Scrubby coat and trousers, dirty shirt, scarf, and cap, socks more like anklets for holes, and a pair of split boots; bedraggled hat, frowsy jacket, blouse and skirt, squashy boots, and perhaps a patchy “pelerine” or mangy “boa”—­such is accepted as the natural costume for the heirs of all the ages.  Prehistoric man, roaming through desert and forest in his own shaggy pelt, was infinitely better clad.  So is the aboriginal African with a scrap of leopard skin, or a single bead upon a cord.  To judge by clothing, we may wonder to what purpose evolution ever started upon its long course of groaning and travailing up to now.  And more than half-concealed by that shabby clothing, what shabby forms and heads we must divine!  How stunted, puny, and ill-developed the bodies are!  How narrow-shouldered the men, how flat-breasted the women!  And the faces, how shapeless and anaemic!  How deficient in forehead, nose, and jaw!  Compare them with an Afghan’s face; it is like comparing a chicken with an eagle.  Writing in the Standard of April 8, 1912, a well-known clergyman assured us that “when a woman enters the political arena, the bloom is brushed from the peach, never to be restored.”  That may seem a hard saying to Primrose Dames and Liberal Women, but the thousands of peaches that entered the arena (as peaches will) on Hampstead Heath, had no bloom left to brush, and no political arena could brush it more.

Deficient in blood and bone, the products of stuffy air, mean food, and casual or half-hearted parentage, often tainted with hereditary or acquired disease, the faces are; but, worse than all, how insignificant and indistinguishable!  It is well known that a Chinaman can hardly distinguish one Englishman from another, just as we can hardly distinguish the Chinese.  But in an English working crowd, even an Englishman finds it difficult to distinguish face from face.  Yet as a nation we have always been reckoned conspicuous for strong and even eccentric individuality.  Our well-fed upper and middle classes—­the public school, united services, and university classes—­reach a high physical average.  Perhaps, on the whole, they are still the best specimens of civilised physique.  Within thirty years the Germans have made an astonishing advance.  They are purging off their beer, and working down their fat.  But, as a rule, the well-fed and carefully trained class in England still excels in versatility, decision, and adventure.  Unhappily, it is with few—­only with a few millions of well-to-do people, a fraction of the whole English population—­and with a few country-bred people and open-air workers, that we succeed.  The great masses of the English nation are tending to become the insignificant, indistinguishable, unwholesome, and shabby crowd that becomes visible at football matches and on Bank Holidays upon the Heath.