often not inferior to them, will come the more numerous, rougher and poorer races of small farmers and country labourers. Here will be seen harder lives and a heavier physique--men whose thews and sinews will make Imperial recruiting officers sigh wistfully. Holding anything from twenty or thirty up to two or three hundred acres, the small farmers will have their times of stress and anxiety, when they will be hard put to it to weather a bad season combined with low prices. But their practical skill, strength, and industry, and their ability, at a pinch, to do without all but bare necessaries, will usually pull them through. Moreover, they too will be educated, and no mere race of dull-witted boors. At the worst they will always be able to take to wage-earning for a time, and the smaller of them will commonly pass part of each year in working for others. Sometimes their sons will be labourers, and members of trade unions, and this close contact with organised labour and Socialism will have curious political results. As a class they will be much courted by politicians, and will distrust the rich, especially the rich of the towns. Their main and growing grievance will be the difficulty of putting their sons on the land. For themselves they will be able to live cheaply, and in good years save money; for customs tariffs will be more and more modified to suit them. Some of their children will migrate to the towns; others will become managers, overseers, shepherds, drovers. They will have their share of sport, and from among them will come most of the best athletes of the country, professional and other. Nowhere will be seen a cringing tenantry, hat-touching peasantry, or underfed farm labourers. The country labourers, thoroughly organised, well paid, and active, will yet be not altogether ill-humoured in politics; for, by comparison with the lot of their class in other parts of the world, theirs will be a life of hope, comfort, and confidence. CHAPTER III SPORT AND ATHLETICS