Now the Alpine people, as we have seen, are thrifty, steady, hard-working tillers of the soil, patient but lacking in the spirit of adventure. The Nordics, on the other hand, are strong, active, courageous and adventurous, devoted to the horse and accustomed on its back to drive bands of cattle over the grassy steppes. If we may judge from the views of many of their modern representatives, they despise menial work, such as ploughing the land or digging the soil, just as they prefer cattle and beef to sheep or mutton, and have a contempt for fish-eaters and vegetarians. The Nordic also has a natural instinct for governing and administration. As I have shown elsewhere,[262] if two such peoples come into contact, and settle down together, there can be but one result: the Nordic becomes a lord and his people a privileged nobility, while the Alpine becomes eventually a serf. With a strong racial exclusiveness, or, as we call it to-day, colour prejudice, the Nordics decline to take wives from the subject class, and, though irregular unions may in time take place, marriage is strictly forbidden. In this we have the germs of the caste system so well known in India. Similar objections to such inter-marriages are a marked feature of the Briton throughout the empire. This custom has given rise to the strict marriage regulations, which existed until lately among all royal and many noble families in Europe, and among the descendants of the Visigoths in Spain. The marriage laws of Athens and Rome seem to imply a similar point of view. Another steppe-folk, entering a mountain zone filled with an eastern Alpine population, issued a similar edict, which they credited to their tribal god.[263] Thus in the mountain zone Nordic and Alpine lived together, apparently in harmony, as lord and serf, never intermarrying and rarely, if ever, mating with one another. In the plain, however, the Alpines seem to have been absent, or at any rate few in number. Here we may well imagine the Nordics continued their nomadic existence, driving their cattle from one pasture to another. Thus the population tended to divide into two groups, the people of the mountains and the people of the plain.