The resistant quality of which we have just made mention, and which is especially discoverable in the western part of the county, is perhaps the most remarkable and, under modern circumstances, the most pleasing of the characteristics of the people. To those who have not been brought up in the county it becomes but slowly apparent. Those who know Sussex and its people take a somewhat cynical delight in observing that power at work. There is no peasant in the world so rooted in his customs and so determined to maintain them as is the Sussex peasant. He has been despoiled of his lands; he has been exploited by farmers from every other county, who come to use his rich belts of loam; he has been virtually bought or sold by families utterly out of the Sussex tradition (the Wyndhams, for example), or what is worse, Colonials and random rich men who make themselves great by the purchase of an ancient estate with whose traditional history they have not the remotest sympathy. He is, one would say, without defences against the modern world. But the modern world, as it is represented by the chance rich men who are now his masters, will very soon learn that the pressure of that proletariat is too much for them and not they for it. A Sussex man will not plant early. You may pay him to do so, and if you pay him enough he will do so once or twice; but before you have your garden many years, you will find he is planting again at his accustomed dates. He will not use silos. You may prove to him in a thousand ways that he would be the richer for using them. You may pay him as your servant such a wage that he may begin using them, but his abhorrence of a new method of that sort will express itself in the result, that you will lose a great deal of money by your experiment. He will hatch no eggs in an incubator, he will keep no bees in a new-fangled hive. He will give his pigs too much barley meal if he can get it, and will remark when he has done so that pigs do not really pay. He will bargain in his traditional fashion if you send him to market, and you will not by any payment or pressure cause him to express dissent in any other manner than by silence. It will be of interest to watch the near future and to see if his characteristics can be retained as [Sidenote: SUSSEX PRONUNCIATION] the county gets better and better known, and more thoroughly spoiled by the advent of what is called the leisured class. So far those who have been able to watch this peasant for the last thirty years have seen very little change indeed. And even the noble and rich south country accent, which education was to have destroyed, is as perfect in the little children of the last few years as in the mouths of the oldest men. And that peculiar emphasis upon the latter syllable--Amber_ley_, Billings_hurst_, and the rest--has not disappeared, at least in the western half of the county.