[311] Nesbit Bain, Finland and the Tsar, _Fortnightly Review_, Vol. 71,
p. 735. E. Limedorfer, Finland's Plight, _Forum_, Vol. 32, pp. 85-93.
[312] Archibald Geikie, The Scenery of Scotland, pp. 398-399. London,
1887.
[313] Railways in Asia Minor, _Littell's Living Age_, Vol. 225, p. 196.
[314] J. Ellis Barker, Modern Germany, pp. 38-66. London, 1907.
[315] The Polish Danger in Prussia, _Westminster Review_, Vol. 155, p.
375.
[316] Heinrich von Treitschke, _Politik_, Vol. I, pp. 223-224. Leipzig,
1897.
[317] Plato, Critias, 112. Aristotle, Politics, Book II, chap. VII; Book
IV, chap. IV; Book VII, chap. IV.
[318] Plato, _De Legibus_, Book V, chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11.
[319] Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses_,
pp. 180-187. Stuttgart, 1899.
[320] Blanqui, History of Political Economy, pp. 150-152. New York,
1880.
[321] Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, p. 63. New York, 1865.
[322] E. C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, pp.
42-43, 109, 110. Boston, 1903.
[323] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 405-6. New York,
1897.
[324] P. L. Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. VIII. Letter to
John Bacon, April 30, 1803; and Confidential Message to Congress on the
Expedition to the Pacific, January 18, 1803.
[325] Emerson, The Young American, in Nature Addresses and Lectures, pp.
369-371. Centenary Edition, Boston.
CHAPTER VII
GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES
[Sidenote: The boundary zone in nature.]
Nature abhors fixed boundary lines and sudden transitions; all her
forces combine against them. Everywhere she keeps her borders melting,
wavering, advancing, retreating. If by some cataclysm sharp lines of
demarcation are drawn, she straightway begins to blur them by creating
intermediate forms, and thus establishes the boundary zone which
characterizes the inanimate and animate world. A stratum of limestone or
sandstone, when brought into contact with a glowing mass of igneous
rock, undergoes various changes due to the penetrating heat of the
volcanic outflow, so that its surface is metamorphosed as far as that
heat reaches. The granite cliff slowly deposits at its base a rock-waste
slope to soften the sudden transition from its perpendicular surface to
the level plain at its feet. The line where a land-born river meets the
sea tends to become a sandbar or a delta, created by the river-borne
silt and the wash of the waves, a form intermediate between land and
sea, bearing the stamp of each, fluid in its outlines, ever growing by
the persistent accumulation of mud, though ever subject to inundation
and destruction by the waters which made it. The alluvial coastal hems
that edge all shallow seas are such border zones, reflecting in their
flat, low surfaces the dead level of the ocean, in their composition the
solid substance of the land; but in the miniature waves imprinted on the
sands and the billows of heaped-up boulders, the master workman of the
deep leaves his mark. [See map page 243.]
Under examination, even our familiar term coastline proves to be only an
abstraction with no corresponding reality in nature. Everywhere, whether
on margin of lake or gulf, the actual phenomenon is a coast zone,
alternately covered and abandoned by the waters, varying in width from a
few inches to a few miles, according to the slope of the land, the range
of the tide and the direction of the wind. It has one breadth at the
minimum or neap tide, but increases often two or three fold at spring
tide, when the distance between ebb and flood is at its maximum. At the
mouth of Cook's Inlet on the southern Alaskan coast, where the range of
tides is only eight feet, the zone is comparatively narrow, but widens
rapidly towards the head of the inlet, where the tide rises twenty-three
feet above the ebb line, and even to sixty-five feet under the influence
of a heavy southwest storm. On flat coasts we are familiar with the wide
frontier of salt marshes, that witness the border warfare of land and
sea, alternate invasion and retreat. In low-shored estuaries like those
of northern Brittany and northwestern Alaska, this amphibian girdle of
the land expands to a width of four miles, while on precipitous coasts
of tideless sea basins it contracts to a few inches. Hence this boundary
zone changes with every impulse of the mobile sea and with every varying
configuration of the shore. Movement and external conditions are the
factors in its creation. They make something that is only partially akin
to the two contiguous forms. Here on their outer margins land and ocean
compromise their physical differences, and this by a law which runs
through animate and inanimate nature. Wherever one body moves in
constant contact with another, it is subjected to modifying influences
which differentiate its periphery from its interior, lend it a
transitional character, make of it a penumbra between light and shadow.
The modifying process goes on persistently with varying force, and
creates a shifting, changing border zone which, from its nature, cannot
be delimited. For convenience' sake, we adopt the abstraction of a
boundary line; but the reality behind this abstraction is the important
thing in anthropo-geography.
[Sidenote: Gradations in the boundary zone.]
All so-called boundary lines with which geography has to do have this
same character,--coastlines, river margins, ice or snow lines, limits of
vegetation, boundaries of races or religions or civilizations, frontiers
of states. They are all the same, stamped by the eternal flux of nature.
Beyond the solid ice-pack which surrounds the North Pole is a wide
girdle of almost unbroken drift ice, and beyond this is an irregular
concentric zone of scattered icebergs which varies in breadth with
season, wind and local current; a persistent decrease in continuity from
solid pack to open sea. The line of perpetual snow on high mountains
advances or retreats from season to season, from year to year; it drops
low on chilly northern slopes and recedes to higher altitudes on a
southern exposure; sends down long icy tongues in dark gorges, and
leaves outlying patches of old snow in shaded spots or beneath a
covering of rock waste far below the margin of the snow fields.
In the struggle for existence in the vegetable world, the tree line
pushes as far up the mountain as conditions of climate and soil will
permit. Then comes a season of fiercer storms, intenser cold and
invading ice upon the peaks. Havoc is wrought, and the forest drops back
across a zone of border warfare--for war belongs to borders--leaving
behind it here and there a dwarfed pine or gnarled and twisted juniper
which has survived the onslaught of the enemy, Now these are stragglers
in the retreat, but are destined later in milder years to serve as
outposts in the advance of the forest to recover its lost ground. Here
we have a border scene which is typical in nature--the belt of unbroken
forest, growing thinner and more stunted toward its upper edge,
succeeded by a zone of scattered trees, which may form a cluster perhaps
in some sheltered gulch where soil has collected and north winds are
excluded, and higher still the whitened skeleton of a tree to show how
far the forest once invaded the domain of the waste.
[Sidenote: Oscillating boundaries]
The habitable area of the earth everywhere shows its boundaries to be
peripheral zones of varying width, now occupied and now deserted,
protruding or receding according to external conditions of climate and
soil, and subject to seasonal change. The distribution of human life
becomes sparser from the temperate regions toward the Arctic Circle,
foreshadowing the unpeopled wastes of the ice-fields beyond. The outward
movement from the Tropics poleward halts where life conditions
disappear, and there finds its boundary; but as life conditions advance
or retreat with the seasons, so does that boundary. On the west coast of
Greenland the Eskimo village of Etah, at about the seventy-eighth
parallel, marks the northern limit of permanent or winter settlement;
but in summer the Eskimo, in his kayak, follows the musk-ox and seal
much farther north and there leaves his igloo to testify to the wide
range of his poleward migration. Numerous relics of the Eskimo and their
summer encampments have been found along Lady Franklin Bay in northern
Grinnell Land (81° 50' N. L.), but in the interior, on the outlet
streams of Lake Hazen, explorers have discovered remains of habitations
which had evidently, in previous ages, been permanently occupied.[326] The
Murman Coast of the Kola Peninsula has in summer a large population of
Russian fishermen and forty or more fishing stations; but when the catch
is over at the end of August, and the Arctic winter approaches, the
stations are closed, and the three thousand fishermen return to their
permanent homes on the shores of the White Sea.[327] Farther east along
this polar fringe of Russia, the little village of Charbarova, located
on the Jugor Strait, is inhabited in summer by a number of Samoyedes,
who pasture their reindeer over on Vaygats Island, and by some Russians
and Finns, who come from the White Sea towns to trade with the Samoyedes
and incidentally to hunt and fish. But in the fall, when a new ice
bridge across the Strait releases the reindeer from their enclosed
pasture on the island, the Samoyedes withdraw southward, and the
merchants with their wares to Archangel and other points. This has gone
on for centuries.[328] On the Briochov Islands at the head of the Yenisei
estuary Nordenskiold found a small group of houses which formed a summer
fishing post in 1875, but which was deserted by the end of August.[329]
[Sidenote: Altitude boundary zones.]
An altitude of about five thousand feet marks the limit of village life
in the Alps; but during the three warm months of the year, the summer
pastures at eight thousand feet or more are alive with herds and their
keepers. The boundary line of human life moves up the mountains in the
wake of spring and later hurries down again before the advance of
winter. The Himalayan and Karakorum ranges show whole villages of
temporary occupation, like the summer trading town of Gartok at 15,000
feet on the caravan route from Leh to Lhassa, or Shahidula (3,285 meters
or 10,925 feet) on the road between Leh and Yarkand;[330] but the boundary
of permanent habitation lies several thousand feet below. Comparable to
these are the big hotels that serve summer stage-coach travel over the
Alps and Rockies, but which are deserted when the first snow closes the
passes. Here a zone of altitude, as in the polar regions a zone of
latitude, marks the limits of the habitable area.
[Sidenote: "Wallace's Line" a typical boundary zone.]
The distribution of animals and races shows the limit of their movements
or expansion. Any boundary defining the limits of such movements can not
from its nature be fixed, and hence can not be a line. It is always a
zone. Yet "Wallace's Line," dividing the Oriental from the Australian
zoological realm, and running through Macassar Strait southward between
Bali and Lombok, is a generally accepted dictum. The details of
Wallace's investigation, however, reveal the fact that this boundary is
not a line, but a zone of considerable and variable width, enclosing the
line on either side with a marginal belt of mixed character. Though
Celebes, lying to the east of Macassar Strait, is included in the
Australian realm, it has lost so large a proportion of Australian types
of animals, and contains so many Oriental types from the west, that
Wallace finds it almost impossible to decide on which side of the line
it belongs.[331] The Oriental admixture extends yet farther east over the
Moluccas and Timor. Birds of Javan or Oriental origin, to the extent of
thirty genera, have spread eastward well across Wallace's Line; some of
these stop short at Flores, and some reach even to Timor,[332] while
Australian cockatoos, in turn, have been seen on the west coast of Bali
but not in Java, Heilprin avoids the unscientific term line, because he
finds his zoological realms divided by "transition regions," which are
intermediate in animal types as they are in geographical location.[333]
Wallace notes a similar "debatable land" in the Rajputana Desert east of
the Indus, which is the border district between the Oriental and
Ethiopian realms.[334]
[Sidenote: Boundaries as limits of movements or expansion.]
Such boundaries mark the limits of that movement which is common to all
animate things. Every living form spreads until it meets natural
conditions in which it can no longer survive, or until it is checked by
the opposing expansion of some competing form. If there is a change
either in the life conditions or in the strength of the competing forms,
the boundary shifts. In the propitious climate of the Genial Period,
plants and animals lived nearer to the North Pole than at present; then
they fell back before the advance of the ice sheet. The restless
surface of the ocean denies to man a dwelling place; every century,
however, the Dutch are pushing forward their northern boundary by
reclamation of land from the sea; but repeatedly they have had to drop
back for a time when the water has again overwhelmed their hand-made
territory.
[Sidenote: Peoples as barriers.]
The boundaries of race and state which are subjected to greatest
fluctuations are those determined by the resistance of other peoples.
The westward sweep of the Slavs prior to eighth century carried them
beyond the Elbe into contact with the Germans; but as these increased in
numbers, outgrew their narrow territories and inaugurated a
counter-movement eastward, the Slavs began falling back to the Oder, to
the Vistula, and finally to the Niemen. Though the Mohawk Valley opened
an easy avenue of expansion westward for the early colonists of New
York, the advance of settlements up this valley for several decades went
on at only a snail's pace, because of the compact body of Iroquois
tribes holding this territory. In the unoccupied land farther south
between the Cumberland and Ohio rivers the frontier went forward with
leaps and bounds, pushed on by the expanding power of the young
Republic. [See map page 156.]
Anything which increases the expanding force of a people--the
establishment of a more satisfactory government by which the national
consciousness is developed, as in the American and French revolutions,
the prosecution of a successful war by which popular energies are
released from an old restraint, mere increase of population, or an
impulse communicated by some hostile and irresistible force behind--all
are registered in an advance of the boundary of the people in question
and a corresponding retrusion of their neighbor's frontier.
[Sidenote: Boundary zone as index of growth or decline.]
The border district is the periphery of the growing or declining race or
state. It runs the more irregularly, the greater are the variations in
the external conditions as represented by climate, soil, barriers, and
natural openings, according as these facilitate or obstruct advance.
When it is contiguous with the border of another state or race, the two
form a zone in which ascendency from one side or the other is being
established. The boundary fluctuates, for equilibrium of the contending
forces is established rarely and for only short periods. The more
aggressive people throws out across this debatable zone, along the lines
of least resistance or greatest attraction, long streamers of
occupation; so that the frontier takes on the form of a fringe of
settlement, whose interstices are occupied by a corresponding fringe of
the displaced people. Such was its aspect in early colonial America,
where population spread up every fertile river valley across a zone of
Indian land; and such it is in northern Russia to-day, where long narrow
Slav bands run out from the area of continuous Slav settlement across a
wide belt of Mongoloid territory to the shores of the White Sea and
Arctic Ocean.[335] [See maps pages 103 and 225.]
The border zone is further broadened by the formation of ethnic islands
beyond the base line of continuous settlement, which then advances more
or less rapidly, if expansion is unchecked, till it coalesces with these
outposts, just as the forest line on the mountains may reach, under
advantageous conditions, its farthest outlying tree. Such ethnic
peninsulas and islands we see in the early western frontiers of the
United States from 1790 to 1840, when that frontier was daily moving
westward.[336] [See map page 156.]
[Sidenote: Breadth of the boundary zone.]
The breadth of the frontier zone is indicative of the activity of growth
on the one side and the corresponding decline on the other, because
extensive encroachment in the same degree disintegrates the territory of
the neighbor at whose cost such encroachment is made. A straight, narrow
race boundary, especially if it is nearly coincident with a political
boundary, points to an equilibrium of forces which means, for the time
being at least, a cessation of growth. Such boundaries are found in old,
thickly populated countries, while the wide, ragged border zone belongs
to new, and especially to colonial peoples. In the oldest and most
densely populated seats of the Germans, where they are found in the
Rhine Valley, the boundaries of race and empire are straight and simple;
but the younger, eastern border, which for centuries has been steadily
advancing at the cost of the unequally matched Slavs, has the ragged
outline and sparse population of a true colonial frontier. Between two
peoples who have had a long period of growth behind them, the
oscillations of the boundary decrease in amplitude, as it were, and
finally approach a state of rest. Each people tends to fill out its area
evenly; every advance in civilization, every increase of population,
increases the stability of their tenure, and hence the equilibrium of
the pressure upon the boundary. Therefore, in such countries, racial,
linguistic and cultural boundaries tend to become simpler and
straighter.
[Sidenote: The broad frontier zone of active expansion.]
The growth is more apparent, or, in other words, the border zone is
widest and most irregular, where a superior people intrudes upon the
territory of an interior race. Such was the broad zone of thinly
scattered farms and villages amid a prevailing wilderness and hostile
Indian tribes which, in 1810 and 1820, surrounded our Trans-Allegheny
area of continuous settlement in a one to two hundred mile wide girdle.
Such has been the wide, mobile frontier of the Russian advance in
Siberia and until recently in Manchuria, which aimed to include within a
dotted line of widely separated railway-guard stations, Cossack
barracks, and penal colonies, the vast territory which later generations
were fully to occupy. Similar, too, is the frontier of the Dutch and
English settlements in South Africa, which has been pushed forward into
the Kaffir country--a broad belt of scattered cattle ranches and
isolated mining hives, dropped down amid Kaffir hunting and grazing
lands. Broader still was that shadowy belt of American occupation which
for four decades immediately succeeding the purchase of Louisiana
stretched in the form of isolated fur-stations, lonely trappers' camps,
and shifting traders' _rendezvous_ from the Mississippi to the western
slope of the Rockies and the northern watershed of the Missouri, where
it met the corresponding nebulous outskirts of the far-away Canadian
state on the St. Lawrence River.
The same process with the same geographical character has been going on
in the Sahara, as the French since 1890 have been expanding southward
from the foot of the Atlas Mountains in Algeria toward Timbuctoo at the
cost of the nomad Tuaregs. Territory is first subdued and administered
by the military till it is fully pacified. Then it is handed over to the
civil government. Hence the advancing frontier consists of a military
zone of administration, with a civil zone behind it, and a weaker
wavering zone of exploration and scout work before it.[337] Lord Curzon
in his Romanes lecture describes the northwest frontier of India as just
such a three-ply border.
[Sidenote: Economic factors in expanding frontiers.]
The untouched resources of such new countries tempt to the widespread
superficial exploitation, which finds its geographical expression in a
broad, dilating frontier. Here the man-dust which is to form the future
political planet is thinly disseminated, swept outward by a centrifugal
force. Furthermore, the absence of natural barriers which might block
this movement, the presence of open plains and river highways to
facilitate it, and the predominance of harsh conditions of climate or
soil rendering necessary a savage, extensive exploitation of the slender
resources, often combine still further to widen the frontier zone. This
was the case in French Canada and till recent decades in Siberia, where
intense cold and abundant river highways stimulated the fur trade to the
practical exclusion of all other activities, and substituted for the
closely grouped, sedentary farmers with their growing families the
wide-ranging trader with his Indian or Tunguse wife and his half-breed
offspring. Under harsh climatic conditions, the fur trade alone afforded
those large profits which every infant colony must command in order to
survive; and the fur trade meant a wide frontier zone of scattered posts
amid a prevailing wilderness. The French in particular, by the
possession of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers, the greatest
systems in America, were lured into the danger of excessive expansion,
attenuated their ethnic element, and failed to raise the economic status
of their wide border district, which could therefore offer only slight
resistance to the spread of solid English settlement.[338] Yet more
recently, the chief weakness of the Russians in Siberia and
Manchuria--apart from the corruption of the national government--was the
weakness of a too remote and too sparsely populated frontier, and of a
people whose inner development had not kept pace with their rate of
expansion.
[Sidenote: Value of barrier boundaries.]
Wasteful exploitation of a big territory is easier than the economical
development of a small district. This is one line of least resistance
which civilized man as well as savage instinctively follows, and which
explains the tendency toward excessive expansion characteristic of all
primitive and nascent peoples. For such peoples natural barriers which
set bounds to this expansion are of vastly greater importance than they
are for mature or fully developed peoples. The reason is this: the
boundary is only the expression of the outward movement or growth, which
is nourished from the same stock of race energy as is the inner
development. Either carried to an excess weakens or retards the other.
If population begins to press upon the limits of subsistence, the
acquisition of a new bit of territory obviates the necessity of applying
more work and more intelligence to the old area, to make it yield
subsistence for the growing number of mouths; the stimulus to adopt
better economic methods is lost. Therefore, natural boundaries drawn by
mountain, sea and desert, serving as barriers to the easy appropriation
of new territory, have for such peoples a far deeper significance than
the mere determination of their political frontiers by physical
features, or the benefit of protection.
The land with the most effective geographical boundaries is a naturally
defined region like Korea, Japan, China, Egypt, Italy, Spain, France or
Great Britain--a land characterized not only by exclusion from without
through its encircling barriers, but also by the inclusion within itself
of a certain compact group of geographic conditions, to whose combined
influences the inhabitants are subjected and from which they cannot
readily escape. This aspect is far more important than the mere
protection which such boundaries afford. They are not absolutely
necessary for the development of a people, but they give it an early
start, accelerate the process, and bring the people to an early
maturity; they stimulate the exploitation of all the local geographic
advantages and resources, the formation of a vivid tribal or national
consciousness and purpose, and concentrate the national energies when
the people is ready to overleap the old barriers. The early development
of island and peninsula peoples and their attainment of a finished
ethnic and political character are commonplaces of history. The stories
of Egypt, Crete and Greece, of Great Britain and Japan, illustrate the
stimulus to maturity which emanates from such confining boundaries. The
wall of the Appalachians narrowed the westward horizon of the early
English colonies in America, guarded them against the excessive
expansion which was undermining the French dominion in the interior of
the continent, set a most wholesome limit to their aims, and thereby
intensified their utilization of the narrow land between mountains and
sea. France, with its limits of growth indicated by the Mediterranean,
Pyrenees, Atlantic, Channel, Vosges, Jura and Western Alps, found its
period of adolescence shortened and, like Great Britain, early reached
its maturity. Nature itself set the goal of its territorial expansion,
and by crystallizing the political ideal of the people, made that goal
easier to reach, just as the dream of "United Italy" realized in 1870
had been prefigured in contours drawn by Alpine range and Mediterranean
shore-line.
[Sidenote: The sea as the absolute boundary]
The area which a race or people occupies is the resultant of the
expansive force within and the obstacles without, either physical or
human. Insurmountable physical obstacles are met where all life
conditions disappear, as on the borders of the habitable world, where
man is barred from the unpeopled wastes of polar ice-fields and
unsustaining oceans. The frozen rim of arctic lands, the coastline of
the continents, the outermost arable strip on the confines of the
desert, the barren or ice-capped ridge of high mountain range, are all
such natural boundaries which set more or less effective limits to the
movement of peoples and the territorial growth of states. The sea is the
only absolute boundary, because it alone blocks the continuous, unbroken
expansion of a people. When the Saxons of the lower Elbe spread to the
island of Britain, a zone of unpeopled sea separated their new
settlements from their native villages on the mainland. Even the most
pronounced land barriers, like the Himalayas and Hindu Kush, have their
passways and favored spots for short summer habitation, where the people
from the opposite slopes meet and mingle for a season. Sandy wastes are
hospitable at times. When the spring rains on the mountains of Abyssinia
start a wave of moisture lapping over the edges of the Nubian desert,
it is immediately followed by a tide of Arabs with their camels and
herds, who make a wide zone of temporary occupation spread over the
newly created grassland, but who retire in a few weeks before the
desiccating heat of summer.[339]
[Sidenote: Natural boundaries as bases of ethnic and political
boundaries.]
Nevertheless, all natural features of the earth's surface which serve to
check, retard or weaken the expansion of peoples, and therefore hold
them apart, tend to become racial or political boundaries; and all
present a zone-like character. The wide ice-field of the Scandinavian
Alps was an unpeopled waste long before the political boundary was drawn
along it. "It has not in reality been a definite natural _line_ that has
divided Norway from her neighbour on the east; it has been a _band_ of
desert land, up to hundreds of miles in width. So utterly desolate and
apart from the area of continuous habitation has this been, that the
greater part of it, the district north of Trondhjem, was looked upon
even as recently as the last century as a common district. Only nomadic
Lapps wandered about in it, sometimes taxed by all three countries. A
parcelling out of this desert common district was not made toward Russia
until 1826. Toward Sweden it was made in 1751."[340] In former centuries
the Bourtanger Moor west of the River Ems used to be a natural desert
borderland separating East and West Friesland, despite the similarity of
race, speech and country on either side of it. It undoubtedly
contributed to the division of Germany and the Netherlands along the
present frontier line, which has been drawn the length of this moor for
a hundred kilometers.[341]
[Sidenote: Primitive waste boundaries.]
Any geographical feature which, like this, presents a practically
uninhabitable area, forms a scientific boundary, not only because it
holds apart the two neighboring peoples and thereby reduces the contact
and friction which might be provocative of hostilities, but also because
it lends protection against attack. This motive, as also the zone
character of all boundaries, comes out conspicuously in the artificial
border wastes surrounding primitive tribes and states in the lower
status of civilization. The early German tribes depopulated their
borders in a wide girdle, and in this wilderness permitted no neighbors
to reside. The width of this zone indicated the valor and glory of the
state, but was also valued as a means of protection against unexpected
attack.[342] Cæsar learned that between the Suevi and Cherusci tribes
dwelling near the Rhine "_silvam esse ibi, infinita magnitudine quae
appelletur Bacenis; hanc longe introrsus pertinere et pro nativo muro
objectam Cheruscos ab Suevis Suevosque ab Cheruscis injuriis
incursionibusque prohibere_."[343] The same device appears among the
Huns. When Attila was pressing upon the frontier of the Eastern Empire
in 448 A.D., his envoys sent to Constantinople demanded that the Romans
should not cultivate a belt of territory, a hundred miles wide and three
hundred miles long, south of the Danube, but maintain this as a
March.[344] When King Alfonso I. (751-764 A.D.) of mountain Asturias
began the reconquest of Spain from the Saracens, he adopted the same
method of holding the foe at arm's length. He seized Old Castile as far
as the River Duoro, but the rest of the province south of that stream he
converted into a waste boundary by transporting the Christians thence to
the north side, and driving the Mohammedans yet farther southward.[345]
Similarly Xenophon found that the Armenian side of the River Kentrites,
which formed the boundary between the Armenian plains and the highlands
of Karduchia, was unpeopled and destitute of villages for a breadth of
fifteen miles, from fear of the marauding Kurds.[346] In the eastern
Sudan, especially in that wide territory along the Nile-Congo watershed
occupied by the Zandeh, Junker found the frontier wilderness a regular
institution owing to the exposure of the border districts in the
perennial intertribal feuds.[347] The same testimony comes from
Barth,[348] Boyd Alexander,[349] Speke,[350] and other explorers in the
Sudan and the neighboring parts of equatorial Africa.
[Sidenote: Border wastes of Indian lands.]
The vast and fertile region defined by the Ohio and Tennessee rivers,
lay as a debatable border between the Algonquin Indians of the north
and the Appalachians of the south. Both claimed it, both used it for
hunting, but neither dared dwell therein.[351] Similarly the Cherokees
had no definite understanding with their savage neighbors as to the
limits of their respective territories The effectiveness of their claim
to any particular tract of country usually diminished with every
increase of its distance from their villages. The consequence was that a
considerable strip of territory between the settlements of two tribes,
Cherokees and Creeks for instance, though claimed by both, was
practically considered neutral ground and the common hunting ground of
both.[352] The Creeks, whose most western villages from 1771 to 1798 were
located along the Coosa and upper Alabama rivers,[353] were separated by
300 miles of wilderness from the Chickasaws to the northwest, and by a
150-mile zone from the Choctaws. The most northern Choctaw towns, in
turn, lay 160 miles to the south of the Chickasaw nation, whose compact
settlements were located on the watershed between the western sources of
the Tombigby and the head stream of the Yazoo.[354] The wide intervening
zone of forest and canebrake was hunted upon by both nations.[355]
Sometimes the border is preserved as a wilderness by formal agreement. A
classic example of this case is found in the belt of untenanted land,
fifty to ninety kilometers wide, which China and Korea once maintained
as their boundary. No settler from either side was allowed to enter, and
all travel across the border had to use a single passway, where three
times annually a market was held.[356] On the Russo-Mongolian border
south of Lake Baikal, the town of Kiakhta, which was established in 1688
as an entrepôt of trade between the two countries, is occupied in its
northern half by Russian factories and in its southern by the
Mongolian-Chinese quarters, while between the two is a neutral space
devoted to commerce.[357]
[Sidenote: Alien intrusions into border wastes.]
These border wastes do not always remain empty, however, even when their
integrity is respected by the two neighbors whom they serve to divide;
alien races often intrude into their unoccupied reaches. The boundary
wilderness between the Sudanese states of Wadai and Dar Fur harbors
several semi-independent states whose insignificance is a guarantee of
their safety from conquest.[358] Similarly in the wide border district
between the Creeks on the east and the Choctaws on the west were found
typical small, detached tribes--the Chatots and Thomez of forty huts
each on the Mobile River, the Tensas tribe with a hundred huts on the
Tensas River, and the Mobilians near the confluence of the Tombigby and
Alabama.[359] Along the desolate highland separating Norway and Sweden
the nomadic Lapps, with their reindeer herds, have penetrated southward
to 62° North Latitude, reinforcing the natural barrier by another
barrier of alien race. From this point southward, the coniferous forests
begin and continue the border waste in the form of a zone some sixty
miles wide; this was unoccupied till about 1600, when into it slowly
filtered an immigration of Finns, whose descendants to-day constitute an
important part of the still thin population along the frontier to the
heights back of Christiania. Only thirty miles from the coast does the
border zone between Norway and Sweden, peopled chiefly by intruding
foreign stocks, Lapps and Finns, contract and finally merge into the
denser Scandinavian settlements.[360]
Where the border waste offers favorable conditions of life and the
intruding race has reached a higher status of civilization, it
multiplies in this unpeopled tract and soon spreads at the cost of its
less advanced neighbors. The old No Man's Land between the Ohio and
Tennessee was a line of least resistance for the expanding Colonies, who
here poured in a tide of settlement between the northern and southern
Indians, just as later other pioneers filtered into the vague border
territory of weak tenure between the Choctaws and Creeks, and there on
the Tombigby, Mobile and Tensas rivers, formed the nucleus of the State
of Alabama.[361]
[Sidenote: Politico-economic significance of the waste boundary.]
This untenanted hem of territory surrounding so many savage and
barbarous peoples reflects their superficial and unsystematic
utilization of their soil, by reason of which the importance of the land
itself and the proportion of population to area are greatly reduced. It
is a part of that uneconomic and extravagant use of the land, that
appropriation of wide territories by small tribal groups, which
characterizes the lower stages of civilization, as opposed to the
exploitation of every square foot for the support of a teeming humanity,
which marks the most advanced states. Each stage puts its own valuation
upon the land according to the return from it which each expects to
get. The low valuation is expressed in the border wilderness, by which a
third or even a half of the whole area is wasted; and also in the
readiness with which savages often sell their best territory for a song.
For the same reason they leave their boundaries undefined; a mile nearer
or farther, what does it matter? Moreover, their fitful or nomadic
occupation of the land leads to oscillations of the frontiers with every
attack from without and every variation of the tribal strength within.
Their unstable states rarely last long enough in a given form or size to
develop fixed boundaries; hence, the vagueness as to the extent of
tribal domains among all savage peoples, and the conflicting land claims
which are the abiding source of war. Owing to these overlapping
boundaries--border districts claimed but not occupied--the American
colonists met with difficulties in their purchase of land from the
Indians, often paying twice for the same strip.
[Sidenote: Common boundary districts.]
Even civilized peoples may adopt a waste boundary where the motive for
protection is peculiarly strong, as in the half-mile neutral zone of
lowland which ties the rock of Gibraltar to Spain. On a sparsely
populated frontier, where the abundance of land reduces its value, they
may throw the boundary into the form of a common district, as in the
vast, disputed Oregon country, accepted provisionally as a district of
joint occupancy between the United States and Canada from 1818 to 1846,
or that wide highland border which Norway so long shared with Russia and
Sweden. In South America, where land is abundant and population sparse,
this common boundary belt is not rare. It suggests a device giving that
leeway for expansion desired by all growing states. By the treaty of
1866, the frontier between Chile and Bolivia crossed the Atacama desert
at 24° South Latitude; but the zone between 23° and 25° was left under
the common jurisdiction of the two states, for exploitation of the guano
deposits and mineral wealth.[362] A common border district on a much
larger scale is found between Brazil and the eastern frontier of French
Guiana. It includes a belt 185 miles (300 kilometers) wide between the
Oyapok and Arawary rivers, and is left as a neutral district till its
fate is decided by arbitration.[363] All these instances are only
temporary phases in the evolution of a political frontier from wide,
neutral border to the mathematically determined boundary line required
by modern civilized states.
[Sidenote: Tariff free zones.]
Even when the boundary line has been surveyed and the boundary pillars
set up, the frontier is prone to assert its old zonal nature, simply
because it marks the limits of human movements. Rarely, for instance,
does a customs boundary coincide with a political frontier, even in the
most advanced states of Europe, except on the coasts. The student of
Baedecker finds a gap of several miles on the same railroad between the
customs frontier of Germany and France, or France and Italy. Where the
border district is formed by a high and rugged mountain range, the
custom houses recede farther and farther from the common political line
upon the ridge, and drop down the slope to convenient points, leaving
between them a wide neutral tariff zone, like that in Haute Savoie along
the massive Mont Blanc Range between France and Italy.
Allied to this phase, yet differing from it, is the "Zona Libre" or Free
Zone, 12 miles broad and 1,833 miles long, which forms the northern hem
of Mexico from the Gulf to the Pacific. Here foreign goods pay only
18-1/2 per cent., formerly only 2-1/2 per cent., of the usual federal
duties. Goods going on into the interior pay the rest of the tariff at
the inner margin of the Zone. This arrangement was adopted in 1858 to
establish some sort of commercial equilibrium between the Mexican towns
of the Rio Grande Valley, which were burdened by excessive taxation on
internal trade, and the Texas towns across the river, which at this time
enjoyed a specially low tariff. Consequently prices of food and
manufactured goods were twice or four times as high on the Mexican as on
the American side. The result was persistent smuggling, extensive
emigration from the southern to the northern bank, and the commercial
decline of the frontier states of Mexico, till the Zona Libre adjusted
the commercial discrepancy.[364] Since 1816 a tariff free zone a league
wide has formed the border of French Savoy along the Canton and Lake of
Geneva, thus uniting this canton by a free passway with the Swiss
territory at the upper end of the lake.[365]
[Sidenote: Boundary zones of mingled race elements.]
When the political boundary has evolved by a system of contraction out
of the wide waste zone to the nicely determined line, that line,
nevertheless, is always encased, as it were, in a zone of contact
wherein are mingled the elements of either side. The zone includes the
peripheries of the two contiguous racial or national bodies, and in it
each is modified and assimilated to the other. On its edges it is
strongly marked by the characteristics of the adjacent sides, but its
medial band shows a mingling of the two in ever-varying proportions; it
changes from day to day and shifts backward and forward, according as
one side or the other exercises in it more potent economic, religious,
racial, or political influences.
Its peripheral character comes out strongly in the mingling of
contiguous ethnic elements found in every frontier district. Here is
that zone of transitional form which we have seen prevails so widely in
nature. The northern borderland of the United States is in no small
degree Canadian, and the southern is strongly Mexican. In the Rio Grande
counties of Texas, Mexicans constituted in 1890 from 27 to 55 per cent.
of the total population, and they were distributed in considerable
numbers also in the second tier of counties. A broad band of French and
English Canadians overlaps the northern hem of United States territory
from Maine to North Dakota.[366] In the New York and New England counties
bordering on the old French province of Quebec, they constitute from 11
to 22 per cent. of the total population, except in two or three western
counties of Maine which have evidently been mere passways for a tide of
_habitants_ moving on to more attractive conditions of life in the
counties just to the south.[367] But even these large figures do not
adequately represent the British-American element within our boundaries,
because they leave out of account the native-born of Canadian parents
who have been crossing our borders for over a generation.
[Sidenote: Ethnic border zones in the Alps.]
If we turn to northern Italy, where a mountain barrier might have been
expected to segregate the long-headed Mediterranean stock from the
broad-headed Alpine stock, we find as a matter of fact that the ethnic
type throughout the Po basin is markedly brachycephalic and becomes more
pronounced along the northern boundary in the Alps, till it culminates
in Piedmont along the frontier of France, where it becomes identical
with the broad-headed Savoyards.[368] More than this, Provençal French is
spoken in the Dora Baltea Valley of Piedmont; and along the upper Dora
Riparia and in the neighboring valleys of the Chisone and Pellice are
the villages of the refugee Waldenses, who speak an idiom allied to the
Provençal. More than this, the whole Piedmontese Italian is
characterized by its approach to the French, and the idiom of Turin
sounds very much like Provençal.[369] To the north there is a similar
exchange between Italy and Switzerland with the adjacent Austrian
province of the Tyrol. In the rugged highlands of the Swiss Grisons
bordering upon Italy, we find a pure Alpine stock, known to the ancients
as the Rhaetians, speaking a degenerate Latin tongue called Romansch,
which still persists also under the names of Ladino and Frioulian in the
Alpine regions of the Tyrol and Italy. In fact, the map of linguistic
boundaries in the Grisons shows the dovetailing of German, Italian, and
Romansch in a broad zone.[370] The traveller in the southern Tyrol
becomes accustomed in the natives to the combination of Italian
coloring, German speech, and Alpine head form; whereas, if on reaching
Italy he visits the hills back of Vicenza, he finds the German
settlements of Tredici and Sette Communi, where German customs,
folklore, language, and German types of faces still persist, survivals
from the days of German infiltration across the Brenner Pass.[371]
[Illustration: SLAV-GERMAN BOUNDARY IN EUROPE.]
[Sidenote: The Slav-German boundary.]
Where Slavs and Teutons come together in Central Europe, their race
border is a zone lying approximately between 14 and 24 degrees East
Longitude; it is crossed by alternate peninsulas of predominant Germans
and Austrians from the one side, Czechs and Poles from the other, the
whole spattered over by a sprinkling of the two elements. Rarely, and
then only for short stretches, do political and ethnic boundaries
coincide. The northern frontier hem of East Prussia lying between the
River Niemen and the political line of demarcation is quite as much
Lithuanian as German, while German stock dots the whole surface of the
Baltic provinces of Russia as far as St. Petersburg, The eastern rim of
the Kaiser's empire as far south as the Carpathians presents a broad
band of the Polish race, averaging about fifty kilometers (30 miles) in
width, sparsely sprinkled with German settlements; these are found
farther east also as an ethnic archipelago dotting the wide Slav area of
Poland. The enclosed basin of Bohemia, protected on three sides by
mountain walls and readily accessible to the Slav stock at the sources
of the Vistula, enabled the Czechs to penetrate far westward and there
maintain themselves; but in spite of encompassing mountains, the inner
or Bohemian slopes of the Boehmer Wald, Erz, and Sudetes ranges
constitute a broad girdle of almost solid German population.[372] In the
Austrian provinces of Moravia and Silesia, which form the southeastward
continuation of this Slav-German boundary zone, 60 per cent. of the
population are Czechs, 33 per cent. are German, and 7 per cent., found
in the eastern part of Silesia, are Poles.[373]
An ethnic map of the western Muscovite Empire in Europe shows a marked
infiltration into White and Little Russia of West Slavs from Poland,
and in the province of Bessarabia alternate areas of Russians and
Roumanians. The latter in places form an unbroken ethnic expansion
from the home kingdom west of the Pruth, extending in solid bands as
far as the Dniester, and throwing out ethnic islands between this
stream and the Bug.
[Illustration: ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF RUSSIA.
MONGOLOID: Kalmucks, Kirghis, Nogai, Tartars, Bashkirs, Voguls,
Ostiaks, Samoyedes.
ZIRIAN: Mingled Mongoloid and Finnish.]
[Sidenote: Assimilation of culture in boundary zones.]
In the northern provinces of Russia, in the broad zone shared by the
aboriginal Finns and the later-coming Slavs, Wallace found villages in
every stage of Russification. "In one everything seemed thoroughly
Finnish; the inhabitants had a reddish-olive skin, very high cheek
bones, obliquely set eyes, and a peculiar costume; none of the women and
very few of the men could understand Russian and any Russian who visited
the place was regarded as a foreigner. In the second, there were already
some Russian inhabitants; the others had lost something of their purely
Finnish type, many of the men had discarded the old costume and spoke
Russian fluently, and a Russian visitor was no longer shunned. In a
third, the Finnish type was still further weakened; all the men spoke
Russian, and nearly all the women understood it; the old male costume
had entirely disappeared and the old female was rapidly following it;
and intermarriage with the Russian population was no longer rare. In a
fourth, intermarriage had almost completely done its work, and the old
Finnish element could be detected merely in certain peculiarities of
physiognomy and accent." This amalgamation extends to their
religions--prayers wholly pagan devoutly uttered under the shadow of a
strange cross, next the Finnish god Yumak sharing honors equally with
the Virgin, finally a Christianity pure in doctrine and outward forms
except for the survival of old pagan ceremonies in connection with the
dead.[374]
At the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, this boundary zone of
Russians and Finns meets the borderland of the Asiatic Mongols; and here
is found an intermingling of races, languages, religions, and customs
scarcely to be equalled elsewhere. Finns are infused with Tartar as well
as Russian blood, and Russians show Tartar as well as Finnish traits.
The Bashkirs, who constitute an ethnic peninsula running from the solid
Mongolian mass of Asia, show every type of the mongrel.[375] [See map
page 225.]
[Sidenote: Boundary zones of assimilation in Asia.]
If we turn to Asia and examine the western race boundary of the
expanding Chinese, we find that a wide belt of mingled ethnic elements,
hybrid languages, and antagonistic civilizations marks the transition
from Chinese to Mongolian and Tibetan areas. The eastern and southern
frontiers of Mongolia, formerly marked by the Great Wall, are now
difficult to define, owing to the steady encroachment of the
agricultural Chinese on the fertile edges of the plateau, where they
have converted the best-watered pastures of the Mongols into millet
fields and vegetable gardens, leaving for the nomad's herds the more
sterile patches between.[376] Every line of least resistance--climatic,
industrial, commercial--sees the Chinese widening this transitional
zone. He sprinkles his crops over the "Land of Grass," invades the trade
of the caravan towns, sets up his fishing station on the great northern
bend of the Hoangho in the Ordos country, three hundred miles beyond the
Wall, to exploit the fishing neglected by the Mongols.[377] The
well-watered regions of the Nan-Shan ranges has enabled him to drive a
long, narrow ethnic wedge, represented by the westward projection of
Kansu Province between Mongolia and Tibet, into the heart of the Central
Plateau. [See map page 103.] Here the nomad Si Fan tribes dwell side by
side with Chinese farmers,[378] who themselves show a strong infusion of
the Mongolian and Tibetan blood to the north and south, and whose
language is a medley of all three tongues.[379]
[Sidenote: Boundary zones of mountain Tibet.]
In easternmost Tibet, in the elevated province of Minjak (2,600 meters
or 8,500 feet), M. Hue found in 1846 a great number of Chinese from the
neighboring Sze-Chuan and Yun-nan districts keeping shops and following
the primary trades and agriculture. The language of the Tibetan natives
showed the effect of foreign intercourse; it was not the pure speech of
Lhassa, but was closely assimilated to the idiom of the neighboring Si
Fan speech of Sze-Chuan and contained many Chinese expressions. He found
also a modification of manners, customs, and costumes in this peripheral
Tibet; the natives showed more of the polish, cunning, and covetousness
of the Chinese, less of the rudeness, frankness, and strong religious
feeling characteristic of the western plateau man.[380] Just across the
political boundary in Chinese territory, the border zone of assimilation
shows predominance of the Chinese element with a strong Tibetan
admixture both in race and civilization.[381] Here Tibetan traders with
their yak caravans are met on the roads or encamped in their tents by
the hundred about the frontier towns, whither they have brought the
wool, sheep, horses, hides and medicinal roots of the rough highland
across that "wild borderland which is neither Chinese nor Tibetan." The
Chinese population consists of hardy mountaineers, who eat millet and
maize instead of rice. The prevailing architecture is Tibetan and the
priests on the highways are the red and yellow lamas from the Buddhist
monasteries of the plateau. "The Country is a cross between China and
Tibet."[382]
Even the high wall of the Himalayas does not suffice to prevent similar
exchanges of ethnic elements and culture between southern Tibet and
northern India. Lhassa and Giamda harbor many emigrants from the
neighboring Himalayan state of Bhutan, allow them to monopolize the
metal industry, in which they excel, and to practise undisturbed their
Indian form of Buddhism.[383] The southern side of this zone of
transition is occupied by a Tibetan stock of people inhabiting the
Himalayan frontiers of India and practising the Hindu religion.[384] In
the hill country of northern Bengal natives are to be seen with the
Chinese queue hanging below a Hindu turban, or wearing the Hindu caste
mark on their broad Mongolian faces. With these are mingled genuine
Tibetans who have come across the border to work in the tea plantations
of this region.[385] [See map page 102.]
[Sidenote: Relation of ethnic and cultural assimilation.]
The assimilation of culture within a boundary zone is in some respects
the result of race amalgamation, as, for instance, in costume, religion,
manners and language; but in economic points it is often the result of
identical geographic influences to which both races are alike subjected.
For example, scarcity of food on the arid plateau of Central Asia makes
the Chinese of western Kansu eat butter and curds as freely as do the
pastoral Mongols, though such a diet is obnoxious to the purely
agricultural Chinese of the lowlands.[386] The English pioneer in the
Trans-Allegheny wilderness shared with the Indians an environment of
trackless forests and savage neighbors; he was forced to discard for a
time many essentials of civilization, both material and moral. Despite a
minimum of race intermixture, the men of the Cumberland and Kentucky
settlements became assimilated to the life of the red man; they borrowed
his scalping knife and tomahawk, adopted his method of ambush and
extermination in war; like him they lived in great part by the chase,
dressed in furs and buckskin, and wore the noiseless moccasin. Here the
mere fact of geographical location on a remote frontier, and of almost
complete isolation from the centers of English life on the Atlantic
slope, and the further fact of persistent contact with a lower status of
civilization, resulted in a temporary return to primitive methods of
existence, till the settlements secured an increase of population
adequate for higher industrial development and for defence.
A race boundary involves almost inevitably a cultural boundary, often,
too, a linguistic and religionary, occasionally a political boundary.
The last three are subject to wide fluctuation, frequently overstepping
all barriers of race and contrasted civilizations. Though one often
accompanies another, it is necessary to distinguish the different kinds
of boundaries and to estimate their relative importance in the history
of a people or state. We may lay down the rule that the greater, more
permanent, and deep-seated the contrasts on the two sides of a border,
the greater is its significance; and that, on this basis, boundaries
rank in importance, with few exceptions, in the following order: racial,
cultural, linguistic, and political. The less marked the contrasts, in
general, the more rapid and complete the process of assimilation in the
belt of borderland.
[Sidenote: The boundary zone in political expansion.]
The significance of the border zone of assimilation for political
expansion lies in the fact that it prepares the way for the advance of
the state boundary from either side; in it the sharp edge of racial and
cultural antagonism is removed, or for this antagonism a new affinity
may be substituted. The zone of American settlement, industry, and
commerce which in 1836 projected beyond the political boundary of the
Sabine River over the eastern part of Mexican Texas facilitated the
later incorporation of the State into the Union, just as a few years
earlier the Baton Rouge District of Spanish West Florida had gravitated
to the United States by reason of the predominant American element
there, and thus extended the boundary of Louisiana to the Pearl River.
When the political boundary of Siberia was fixed at the Amur River, the
Muscovite government began extending the border zone of assimilation far
to the south of that stream by the systematic Russification of
Manchuria, with a view to its ultimate annexation. Schleswig-Holstein
and Alsace-Lorraine, by reason of their large German population, have
been readily incorporated into the German Empire. Only in Lorraine has a
considerable French element retarded the process. The considerable
sprinkling of Germans over the Baltic provinces of Russia and Poland
west of the Vistula, and a certain Teutonic stamp of civilization which
these districts have received, would greatly facilitate the eastward
extension of the German Empire; while their common religions, both
Protestant and Roman Catholic, would help obliterate the old political
fissure. Thus the borderland of a country, so markedly differentiated
from its interior, performs a certain historical function, and becomes,
as it were, an organ of the living, growing race or state.
[Sidenote: Tendency toward defection along political frontiers.]
Location on a frontier involves remoteness from the center of national,
cultural, and political activities; these reach their greatest intensity
in the core of the nation and exercise only an attenuated influence on
the far-away borders, unless excellent means of communication keep up a
circulation of men, commodities, and ideas between center and periphery.
For the frontier, therefore, the centripetal force is weakened; the
centrifugal is strengthened often by the attraction of some neighboring
state or tribe, which has established bonds of marriage, trade, and
friendly intercourse with the outlying community. Moreover, the mere
infusion of foreign blood, customs, and ideas, especially a foreign
religion, which is characteristic of a border zone, invades the national
solidarity. Hence we find that a tendency to political defection
constantly manifests itself along the periphery. A long reach weakens
the arm of authority, especially where serious geographical barriers
intervene; hence border uprisings are usually successful, at least for a
time. When accomplished, they involve that shrinkage of the frontiers
which we have found to be the unmistakable symptom of national decline.
This defection shows itself most promptly in conquered border tribes of
different blood, who lack the bond of ethnic affinity, and whose
remoteness emboldens them to throw off the political yoke. The decay of
the Roman Empire, after its last display of energy under Trajan, was
registered in the revolt of its peripheral districts beyond the
Euphrates, Danube, and Rhine, as also in the rapid Teutonization of
eastern Gaul, which here prepared the way for the assertion of
independence. The border satraps of the ancient Persian Empire were
constantly revolting, as the history of Asia Minor shows. Aragon, Old
Castile, and Portugal were the first kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula
to throw off Saracen dominion. Mountain ranges and weary stretches of
desert roads enabled the rebellions in Chinese Turkestan and the border
districts of Sungaria in 1863 to be maintained for several years.[387]
[Sidenote: Centrifugal forces on the frontier.]
A feeble grasp upon remote peripheral possessions is often further
weakened by the resistance of an immigrant population from beyond the
boundary, which brings with it new ideas of government. This was the
geographical history of the Texan revolt. A location on the far northern
outskirts of Mexican territory, some twelve hundred miles from the
capital, rendered impossible intelligent government control, the
enforcement of the laws, and prompt defence against the Indians.
Remoteness weakened the political cohesion. More than this, the American
ethnic boundary lapped far over eastern Texas, forming that border zone
of two-fold race which we have come to know. This alien stock,
antagonistic to the national ideals emanating from the City of Mexico,
dominant over the native population by reason of its intelligence,
energy, and wealth, ruptured the feeble political bond and asserted the
independence of Texas. Quite similar was the history of the "Independent
State of Acre," which in 1899 grew up just within the Bolivian frontier
under the leadership of Brazilian caoutchouc gatherers, resisted the
collection of taxes by the Bolivian government, and four years later
secured annexation to Brazil.[388]
Even when no alien elements are present to weaken the race bond, if
natural barriers intervene to obstruct and retard communications between
center and periphery, the frontier community is likely to develop the
spirit of defection, especially if its local geographic, and hence
social, conditions are markedly different from those of the governing
center. This is the explanation of that demand for independent statehood
which was rife in our Trans-Allegheny settlements from 1785 to 1795, and
of that separatist movement which advocated political alliance with
either the British colonies to the north or the Spanish to the west,
because these were nearer and offered easier access to the sea. A
frontier location and an intervening mountain barrier were important
factors in the Whisky Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, just as similar
conditions later suggested the secession of the Pacific States from the
Union. Disaffection from the government was manifested by the Trek Boers
of early South Africa, "especially by those who dwelt in the outlying
districts where the Government had exerted and could exert little
control." In 1795 the people of Graaf-Reinet, a frontier settlement of
that time, revolted against the Dutch South African Company and set up a
miniature republic.[389]
[Sidenote: The spirit of colonial frontiers.]
The spirit of the colonial frontier is the spirit of freedom, the spirit
of men who have traveled far, who are surcharged with energy, enterprise
and self-reliance, often with impatience of restraint. A severe process
of elimination culls out for the frontier a population strikingly
differentiated from the citizens of the old inhabited centers. Then
remoteness of location and abundance of opportunity proceed to emphasize
the qualities which have squeezed through the sieve of natural and
social selection. This is the type bred upon our own frontier, which,
West beyond West, has crossed the continent from the backwoods of the
Allegheny Mountains to the Pacific. The Siberian frontier develops much
the same type on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire. Here army
officers find a compensation for their rough surrounding in the escape
from the excessive bureaucracy of the capitals. Here is to be noted the
independence, self-reliance and self-respect characteristic of other
colonial frontiers. The Russian of the Asiatic border is proud to call
himself a Siberian: he is already differentiated in his own
consciousness. The force of Moscow tradition and discipline is faint
when it reaches him, it has traveled so far. Even the elaborate
observances of the orthodox Greek Church tend to become simplified on
the frontier. The question naturally arises whether in the Russian
Empire, as in the United States, the political periphery will in time,
react upon the center, infuse it with the spirit of progress and
youth.[390]
[Sidenote: Free border states as political survivals.]
When to a border situation is added a geographic location affording
conditions of long-established isolation, this tendency to maintain
political autonomy becomes very pronounced. This is the explanation of
so many frontier mountain states that have retained complete or partial
independence, such as Nepal, Bhutan, the Asturias, which successfully
withstood Saracen attack, and Montenegro, which has repelled alike
Venetian, Servian, and Turkish dominion. Europe especially has numerous
examples of these unabsorbed border states, whose independence
represents the equilibrium of the conflicting political attractions
about them. But all these smallest fragments of political territory have
either some commercial or semi-political union with one or another of
their neighbors. The little independent principality of Liechtenstein,
wedged in between Switzerland and the Tyrol, is included in the customs
union of Austro-Hungary. The small, independent duchy of Luxemburg,
which has been attached in turn to all the great states which have grown
up along its borders, is included in the _Zollverein_ of Germany. The
republic of Andorra, far up in a lofty valley of the Pyrenees, which has
maintained its freedom for a thousand years, acknowledges certain rights
of suzerainty exercised by France and the Spanish bishopric of
Urgel.[391]
[Sidenote: Guardians of the marches.]
Oftentimes a state gains by recognizing this freedom-loving spirit of
the frontier, and by turning it to account for national defence along an
exposed boundary. In consequence of the long wars between Scotland and
England, to the Scotch barons having estates near the Border were given
the Wardenships of the Marches, offices of great power and dignity; and
their clans, accustomed only to the imperfect military organization
demanded by the irregular but persistent hostilities of the time and
place, developed a lawless spirit. Prohibited from agriculture by their
exposed location, they left their fields waste, and lived by pillage and
cattle-lifting from their English and even their Scotch neighbors. The
valor of these southern clans, these "reivers of the Border," was the
bulwark of Scotland against the English, but their mutinous spirit
resisted the authority of the king and led them often to erect
semi-independent principalities.[392]
[Sidenote: Border nomads as frontier police.]
China has fringed her western boundaries with quasi-independent tribes
whose autonomy is assured and whose love of freedom is a guarantee of
guerilla warfare against any invader from Central Asia. The Mantze
tribes in the mountain borders of Sze-Chuan province have their own
rulers and customs, and only pay tribute to China.[393] The highlands of
Kansu are sprinkled with such independent tribes. Sometimes a definite
bargain is entered into--a self-governing military organization and a
yearly sum of money in return for defence of the frontier. The Mongol
tribes of the Charkar country or "Borderland" just outside the Great
Wall northwest of Pekin constitute a paid army of the Emperor to guard
the frontier against the Khalkhas of northern Mongolia, the tribe of
Genghis Khan.[394] Similarly, semi-independent military communities for
centuries made a continuous line of barriers against the raids of the
steppe nomads along the southern and southeastern frontiers of Russia,
from the Dnieper to the Ural rivers. There were the "Free Cossacks,"
located on the debatable ground between the fortified frontier of the
agricultural steppe and marauding Crimean Tartars. Nominally subjects of
the Czar, they obeyed him when it suited them, and on provocation rose
in open revolt. The Cossacks of the Dnieper, who to the middle of the
seventeenth century formed Poland's border defence against Tartar
invasion, were jealous of any interference with their freedom. They lent
their services on occasions to the Sultan of Turkey, and even to the
Crimean Khan; and finally, in 1681, attached themselves and their
territory to Russia.[395] Here speaks that spirit of defection which is
the natural product of the remoteness and independence of frontier life.
The Russians also attached to themselves the Kalmucks located between
the lower Volga and Don, and used them as a frontier defence against
their Tartar and Kirghis neighbors.[396] In this case, as in that of the
Cossacks and the Charkars of eastern Mongolia, we have a large body of
men living in the same arid grassland, leading the same pastoral life,
and carrying on the same kind of warfare as the nomadic marauders whose
pillaging, cattle-lifting raids they aim to suppress. The imperial
orders to the Charkars limit them strictly to the life of herdmen, with
the purpose of maintaining their mobility and military efficiency. So in
olden times, for the Don Cossacks agriculture was prohibited on pain of
death, lest they should lose their taste for the live-stock booty of a
punitive raid. A still earlier instance of this utilization of border
nomads is found in the first century after Christ, when the Romans made
the Arabian tribe of Beni Jafre, dwelling on the frontier of Syria, the
warders of the eastern marches of the Empire.[397]
[Sidenote: Lawless citizens deported to frontiers.]
The advancing frontier of an expanding people often carries them into a
sparsely settled country where the unruly members of society can with
advantage be utilized as colonists. After centralized and civilized
Russia began to encroach with the plow upon the pastures of the steppe
Cossacks, and finally suppressed these military republics, the more
turbulent and obstinate remnants of them she colonized along the Kuban
and Terek rivers, to serve as bulwarks against the incursions of the
Caucasus tribes and as the vanguard of the advance southward.[398]
This is one principle underlying the transportation of criminals to the
frontier. They serve to hold the new country. There these waste elements
of civilization are converted into a useful by-product. They may be only
political radicals or religious dissenters: if so, so much the better
colonial material. The Russian government formerly transported the
rebellious sect of the Molokans or Unitarians to the outskirts of the
Empire, where the danger of contagion was reduced. Hence they are to be
found to-day scattered in the Volga province of Samara, on the border of
the Kirghis steppe, in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Siberia, still
faithful and still persecuted.[399] Since 1709 the Russian advance into
Siberia has planted its milestones in settlements formed of prisoners of
war, political exiles, and worse offenders.[400] Penal colonists located
on the shores of Kamchatka helped build and man the crazy boats which
set out for Alaska at the end of the eighteenth century. China settles
its thieves and cheats among the villages of its own border provinces of
Shensi[401] and Kansu; but its worst criminals it transports far away to
the Hi country on the western frontier of the Empire, where they have
doubtless contributed to the spirit of revolt that has there manifested
itself.[402]
[Sidenote: Drift of lawless elements to the frontiers.]
The abundance of opportunity and lack of competition in a new frontier
community, its remoteness from the center of authority, and its
imperfect civil government serve to attract thither the vicious, as well
as the sturdy and enterprising. The society of the early Trans-Allegheny
frontier included both elements. The lawless who drifted to the border
formed gangs of horse thieves, highwaymen, and murderers, who called
forth from the others the summary methods of lynch law.[403] North
Carolina, which in its early history formed the southern frontier of
Virginia, swarmed with ruffians who had fled thither to escape
imprisonment or hanging, and whose general attitude was to resist all
regular authority and especially to pay no taxes.[404] Similarly, that
wide belt of mountain forest which forms the waste boundary between
Korea and Manchuria is the resort of bandits, who have harried both
sides of the border ever since this neutral district was established in
the thirteenth century.[405] The frontier communities of the Russian
Cossacks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were regular
asylums for runaway serfs and peasants who were fleeing from taxation;
their hetmans were repeatedly fugitive criminals. The eastern border of
Russia formed by the Volga basin in 1775 was described as "an asylum for
malcontents and vagabonds of all kinds, ruined nobles, disfrocked monks,
military deserters, fugitive serfs, highwaymen, and Volga
pirates"--disorderly elements which contributed greatly to the
insurrection led by the Ural Cossacks in that year.[406] "The Debatable
Land," a tract between the Esk and Sark rivers, formerly claimed by both
England and Scotland, was long the haunt of thieves, outlaws and
vagabonds, as indeed was the whole Border, subject as it was to the
regular jurisdiction of neither side.[407]
[Sidenote: Asylums beyond the border.]
Just beyond the political boundary, where police authority comes to an
end and where pursuit is cut short or retarded, the fleeing criminal
finds his natural asylum. Hence all border districts tend to harbor
undesirable refugees from the other side. Deserters and outlaws from
China proper sprinkle the eastern districts of Mongolia.[408] Marauding
bands of Apaches and Sioux, after successful depredations on American
ranches, for years fled across the line into Mexico and Canada before
the hammering hoof-beats of Texas Ranger and United States cavalry,
until a treaty with Mexico in 1882, authorizing such armed pursuit to
cross the boundary, cut off at least one asylum.[409] Our country
exchanges other undesirable citizens with its northern and southern
neighbors in cases where no extradition treaty provides for their
return; and the borders of the individual states are crossed and
recrossed by shifty gentlemen seeking to dodge the arm of the law. The
fact that so many State boundaries fall in the Southern Appalachians,
where illicit distilling and feud murders provide most of the cases on
the docket, has materially retarded the suppression of these crimes by
increasing the difficulty both of apprehending the offender and of
subpoenaing the reluctant witness.
[Sidenote: Border refugees and ethnic mingling.]
Dissatisfied, oppressed, or persecuted members of a political community
are prone to seek an asylum across the nearest border, where happier or
freer conditions of life are promised. There they contribute to that
mixture of race which characterizes every boundary zone, though as an
embittered people they may also help to emphasize any existing political
or religious antagonism. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685
was followed by an exodus of Huguenots from France to the Protestant
states of Switzerland, the Palatinate of the Rhine, and Holland, as also
across the Channel into southern England; just as in recent years the
Slav borderland of eastern Germany has received a large immigration of
Polish Jews from Russia. When the Polish king in 1571 executed the
leader of the Dnieper Cossacks, thousands of these bold borderers left
their country and joined the community of the Don; and in 1722 after the
Dnieper community had been crushed by Peter the Great, a similar exodus
took place across the southern boundary into the Crimea, whereby the
Tartar horde was strengthened, just as a few years before, during an
unsuccessful revolt of the Don Cossacks, some two thousand of the
malcontents crossed the southern frontier to the Kuban River in
Circassia.[410] The establishment of American independence in 1783 saw an
exodus of loyalists from the United States into the contiguous districts
of Ontario, New Brunswick, and Spanish Florida, Five years later
discontent with the Federal Government for its dilatory opposition to
the occlusion of the Mississippi and the lure of commercial betterment
sent many citizens of the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths to the
Spanish side of the Mississippi,[411] while the Natchez District on the
east bank of the river contained a sprinkling of French who had become
dissatisfied with Spanish rule in Louisiana and changed their domicile.
These are some of the movements of individuals and groups which
contribute to the blending of races along every frontier, and make of
the boundary a variable zone, as opposed to the rigid artificial line in
terms of which we speak.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VII
[326] A.W. Greely, Report of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, Vol. I,
pp. 28-33, 236. Misc. Doc. No. 393. Washington, 1888.
[327] A.P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp. 123-130.
Translated from the Russian. London, 1899.
[328] Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, pp. 60-62. New York, 1882.
[329] _Ibid._, pp. 146, 161.
[330] Col. F.E. Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 194-199.
London, 1904.
[331] A.R. Wallace, Geographical Distribution of Animals, Vol. I, pp.
387-389, 426-431, 436-438. London, 1876.
[332] _Ibid._, 409, 424.
[333] A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, pp. 105-108.
London, 1894.
[334] A.R. Wallace, Geographical Distribution of Animals, Vol. I, pp.
313, 321-322. London, 1876.
[335] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I,
ethnographical map. New York, 1893.
[336] Eleventh Census of the United States, _Population_, Part I., maps
on pp. xviii-xxiii.
[337] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 64-68, 77. London, 1905.
[338] Fully treated in E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic
Conditions, pp. 22-31. Boston, 1903.
[339] Sir S.W. Baker, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, pp. 88,
128-129, 135. Hartford, 1868.
[340] Norway, Official Publication for the Paris Exhibition, pp. 3-4 and
map. Christiania, 1900.
[341] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 297. London, 1903.
[342] Cæsar, _Bello Gallico_, Book IV, chap. 3 and Book VI, chap. 23.
[343] _Ibid._, Book VI, chap. 10.
[344] T. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, p. 56, Note I.
Oxford, 1892.
[345] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. IV, p. 510. New York,
1902-1906.
[346] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. IX, chap. 70, pp. 99, 115. New
York, 1859.
[347] Dr. Wilhelm Junker, Travels in Africa, pp. 18, 45, 79, 87, 115,
117, 138, 191, 192, 200, 308, 312, 325, 332. Translated from the German.
London, 1892.
[348] H. Barth, Human Society in North Central Africa, _Journal Royal
Geographical Society_, Vol. XXX, pp. 123-124. London, 1860.
[349] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 163-164.
London, 1907.
[350] John H. Speke, Discovery of the Sources of the Nile, pp. 74, 89,
91, 94, 95, 173, 176-177, 197. New York, 1868.
[351] Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 50, 70,
135. New York, 1895.
[352] C. C. Royce, The Cherokee Nations of Indians, p. 140. _Fifth
Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_. Washington, 1884.
[353] Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 79-89, 113-115, 1851.
Reprint, Birmingham, 1900. James Adair, History of the American Indians,
p. 257. London, 1775.
[354] _Ibid._, pp. 252-3, 282.
[355] Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 133-135. 1851. Reprint,
Birmingham, 1900.
[356] Archibald Little, The Far East, p. 249. Oxford, 1905.
[357] M. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I,
p. 74. Translated from the French. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.
[358] Nachtigal, _Sahara und Sudan_, Vol. I, pp. 102, 448; Vol. III, pp.
203-205, 314. Leipzig, 1889. Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile,
Vol. II, p. 170. London, 1907.
[359] Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 118-119. 1851. Reprint,
Birmingham, 1900.
[360] Norway, Official Publication for the Paris Exhibition, pp. 5,
83-84. Christiania, 1900.
[361] Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 416, 417, 461, 467.
1857. Reprint, Birmingham, 1900.
[362] C.E. Akers, History of South America, 1854-1904, p. 435. New
York, 1904.
[363] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 883. New York, 1902.
[364] Matias Romero, Mexico and the United States, pp. 433-441. New
York, 1898.
[365] E. Hertslet, The Map of Europe by Treaty, 1814-1875, Vol. I, pp.
422, 425, 426; Vol. II, p. 1430.
[366] Eleventh Census of the United States, _Population_, Part I., map
No. 10 and p. cxliii.
[367] _Ibid._ Based on comparison of Tables 15 and 33 for the States
mentioned.
[368] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 250-253. New York, 1899.
[369] W. Deecke, Italy, pp. 325, 347, 349. Translated from the German.
London, 1904.
[370] Sydow-Wagner, _Methodischer Schul-Atlas, Völker und
Sprachenkarten_, No. 13. Gotha, 1905. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp.
282-284. New York, 1899.
[371] _Ibid._, pp. 255-257. W. Deecke, Italy, p. 357. London, 1904.
[372] Sydow-Wagner, _Methodischer Schul-Atlas, Völker und
Sprachenkarten_ No, 13. Gotha, 1905.
[373] Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, p. 309. New York, 1902.
[374] D.M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 151-155. New York, 1904.
[375] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 362. New York, 1899.
[376] Archibald Little, The Far East. Map p. 8 and pp. 171-172. Oxford,
1905. M. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846. Vol. I,
pp. 2-4, 21, 197-201, 284. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.
[377] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 166-170.
[378] _Ibid._, Vol II, p. 23.
[379] _Ibid._, Vol. I, 312-313.
[380] _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 319-322, 327.
[381] M. Huc, Journey through the Chinese Empire, Vol. I, p. 36. New
York, 1871.
[382] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp.
70-71, 88, 91, 92, 104-109, 113, 117, 133, 134, 155, 194, 195. London,
1900.
[383] M. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. II,
pp. 155-156, 264. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.
[384] C.A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, pp. 60,
65-73, 205, 347-358. London, 1906. Statistical Atlas of India, pp.
61-62, maps. Calcutta, 1895. _Imperial Gazetteer of India_, Vol. I, p.
295-296. Oxford, 1907.
[385] Eliza E. Scidmore, Winter India, pp. 106-108. New York, 1903.
[386] M. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I,
pp. 312-313. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.
[387] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 174-175. New York, 1899.
[388] Charles E. Akers, History of South America, 1854-1904, p. 562. New
York, 1904.
[389] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 108-109. New York,
1897.
[390] O.P. Crosby, Tibet and Turkestan, pp. 15-20.
[391] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 378. New York, 1902. H.
Spencer, A Visit to Andorra, _Fortnightly Review_, Vol. 67, pp. 44-60.
1897.
[392] Wm. Robertson, History of Scotland, pp. 19-20. New York, 1831. The
Scotch Borderers, _Littell's Living Age_, Vol 40, p. 180.
[393] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp.
209-210. London, 1900.
[394] M. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I,
pp. 41, 42, 97. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.
[395] D.M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 352-356. New York, 1904. Article on
Cossacks in Encyclopedia Britannica.
[396] Pallas, Travels in Southern Russia, Vol. I, pp. 126-129; 442; Vol.
II, pp. 330-331. London, 1812.
[397] G. Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, p. 9. New
York, 1897.
[398] D.M. Wallace, Russia, p. 358. New York, 1904. Walter K. Kelly,
History of Russia, Vol. II, pp. 394-395. London, 1881.
[399] D.M. Wallace, Russia, p. 298. New York, 1904.
[400] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 43, 53. New York, 1899.
[401] Francis H. Nichol, Through Hidden Shensi, pp. 139-140. New York,
1902.
[402] M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I,
p. 23. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.
[403] Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 130-132.
New York, 1895.
[404] John Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, Vol. II, pp. 311,
315-321. Boston, 1897.
[405] Archibald Little, The Far East, p. 249. Oxford, 1905.
[406] Alfred Rambaud, History of Russia, Vol. II, pp. 45, 199-200.
Boston, 1886.
[407] Malcolm Lang, History of Scotland, Vol. I, pp. 42-43. London,
1800. The Scotch Borderland, _Gentleman's Magazine_, Vol. CCLX, p. 191.
1886.
[408] Friedrich Ratel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 175, London,
1896.
[409] A.B. Hart, Foundations of American Foreign Policy, pp. 81-82. New
York, 1901.
[410] Alfred Rambaud, History of Russia, Vol. II, pp. 45, 50. Boston,
1886.
[411] Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 366. Boston, 1899.
CHAPTER VIII
COAST PEOPLES
[Sidenote: The coast a zone of transition.]
Of all geographical boundaries, the most important is that between land
and sea. The coast, in its physical nature, is a zone of transition
between these two dominant forms of the earth's surface; it bears the
mark of their contending forces, varying in its width with every
stronger onslaught of the unresting sea, and with every degree of
passive resistance made by granite or sandy shore. So too in an
anthropo-geographical sense, it is a zone of transition. Now the
life-supporting forces of the land are weak in it, and it becomes merely
the rim of the sea; for its inhabitants the sea means food, clothes,
shelter, fuel, commerce, highway, and opportunity. Now the coast is
dominated by the exuberant forces of a productive soil, so that the
ocean beyond is only a turbulent waste and a long-drawn barrier: the
coast is the hem of the land. Neither influence can wholly exclude the
other in this amphibian belt, for the coast remains the intermediary
between the habitable expanse of the land and the international highway
of the sea. The break of the waves and the dash of the spray draw the
line beyond which human dwellings cannot spread; for these the shore is
the outermost limit, as for ages also in the long infancy of the races,
before the invention of boat and sail, it drew the absolute boundary to
human expansion. In historical order, its first effect has been that of
a barrier, and for the majority of peoples this it has remained; but
with the development of navigation and the spread of human activities
from the land over sea to other countries, it became the gateway both of
land and sea--at once the outlet for exploration, colonization, and
trade, and the open door through which a continent or island receives
contributions of men or races or ideas from transoceanic shores. Barrier
and threshold: these are the _rôles_ which coasts have always played in
history. To-day we see them side by side. But in spite of the immense
proportions assumed by transmarine intercourse, the fact remains that
the greater part of the coasts of the earth are for their inhabitants
only a barrier and not an outlet, or at best only a base for timorous
ventures seaward that rarely lose sight of the shore.
[Illustration: GERMAN NORTH SEA COAST.]
[Sidenote: Width of coastal zones.]
As intermediary belt between land and sea, the coast becomes a peculiar
habitat which leaves its mark upon its people. We speak of coast strips,
coastal plains, "tidewater country," coast cities; of coast tribes,
coast peoples, maritime colonies; and each word brings up a picture of a
land or race or settlement permeated by the influences of the sea. The
old term of "coastline" has no application to such an intermediary belt,
for it is a zone of measurable width; and this width varies with the
relief of the land, the articulation of the coast according as it is
uniform or complex, with the successive stages of civilization and the
development of navigation among the people who inhabit it.
Along highly articulated coasts, showing the interpenetration of sea and
land in a broad band of capes and islands separated by tidal channels
and inlets, or on shores deeply incised by river estuaries, or on low
shelving beaches which screen brackish lagoons and salt marshes behind
sand reefs and dune ramparts, and which thus form an indeterminate
boundary of alternate land and water, the zone character of the coast in
a physical sense becomes conspicuous. In an anthropological sense the
zone character is clearly indicated by the different uses of its inner
and outer edge made by man in different localities and in different
periods of history.
[Sidenote: The inner edge.]
The old German maritime cities of the North Sea and the Baltic were
located on rivers from 6 to 60 miles from the open sea, always on the
inner edge of the coastal belt. Though primarily trading towns, linked
together once in the sovereign confederacy of the Hanseatic League, they
fixed their sites on the last spurs of firm ground running out into the
soft, yielding alluvium, which was constantly exposed to inundation.
Land high enough to be above the ever threatening flood of river and
storm-driven tide on this flat coast, and solid enough to be built upon,
could not be found immediately on the sea. The slight elevations of
sandy "geest" or detrital spurs were limited in area and in time
outgrown. Hence the older part of all these river towns, from Bremen to
Königsberg, rests upon hills, while in every case the newer and lower
part is built on piles or artificially raised ground on the alluvium.[412]
So Utrecht, the Ultrajectum of the Romans, selected for its site a long
raised spur running out from the solid ground of older and higher land
into the water-soaked alluvium of the Netherlands. It was the most
important town of all this region before the arts of civilization began
the conquest by dike and ditch of the amphibian coastal belt which now
comprises one-fourth of the area and holds one-half the population of
the Netherlands.[413] So ancient London marked the solid ground at the
inner edge of the tidal flats and desolate marshes which lined the
Thames estuary, as the Roman Camulodunum and its successor Colchester on
its steep rise or _dun_ overlooked the marshes of the Stour inlet.[414]
Farther north about the Wash, which in Roman days extended far inland
over an area of fens and tidal channels, Cambridge on the River Cam,
Huntingdon and Stamford on the Nen, and Lincoln on the Witham--all river
seaports--defined the firm inner edge of this wide low coast. In the
same way the landward rim of the tidal waters and salt marshes of the
Humber inlet was described by a semicircle of British and Roman
towns--Doncaster, Castleford, Todcaster, and York.[415] On the flat or
rolling West African coastland, which lines the long shores of the Gulf
of Guinea with a band 30 to 100 miles wide, the sandy, swampy tracts
immediately on the sea are often left uninhabited; native population is
distributed most frequently at the limit of deep water, and here at head
of ship-navigation the trading towns are found.[416]
[Sidenote: Inner edge as head of sea navigation.]
While, on low coasts at any rate, the inner edge tends to mark the limit
of settlement advancing from the interior, as the head of sea navigation
on river and inlet it has also been the goal of immigrant settlers from
oversea lands. The history of modern maritime colonization, especially
in America, shows that the aim of regular colonists, as opposed to mere
traders, has been to penetrate as far as possible into the land while
retaining communication with the sea, and thereby with the mother
country. The small boats in use till the introduction of steam
navigation fixed this line far inland and gave the coastal zone a
greater breadth than it has at present, and a more regular contour. In
colonial America this inner edge coincided with the "fall-line" of the
Atlantic rivers, which was indicated by a series of seaport towns; or
with the inland limit of the tides, which on the St. Lawrence fell above
Quebec, and on the Hudson just below Albany.
[Sidenote: Shifting of the inner edge.]
With the recent increase in the size of vessels, two contrary effects
are noticed. In the vast majority of cases, the inner edge, as marked by
ports, moves seaward into deeper water, and the zone narrows. The days
when almost every tobacco plantation in tidewater Virginia had its own
wharf are long since past, and the leaf is now exported by way of
Norfolk and Baltimore. Seville has lost practically all its sea trade to
Cadiz, Rouen to Havre, and Dordrecht to Rotterdam. In other cases the
zone preserves its original width by the creation of secondary ports on
or near the outer edge, reserved only for the largest vessels, while the
inner harbor, by dredging its channel, improves its communication with
the sea. Thus arises the phenomenon of twin ports like Bremen and
Bremerhaven, Dantzig and Neufahrwasser, Stettin and Swinemünde, Bordeaux
and Pauillac, London and Tilbury. Or the original harbor seeks to
preserve its advantage by canalizing the shallow approach by river,
lagoon, or bay, as St. Petersburg by the Pantiloff canal through the
shallow reaches of Kronstadt Bay; or Königsberg by its ship canal,
carried for 25 miles across the Frisches Haff to the Baltic;[417] or
Nantes by the Loire ship canal, which in 1892 was built to regain for
the old town the West Indian trade recently intercepted by the rising
outer port of St. Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire estuary.[418] In
northern latitudes, however, the outer ports on enclosed sea basins like
the Baltic become dominant in the winter, when the inner ports are
ice-bound. Otherwise the outer port sinks with every improvement in the
channel between the inner port and the sea. Hamburg has so constantly
deepened the Elbe passage that its outport of Cuxhaven has had little
chance to rise, and serves only as an emergency harbor; while on the
Weser, maritime leadership has oscillated between Bremen and
Bremerhaven.[419] So the whole German coast and the Russian Baltic have
seen a more or less irregular shifting backward and forward of maritime
importance between the inner and the outer edges.
[Sidenote: Artificial extension of inner edge.]
The width of the coast zone is not only prevented from contracting by
dredging and canaling, but it is even increased. By deepening the
channel, the chief port of the St. Lawrence River has been removed from
Quebec 180 miles upstream to Montreal, and that of the Clyde from Port
Glasgow 16 miles to Glasgow itself, so that now the largest ocean
steamers come to dock where fifty years ago children waded across the
stream at ebb tide. Such artificial modifications, however, are rare,
for they are made only where peculiarly rich resources or superior lines
of communication with the hinterland justify the expenditures; but they
find their logical conclusion in still farther extensions of sea
navigation into the interior by means of ship canals, where previously
no waterway existed. Instances are found in the Manchester ship canal
and the Welland, which, by means of the St. Lawrence and the Great
Lakes, makes Chicago accessible to ocean vessels. Though man
distinguishes between sea and inland navigation in his definitions, in
his practice he is bound by no formula and recognizes no fundamental
difference where rivers, lakes, and canals are deep enough to admit his
sea-going craft.
Such deep landward protrusions of the head of marine navigation at
certain favored points, as opposed to its recent coastward trend in most
inlets and rivers, increase the irregularity of the inner edge of the
coast zone by the marked discrepancy between its maximum and minimum
width. They are limited, however, to a few highly civilized countries,
and to a few points in those countries. But their presence testifies to
the fact that the evolution of the coast zone with the development of
civilization shows the persistent importance of this inner edge.
[Sidenote: Outer edge in original settlement.]
The outer edge finds its greatest significance, which is for the most
part ephemeral, in the earlier stages of navigation, maritime
colonization, and in some cases of original settlement. But this
importance persists only on steep coasts furnishing little or no level
ground for cultivation and barred from interior hunting or grazing land;
on many coral and volcanic islands of the Pacific Ocean whose outer rim
has the most fertile soil and furnishes the most abundant growth of coco
palms, and whose limited area only half suffices to support the
population; and in polar and sub-polar districts, where harsh climatic
conditions set a low limit to economic development. In all these regions
the sea must provide most of the food of the inhabitants, who can
therefore never lose contact with its waters. In mountainous Tierra del
Fuego, whose impenetrably forested slopes rise directly from the sea,
with only here and there a scanty stretch of stony beach, the natives of
the southern and western coasts keep close to the shore. The straits and
channels yield them all their food, and are the highways for all their
restless, hungry wanderings.[420] The steep slopes and dense forests
preclude travel by land, and force the wretched inhabitants to live as
much in their canoes as in their huts. The Tlingit and Haida Indians of
the mountainous coast of southern Alaska locate their villages on some
smooth sheltered beach, with their houses in a single row facing the
water, and the ever-ready canoe drawn up on shore in front. They select
their sites with a view to food supply, and to protection in case of
attack. On the treeless shores of Kadiak Island and of the long narrow
Alaska Peninsula near by, the Eskimo choose their village location for
an accumulation of driftwood, for proximity to their food supply, and a
landing-place for their kayaks and bidarkas. Hence they prefer a point
of land or gravel spit extending out into the sea, or a sand reef
separating a salt-water lagoon from the open sea. The Aleutian Islanders
regard only accessibility to the shell-fish on the beach and their
pelagic hunting and fishing; and this consideration has influenced the
Eskimo tribes of the wide Kuskokwin estuary to such an extent, that they
place their huts only a few feet above ordinary high tide, where they
are constantly exposed to overflow from the sea.[421] Only among the
great tidal channels of the Yukon delta are they distributed over the
whole wide coastal zone, even to its inner edge.
The coast Chukches of northeastern Siberia locate their tent villages on
the sand ramparts between the Arctic Ocean and the freshwater lagoons
which line this low tundra shore. Here they are conveniently situated
for fishing and hunting marine animals, while protected against the
summer inundations of the Arctic rivers.[422] The whole western side of
Greenland, from far northern Upernivik south to Cape Farewell, shows
both Eskimo and Danish settlements almost without exception on
projecting points of peninsulas or islands, where the stronger effect of
the warm ocean current, as well as proximity to the food supply, serve
to fix their habitations; although the remains of the old Norse
settlements in general are found in sheltered valleys with summer
vegetation, striking off from the fiords some 20 miles back from the
outer coast.[423] Cæsar found that the ancient Veneti, an immigrant
people of the southern coast of Brittany, built their towns on the
points of capes and promontories, sites which gave them ready contact
with the sea and protection against attack from the land side, because
every rise of the tide submerged the intervening lowlands.[424] Here a
sterile plateau hinterland drove them for part of their subsistence to
the water, and the continuous intertribal warfare of small primitive
states to the sea-girt asylums of the capes.
[Sidenote: Outer edge in early navigation.]
In the early history of navigation and exploration, striking features of
this outer coast edge, like headlands and capes, became important sea
marks. The promontory of Mount Athos, rising 6,400 feet above the sea
between the Hellespont and the Thessalian coast, and casting its shadow
as far as the market-place of Lemnos, was a guiding point for mariners
in the whole northern Aegean.[425] For the ancient Greeks Cape Malia was
long the boundary stone to the unknown wastes of the western
Mediterranean, just as later the Pillars of Hercules marked the portals
to the _mare tenebrosum_ of the stormy Atlantic. So the Sacred
Promontory (Cape St. Vincent) of the Iberian Peninsula defined for
Greeks and Romans the southwestern limit of the habitable world.[426]
Centuries later the Portuguese marked their advance down the west coast
of Africa, first by Cape Non, which so long said "No!" to the struggling
mariner, then by Cape Bojador, and finally by Cape Verde.
In coastwise navigation, minor headlands and inshore islands were points
to steer by; and in that early maritime colonization, which had chiefly
a commercial aim, they formed the favorite spots for trading stations.
The Phoenicians in their home country fixed their settlements by
preference on small capes, like Sidon and Berytus, or on inshore
islets, like Tyre and Aradus,[427] and for their colonies and trading
stations they chose similar sites, whether on the coast of Sicily,[428]
Spain, or Morocco.[429] Carthage was located on a small hill-crowned cape
projecting out into the Bay of Carthage. The two promontories embracing
this inlet were edged with settlements, especially the northern arm,
which held Utica and Hippo,[430] the latter on the site of the modern
French naval station of Bizerta.
[Illustration: MAP OF ANCIENT PHOENICIAN AND GREEK COLONIES.]
[Sidenote: Outer edge and piracy.]
In this early Hellenic world, when Greek sea-power was in its infancy,
owing to the fear of piracy, cities were placed a few miles back from
the coast; but with the partial cessation of this evil, sites on shore
and peninsula were preferred as being more accessible to commerce,[431]
and such of the older towns as were in comparatively easy reach of the
seaboard established there each its own port. Thus we find the ancient
urban pairs of Argos and Nauplia, Troezene and Pogon, Mycenæ and
Eiones, Corinth commanding its Aegean port of Cenchreæ 8 miles away on
the Saronic Gulf to catch the Asiatic trade, and connected by a walled
thoroughfare a mile and a half long with Lechæum, a second harbor on
the Corinthian Gulf which served the Italian commerce.[432] In the same
group belonged Athens and its Piræus, Megara and Pegæ, Pergamus and
Elaæ in western Asia Minor.[433] These ancient twin cities may be taken
to mark the two borders of the coast zone. Like the modern ones which we
have considered above, their historical development has shown an advance
from the inner toward the outer edge, though owing to different causes.
However, the retired location of the Baltic and North Sea towns of
Germany served as a partial protection against the pirates who, in the
Middle Ages, scoured these coasts.[434] Lubeck, originally located nearer
the sea than at present, and frequently demolished by them, was finally
rebuilt farther inland up the Trave River.[435] Later the port of
Travemünde grew up at the mouth of the little estuary.
[Sidenote: Outer edge in colonization.]
The early history of maritime colonization shows in general two
geographic phases: first, the appropriation of the islet and headland
outskirts of the seaboard, and later--it may be much later--an advance
toward the inner edge of the coast, or yet farther into the interior.
Progress from the earlier to the maturer phase depends upon the social
and economic development of the colonizers, as reflected in their
valuation of territorial area. The first phase, the outcome of a low
estimate of the value of land, is best represented by the Phoenician and
earliest Greek colonies, whose purposes were chiefly commercial, and who
sought merely such readily accessible coastal points as furnished the
best trading stations on the highway of the Mediterranean and the
adjacent seas. The earlier Greek colonies, like those of the Triopium
promontory forming the south-western angle of Asia Minor, Chalcidice,
the Thracian Chersonesus, Calchedon, Byzantium, the Pontic Heraclea, and
Sinope, were situated on peninsulas or headlands, that would afford a
convenient anchor ground; or, like Syracuse and Mitylene, on small
inshore islets, which were soon outgrown, and from which the towns then
spread to the mainland near by. The advantages of such sites lay in
their accessibility to commerce, and in their natural protection against
the attack of strange or hostile mainland tribes. For a nation of
merchants, satisfied with the large returns but also with the ephemeral
power of middlemen, these considerations sufficed. While the Phoenician
trading posts in Africa dotted the outer rim of the coast, the inner
edge of the zone was indicated by Libyan or Ethiopian towns, where the
inhabitants of the interior bartered their ivory and skins for the
products of Tyre.[436] So that commercial expansion of the Arabs down the
east coast of Africa in the first and again in the tenth century seized
upon the offshore islands of Zanzibar, Pemba, and Mafia, the small
inshore islets like Mombasa and Lamu, and the whole outer rim of the
coast from the equator southward to the Rovuma River.[437] The Sultan of
Zanzibar, heir to this coastal strip, had not expanded it a decade ago,
when he had to relinquish the long thread of his continental
possessions.
[Sidenote: Inland advance of colonies.]
But when a people has advanced to a higher conception of colonization as
an outlet for national as well as commercial expansion, and when it sees
that the permanent prosperity of both race and trade in the new locality
depends upon the occupation of larger tracts of territory and the
development of local resources as a basis for exchanges, their
settlements spread from the outer rim of the coasts to its inner edge
and yet beyond, if alluvial plains and river highways are present to
tempt inland expansion. Such was the history of many later colonies of
the Greeks[438] and Carthaginians, and especially of most modern colonial
movements, for these have been dominated by a higher estimate of the
value of land.
After the long Atlantic journey, the outposts of the American coast were
welcome resting-places to the early European voyagers, but, owing to
their restricted area and therefore limited productivity, they were soon
abandoned, or became mere bases for inland expansion. The little island
of Cuttyhunk, off southern Massachusetts, was the site of Gosnold's
abortive attempt at colonization in 1602, like Raleigh's attempt on
Roanoke Island in 1585, and the later one of Popham on the eastern
headland of Casco Bay. The Pilgrims paused at the extremity of Cape Cod,
and again on Clark's Island, before fixing their settlement on Plymouth
Bay. Monhegan Island, off the Maine coast, was the site of an early
English trading post, which, however, lasted only from 1623 to 1626;[439]
and the same dates fix the beginning and end of a fishing and trading
station established on Cape Ann, and removed later to Salem harbor. The
Swedes made their first settlement in America on Cape Henlopen, at the
entrance of Delaware Bay; but their next, only seven years later, they
located well up the estuary of the Delaware River. Thus for the modern
colonist the outer edge of the coast is merely the gateway of the land.
From it he passes rapidly to the settlement of the interior, wherever
fertile soil and abundant resources promise a due return upon his labor.
[Sidenote: Interpenetration of land and sea.]
Since it is from the land, as the inhabited portion of the earth's
surface, that all maritime movements emanate, and to the land that all
oversea migrations are directed, the reciprocal relations between land
and sea are largely determined by the degree of accessibility existing
between the two. This depends primarily upon the articulation of a
land-mass, whether it presents an unbroken contour like Africa and
India, or whether, like Europe and Norway, it drops a fringe of
peninsulas and a shower of islands into the bordering ocean. Mere
distance from the sea bars a country from its vivifying contact; every
protrusion of an ocean artery into the heart of a continent makes that
heart feel the pulse of life on far-off, unseen shores. The Baltic inlet
which makes a seaport of St. Petersburg 800 miles (1,300 kilometers)
back from the western rim of Europe, brings Atlantic civilization to
this half-Asiatic side of the continent. The solid front presented by
the Iberian Peninsula and Africa to the Atlantic has a narrow crack at
Gibraltar, whence the Mediterranean penetrates inland 2,300 miles (3,700
kilometers), and converts the western foot of the Caucasus and the roots
of the Lebanon Mountains into a seaboard. By means of the Arabian Sea,
the Indian Ocean runs northward 1,300 miles (2,200 kilometers) from Cape
Comorin to meet the Indus delta; and then turns westward 700 miles
farther through the Oman and Persian gulfs to receive the boats from the
Tigris and Euphrates. Such marine inlets create islands and peninsulas;
which are characterized by proximity to the sea on all or many sides;
and in the interior of the continents they produce every degree of
nearness, shading off into inaccessible remoteness from the watery
highway of the deep.
The success with which such indentations open up the interior of the
continents depends upon the length of the inlets and the size of the
land-mass in question. Africa's huge area and unbroken contour combine
to hold the sea at arm's length, Europe's deep-running inlets open that
small continent so effectively that Kazan, Russia's most eastern city of
considerable size, is only 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) distant from the
nearest White Sea, Baltic, and Azof ports. Asia, the largest of all the
continents, despite a succession of big indentations that invade its
periphery from Sinai peninsula to East Cape, has a vast inland area
hopelessly far from the surrounding oceans.
[Sidenote: Ratio of shoreline to area.]