at any
time from the bronze-age up to the times of Brown Bess; for the
strike-a-lights, still to be got at a penny each, can have barely kept
the wolf from the door. And Mr. Snare is not merely an artisan but
an artist. He has chipped out a flint ring, a feat which taxed the
powers of the clever neolithic knappers of pre-dynastic Egypt; whilst
with one of his own flint fishhooks he has taken a fine trout from
the Little Ouse that runs by the town.

Thus there are things in old England that are older even than some
of our friends wot. In that one county of Suffolk, for instance, the
good flint--so rich in colour as it is, and so responsive to the hammer,
at any rate if you get down to the lower layers or "sases," for instance,
the floorstone, or the black smooth-stone that is generally below
water-level--has served the needs of all the palaeolithic periods,
and of the neolithic age as well, and likewise of the modern Englishmen
who fought with flintlocks at Waterloo, or still more recently took
out tinder-boxes with them to the war in South Africa. And what does
this stand for in terms of the antiquity of man? Thousands of years?
We do not know exactly; but say rather hundreds of thousands of years.

CHAPTER III
RACE

There is a story about the British sailor who was asked to state what
he understood by a Dago. "Dagoes," he replied, "is anything wot isn't
our sort of chaps." In exactly the same way would an ancient Greek
have explained what he meant by a "barbarian." When it takes this
wholesale form we speak, not without reason, of race-prejudice. We
may well wonder in the meantime how far this prejudice answers to
something real. Race would certainly seem to be a fact that stares
one in the face.

Stroll down any London street: you cannot go wrong about that Hindu
student with features rather like ours but of a darker shade. The short
dapper man with eyes a little aslant is no less unmistakably a Japanese.
It takes but a slightly more practised eye to pick out the German waiter,
the French chauffeur, and the Italian vendor of ices. Lastly, when
you have made yourself really good at the game, you will be scarcely
more likely to confuse a small dark Welshman with a broad florid
Yorkshireman than a retriever with a mastiff.

Yes, but remember that you are judging by the gross impression, not
by the element of race or breed as distinguished from the rest. Here,
you say, come a couple of our American cousins