A mountain environment encourages political disunion in several forms.

Sometimes it favors the survival of a turbulent feudal nobility, based

upon clan organization, as among the medieval Scotch, who were not less

rebellious toward their own kings than toward the English

conquerors.[1381] Feudal rule seems congenial to the mountaineer, whose

conservative nature, born of isolation, clings to hereditary chiefs and

a long established order. Feudal communities and dwarf republics exist

side by side in the northern Caucasus,[1382] attended by that primitive

assertion of individual right, the blood feud.[1383] Often the two forms

of government are combined, but the feudal element is generally only a

dwindling survival from a remote past. The little Republic of Andorra,

which for a thousand years has preserved its existence in the protection

of a high Pyrenean valley, is a self-governing community, organized

strictly along the lines of a Tyrolese or Swiss commune; but the two

_viguiers_ or agents, who in some matters outrank the president, are

official appointments tracing back to feudal days, when Andorra was a

seigneurie of the Comté of Urgel.[1384] Tyrol offers a striking parallel

to this. In its local affairs it has in effect a republican form of

government, enjoying as high degree of autonomy as any Swiss canton; but

the great Brenner route, which could confer both power and wealth on its

possessor, made the Tyrol an object of conquest to the feudal nobles of

the early Middle Ages. Their hereditary dominion is now vested in the

archdukes of Austria, to whom the Tyrolese have shown unfailing

fidelity, but from whom they have exacted complete recognition of their

rights.[1385]

Tyrol's neighbor Switzerland illustrates the pure form of commune,

canton and republic, which is the logical result of a rugged mountain

relief. Here commune and canton are the real units of government. In

the federal power at Bern the Swiss peasant takes little interest,

often not even knowing the name of the national president. In the

highest ranges a canton coincides with a mountain-rimmed

valley--Valais with the basin of the upper Rhone, Glarus with the

upper Linth, Uri with the Reuss, Graubünden with the upper Rhine, to

which is joined by many pass routes the sparsely peopled Engadine,

Ticino with the drainage basin of upper Lake Maggiore, Unterwalden

with the southern drainage valleys of Lake Lucerne. Where the

mountains are lower, or where passes connect valleys of high levels,

cantonal boundaries may overstep geographical barriers. A commune

generally consists of the villages strung along a narrow lateral

valley, isolated and sufficient unto itself politically. A close

parallel to the Alpine commune is found among the Kabyles of the Atlas

Mountains. Their political structure is based upon the _Jemaa_ or

commune, a small sovereign republic whose independence is fiercely

defended. It enjoys complete local autonomy, is governed by an

assembly of all the adult male inhabitants, and grants this body the

usual functions except the administration of justice, which,

characteristically, is replaced by blood feuds as the inalienable

right of the individual. Romans, Arabs, Turks and French have in turn

exercised over these mountain Berbers only nominal control, except

when their internal dissensions made them vulnerable.[1386]

[Sidenote: Significance of their small size.]

The mountains, by the segregating power of their ridges and ranges,

first produce these little independent communities, and then, throwing

around them strong protecting arms, enfold them in an embrace which long

provides security to them in their weakness. These minute mountain

states, therefore, tend to reflect in their size the isolation of their

environment, and indirectly the weakness of the surrounding nations. The

original Swiss _Eidgenossensschaft_ of the four forest cantons, embedded

in the high Alps, braced against a mountain wall, held its own against

the feeble feudal states of Austria and Germany. The rugged relief of

Graubünden and the spirit of freedom cradled there enabled its peasants

in the Middle Ages to overthrow the feudal lords, and to establish a

federal republic. This typical mountain state was a league composed of

three other leagues. Each component league consisted of a group of

districts, having the power of sovereign states, and consisting in turn

of a group of communes, which were quite independent in local affairs.

This triune league formed in time an alliance with the Swiss

Confederation, but did not become a member of it till the Vienna

adjustment of 1815. Similar is the story of the mountain shepherds of

Appenzell, who formed a little peasant republic, despite their bishop

overlord of St. Gall; and who later during the Reformation, on the

ground of religious differences, divided into two yet smaller

states.[1387] The relation between size and inaccessibility is most

strikingly illustrated in the high Himalayan ranges west of Kashmir and

north of the Punjab. Here is the Shinaka district, which includes the

Chilas, Darel, Tanger and other valleys branching off from the Indus,

and which is inhabited by Dards of Indo-European stock. Each Shinaka

valley is a small cantonal republic, and each village of each republic

is a commune managing its own affairs by an assembly. One settlement of

only twelve houses enjoys complete autonomy. Besides the village

assemblies there is a state parliament handling questions of general

policy, to which each village sends representatives. One dissentient

vote can defeat a measure. The majority cannot control the minority; for

if one village of a state disagrees with the others, it is free to carry

out its own policy, even in the matter of foreign alliances.[1388] Here

is home rule run to seed.

[Sidenote: Slight power of mountain chiefs.]

Small size is sometimes coupled with monarchical rule, degenerating

occasionally into despotism among aggressive robber tribes. The

inaccessible Hunza Valley is occupied on opposite sides of its deep

gorge by two rival states, the Hunzas and the Nagaris, whose combined

population amounts to scarcely 25,000 souls. Hostile to each other, they

unite only to resist an invading force. While the Hunza Thum is a

tyrant, the Nagari ruler has little voice in the government. The

Tibeto-Burman hill folk of the eastern Himalayas are divided into clans,

and concede a mild authority to a chief who rules a group of clan

villages, but only rarely is able to secure power over a larger

district. The Khasia Hills of Assam are broken up into twenty-three

petty states, each under its own Rajah or chief, who has, however,

little authority beyond the administration of justice.[1389]

Everywhere in mountain regions appears this repugnance to centralized

authority. Protection by environment obviates the necessity of

protection through combination. The spirit of clan exclusiveness, the

absence of a common national sentiment, characterize equally the

tribesmen of mountainous Albania, of Persian Luristan,[1390] and highland

Kurdistan. Along the rugged upheaved area which forms the western

boundary of India from the Khaibar Pass to the sea, British officials

have had to negotiate with the native Pathan and Baluch "jirgahs,"

assemblies of the chief men of the countless clans into which the tribes

are divided, as the only visible form of authority tolerated.[1391]

Combination must be voluntary and of a type to exact a modicum of

submission. These requirements are best answered by the confederation,

which may gradually assume a stable and elaborate form among an

advanced people like the Swiss; or it may constitute a loose yet

effective union, as in the famous Samnite confederacy of the central

Apennines; or a temporary league like that of the ancient Arcadians, or

the group of confederated sheiks of Bellad el Kobail, the "Country of

the Highlanders" in mountainous Yemen, who in 1790 established a

republican form of union for defense against their more powerful

neighbors.[1392]

[Sidenote: Mountain isolation and differentiation.]

The power of mountains to protect makes them asylums of refuge for

displaced peoples. This fact explains the confused ethnology which often

characterizes these isolated regions, especially when they lie near or

across natural highways of human migration. As a tide of humanity sweeps

around or across the mountains, a branch stream turns into a side

valley, where it is caught and held. There it remains unaltered,

crystallizing in its seclusion, subjected for ages to few modifying

influences from without. Its people keep their own language and customs,

little affected by a totally different race stock similarly placed in a

neighboring alcove of the mountains. Lack of communication engenders an

endless multiplication of dialects, as we find them in the Alps, the

Caucasus, in Kafirstan of the Hindu Kush and in Nepal. Diversity of

speech, itself a product of isolation, reacts upon that political and

social aloofness of mountain folk, to emphasize and fix it.

[Sidenote: Survival of primitive races in mountains.]

From this principle it follows that the same highland region shows

strong differentiation and marked social individuality from one district

to another, and from one valley to the next, despite a prevailing

similarity of local geographic conditions. In fact, the very similarity

of those conditions, strong in their power to isolate, present the

conditions for inevitable variation. A mountain region gets its

population from diverse sources, or, which is quite as important, at

different times from the same source. For instance, Nepal received

contingents of Rajput conquerors, dislodged from the Punjab, in the

seventh century, the eleventh, and finally the dominant Gurkhas at the

end of the eighteenth. To-day these represent different degrees of

amalgamation with the local Tibetan stock of Nepal. They are

distinguished from each other by a diversity of languages, and a

multiplicity of dialects, while the whole piedmont of the country shows

a yet different blend with the Aryan Hindus of the Ganges valley, who

have seeped into the Terai and been drawn up, as if by capillary

attraction, into the hill valleys of the outer range. The Vindhyan Range

and its associated highlands, long before the dawn of Indian history,

caught and held in their careful embrace some of the fragile aboriginal

tribes like the Kolarian Ho, Santals and Korkus. Centuries later the

Dravidian Bhils and Gonds sought refuge here before the advancing

Indo-Aryans, and found asylums in the secluded valleys.[1393] Finally

those same northern plains whence the Dravidians had come, after the

Mohammedan conquest of central India in the sixteenth century, sent

flying to the refuge of the hills a large contingent of Hindus of

mingled Dravidian and Aryan stocks, but stamped with the culture of the

Ganges basin. These occupied the richer valleys and the more accessible

plateaus of the highlands, driving the primitive Gonds and Bhils back

into the remoter recesses of the mountains.[1394] Dravidians and

aboriginal Kolarians survive in their purity in the wilder and more

inaccessible regions, but in the lower valleys their upper classes show

signs of mixtures with the Rajput invaders, while the lower classes

betray little Aryan blood.[1395]

[Sidenote: Diversity of peoples and dialects.]

Afghanistan, of disordered relief, set as a transit region between the

plains of Mesopotamia, the Oxus and the Indus, has a confused ethnology

in keeping with the tangle of dissected plateaus and mountain systems

which constitute its surface. Here we find three distinct branches of

the Indo-European race, divided up into various peoples of diverse

tongues and subdivided further into countless tribes; and two branches

of Mongol-Tartars scattered, as if out of a pepper box, from the Helmund

to the Oxus, tossed in among diverse peoples of Iranic and Galcha origin

in hopeless confusion. The various Afghan tribes, separated from each

other by natural barriers and intervening alien stocks, though similar

in physical type, speech, religion and culture, have no sense of unity,

no common political aims, while the appalling list of tribes

constituting the population of the country[1396] offers little hope of

Afghanistan ever developing national cohesion. Kafiristan alone, which

lies in the Hindu Kush range for the most part at an altitude of 12,000

feet or more, harbors in its recesses many remnants of primitive

peoples, speaking various languages and dialects, strangers alike to any

native affinity or political union. It is a mere agglomeration of ethnic

fragments, in which the people of one village are often unable to

converse with those of the next.[1397] Relief has fashioned the ethnology

of the Caucasus in the same way. No other equally small area in the

world contains such a variety of peoples and tongues, differing from one

another in race, language, and customs so fundamentally as the Caucasus.

From the heterogeneous survivals of extremely old ethnic stocks, lodged

in the high valleys, to the intrusive Russians of the lower piedmont,

the Caucasus might be called an ethnographical sample card.[1398]

The rugged configuration of the Alps, from the Rhone to the Danube, has

preserved the broad-headed Alpine race, which was perhaps the primitive

stock of Central Europe. The great river valleys leading into this

massive highland, like the Rhine, Aar, Inn and Adige, show the intrusion

of a long-headed race from both north and south; but lofty and remote

valleys off the main routes of travel, like the Hither Rhine about

Dissentis, the little Stanzerthal of the upper Inn, and the Passierthal

of the upper Adige above Meran, show the race preserved in its purity by

the isolating environment.[1399] Here each segregated lateral valley

becomes an area of marked linguistic and social differentiation; only

where it opens into the wider longitudinal valleys are its peculiarities

of speech and custom diluted by the intrusive current of another race.

Switzerland has received three different streams of language, and broken

them up into numerous rivulets of dialect. On its small area of 16,125

square miles (41,346 square kilometers) thirty-five dialects of German

are spoken, sixteen of French, eight of Italian and five of Romansch, a

primitive and degenerate Latin tongue, surviving from the ancestral days

of Roman occupation.[1400] The yet smaller territory of the Tyrol has all

these languages except French, whose place is taken by various forms of

Slavonic speech, which have entered by the western tributaries of the

Danube.[1401]

[Sidenote: Constriction of mountain areas of ethnic survivals.]

Rarely is a polyglot mountain population able to work out its own

political salvation, as the Swiss have done. More often political union

must be forced upon them from without. Oftener still, when the

highlanders are primitive survivals, ill-matched against the superior

invaders from the plain, they are doomed to a process of constriction of

territory and deterioration of numbers, which proceeds slowly or rapidly

according to the inaccessibility of their environment and the energy of

the intruders. Deliberate, unenterprising nations, like the Chinese,

Turks and Indo-Aryans long tolerate the presence of alien mountain

tribes, who remain like enemies brought to bay in their isolated

fortresses. The conquerors throw around them at their leisure a cordon

of settlement, which, slowly ascending the piedmont, draws closer and

closer about the mountaineers. The situation of many mountain tribes

reminds one of a besieged stronghold. Russian wars against the Caucasus

have rightly been described as protracted sieges. The heroic history of

Switzerland in relation to its neighbors has been that of a skillfully

conducted defense, both military and diplomatic. The territory of China

is dotted over with detached groups of aborigines, who have survived

wherever a friendly mountain has offered them an asylum. Variously known

as Lolos, Mantze or Miaotse, they have preserved everywhere a

semi-independence in pathless mountains, whither Chinese troops do not

dare to follow them;[1402] but the more numerous and patient Chinese

agriculturalists are in many sections slowly encroaching upon their

territories, driving them farther and farther into the recesses of their

highlands. The same process goes on in Formosa, where the Chinese have

gradually forced the native Malays into mountain fastnesses among the

peaks which rise to 14,000 feet (4500 meters). There, split up by

internecine feuds into numberless clans and tribes, ignorant of one

another's languages, raiding each other's territories and the coastal

plains tilled by Chinese colonists, they await their doom, while the

piedmont zone between has already given birth to a typical border race

of halfbreeds, more Chinese than Malay.[1403]

[Sidenote: Isolation and retardation of mountain regions.]

"To have and to hold" is the motto of the mountains. Like remote

islands, they are often museums of social antiquities. Antiquated races

and languages abound. The mountaineers of the Southern Appalachians

speak to-day an eighteenth century English. Their literature is the

ballad poetry of old England and Scotland, handed down from parent to

child. Clan feuds settle questions of justice, as in the Caucasus and

the Apennines. Religion is orthodox to the last degree, sectarianism is

rigid, and Joshua's power over the sun remains in some lonely valleys

undiscounted.[1404] These are all the marks of isolation and retardation

which appear in similar environments elsewhere. Especially religious

dogmas tend to show in mountains a tenacity of life impossible in the

plains. The Kafirs, inhabiting the high Hindu Kush Mountains of

Badakshan, and apparently of Pelasgic, early Greek, or Persian origin,

have a religion blended of paganism, Zoroastrianism and Brahmanism.[1405]

One intruding faith has been unable to dislodge the previous incumbent,

so the three have combined. The great historical destiny of the small,

barren, isolated Judean plateau was to hold aloof the chaste religion of

the desert-bred Jews from the sensuous agricultural gods of the

Canaanites; to conserve and fix it; if need be, to narrow it to a

provincial tribal faith, to stamp it with exclusiveness, conservatism,

and formalism, as its adherents with bigotry,[1406] for this is always

the effect of geographical seclusion. But when all these limitations of

Judaism are acknowledged, the fact remains that that segregated mountain

environment performed the inestimable service for the world of keeping

pure and undefiled the first and last great gift of the desert, a

monotheistic faith.

Buddhism, once the official religion of Korea but disestablished three

centuries ago, has taken refuge in the Diamond Mountains, far from the

main roads; there a dull, moribund form of the faith dozes on in the

monasteries and monastic shrines of these secluded highlands.[1407]

Driven out of India, Buddhism survives only in the Himalayan border of

the country among the local Tibeto-Burman peoples, and in Ceylon, whose

mountain city of Kandy is its stronghold. The persecuted Waldenses, a

heretic sect who fled in 1178 from the cities of France to the Alps,

took refuge in the remote valleys of the Pellice, Chisone, and Augrogne

some thirty miles southwest of Turin. There, protected equally against

attack and modification, the Waldenses have maintained the old tenets

and organization of their religion.[1408]

[Sidenote: Conservatism of mountain peoples.]

The mountain-dweller is essentially conservative. There is little in his

environment to stimulate him to change, and little reaches him from the

outside world. The "spirit of the times" is generally the spirit of a

past time, when it has penetrated to his remote upland. He is strangely

indifferent to what goes on in the great outstretched plains below him.

What filters in to him from the outside has little suggestion for him,

because it does not accord with the established order which he has

always known. Hence innovation is distasteful to him. This repugnance to

change reaches its clearest expression, perhaps, in the development and

preservation of national costumes. _Tracht,_ which is crystallized style

in dress, appears nowhere so widespread and so abundantly differentiated

as in mountain districts. In Switzerland, every canton has its

distinctive costume which has come down from a remote past. The peasants

of Norway, of the German and Austrian Alps, of the Basque settlements in

the Pyrenees, of mountain-bound Alsace and Bohemia, give local color to

the landscape by the picturesqueness of their national dress.

[Sidenote: Mental and moral qualities.]

With this conservatism of the mountaineer is generally coupled suspicion

toward strangers, extreme sensitiveness to criticism, superstition,

strong religious feeling, and an intense love of home and family. The

bitter struggle for existence makes him industrious, frugal, provident;

and, when the marauding stage has been outgrown, he is peculiarly honest

as a rule. Statistics of crime in mountain regions show few crimes

against property though many against person. When the mountain-bred man

comes down into the plains, he brings with him therefore certain

qualities which make him a formidable competitor in the struggle for

existence,--the strong muscles, unjaded nerves, iron purpose, and

indifference to luxury bred in him by the hard conditions of his native

environment.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XVI

[1253] Heinrich von Treitschke, _Politik,_ Vol. I, p. 218. Leipzig,

1897.

[1254] For full discussion, see H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp.

79-81. New York, 1902.

[1255] J. Thomson, Through Masai Land, pp. 78-82, 113-115, 122, 140-141,

163-167, 406-407. London, 1885.

[1256] J. Russell Smith, Plateaus in Tropical America, in Report of

Eighth International Geographical Congress, pp. 829-831. Washington,

1905.

[1257] Isaiah Bowman, The Distribution of Population in Bolivia,

_Bulletin American Geographical Society,_ pp. 74-78, Vol. VII. 1909.

[1258] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 157. London, 1902.

[1259] Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 52-56. New York,

1895. C.C. Royce, The Cherokee Nation of Indians, Fifth Annual Report of

Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 140-143. Washington, 1887.

[1260] W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 253-254. New York, 1899.

[1261] G.L. Gomme, The Village Community, pp. 72, 75-95. New York, 1890.

[1262] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 148, 154, 155. New York,

1902.

[1263] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 204, 207. London, 1903.

[1264] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 304. New York, 1902.

[1265] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 221. London, 1903.

[1266] Alfred Stead, Japan by the Japanese, p. 425. London, 1904. Henry

Dyer, Dai Nippon, p. 241. New York, 1904.

[1267] Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 307-308. Phila., 1891.

[1268] Wilhelm Deecke, Italy, pp. 190, 358-361. London, 1904.

[1269] Elisée Reclus, Europe, Vol. I, p. 284. New York, 1882.

[1270] S.P. Scott, History of the Moorish Empire in Spain, Vol. III, pp.

610-613. Philadelphia, 1904.

[1271] M. Niebuhr, Travels Through Arabia, Vol. I, pp. 290-291, 300.

Edinburgh, 1792. S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, pp. 57, 68,

69, 415. New York, 1900.

[1272] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 75, 140, 267. London, 1902.

[1273] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 10. London, 1897.

[1274] _Ibid._, pp. 312, 460, 463, 468, 475.

[1275] _Ibid._, 118, 119, 160, 200.

[1276] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp.

176, 183, 294; Vol. II, p. 107. New York and London, 1900.

[1277] F.H., Nichols, Through Hidden Shensi, pp. 51, 54. New York, 1902.

[1278] E.J. Payne, History of the New World, Vol. I, pp. 375-378.

Oxford, 1892.

[1279] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 162. London, 1896-1898.

[1280] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 86-87. London, 1897.

[1281] A.B. Ellis, West African Islands, p. 248. London, 1885.

[1282] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 254. London, 1896-1898.

[1283] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 426-428.

[1284] A.E. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, p. 122. New York, 1869.

[1285] _Ibid._, 174.

[1286] W.E. Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Vol. I, p. 90. New York, 1903.

[1287] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 458, 541, 543; and

Vol. IV, pp. 88-89. Washington, 1905. Gazetteer of the Philippine

Islands, photographs, pp. 352-353. Washington, 1902.

[1288] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, pp. 96-97.

London, 1907.

[1289] V.L. Cameron, Across Africa, p. 221. London, 1885.

[1290] Count Gleichen, The Egyptian Sudan, Vol. I, p. 190. London, 1905.

[1291] Prescott, Conquest of Peru, Vol. I, pp. 134-136. New York, 1848.

[1292] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 176. London, 1896-1898.

[1293] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 176.

[1294] E.J. Payne, History of the New World, Vol. I, p. 377. Oxford,

1892.

[1295] Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of Russia, Vol.

II, p. 346. London, 1812.

[1296] B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 57, 58, 61.

London, 1896.

[1297] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 148, 151, 154, 163,

203, 238 _et passim_. London, 1897.

[1298] _Ibid._, 70-73.

[1299] F.H. Nichols, Through Hidden Shensi, p. 52. New York, 1902.

[1300] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp.

163, 176; Vol. II, pp. 126, 147. New York and London, 1900.

[1301] Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, p. 307. Philadelphia, 1891.

[1302] Wilhelm Roscher, _National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues_, p. 656,

Note 1. Stuttgart, 1888.

[1303] Norway, Official Publication, p. 307. Christiania, 1900.

[1304] Roscher, _National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues_, p. 656, Note 4.

Stuttgart, 1888.

[1305] Norway, Official Publication, p. 325. Christiania, 1900.

[1306] Roscher, _National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues,_ p. 657, Note 7.

Stuttgart, 1888.

[1307] _Ibid.,_ p. 655, Note 1.

[1308] Norway, Official Publication, p. 310. Christiania, 1900.

[1309] B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 58-59.

London, 1896.

[1310] McCullough, Geographical Dictionary, Article Nepal. J.O. White,

Journeys in Bhutan, _Geographical Journal,_ Vol. 35, p. 33. London,

1910.

[1311] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 10. London, 1897.

[1312] Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, p. 310. Philadelphia, 1891.

A. von Miaskowski, _Die schweizerische Allmend,_ pp. 88-89, 155, 178,

179, 198. _Staats- und socialwissenschaftliche Forschungen,_ Vol. II, No.

4, Leipzig, 1879.

[1313] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 98, 248, 329. London,

1897.

[1314] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II,

pp. 181, 187, 224. London and New York, 1900.

[1315] Carter Harrison, A Race with the Sun, p. 63. New York, 1889.

[1316] Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 325-327. Phila. 1891.

[1317] A von Miaskowski, _Die schweizerische Allmend,_ pp. 164-166.

_Staats- und socialwissenschaftliche Forschungen,_ Vol. II, No. 4.

Leipzig, 1879.

[1318] Norway, Official Publication, p. 325. Christiania, 1900.

[1319] _Ibid.,_ p. 59.

[1320] Roscher, _National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues,_ p. 655, Note 1.

Stuttgart, 1888.

[1321] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 40, 41, 77. London,

1897.

[1322] M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China in 1846, Vol. II,

pp. 151-156. Chicago, 1898.

[1323] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 228. New York, 1891.

[1324] Perceval Landon, The Opening of Tibet, pp. 110, 111, 205-206. New

York, 1905.

[1325] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 197, 248. London, 1903.

[1326] Wilhelm Deecke, Italy, p. 220. London, 1904.

[1327] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 269-270. London, 1903.

[1328] Malthus, Essay on Population, Book II, chap. V.

[1329] Cliffe Leslie, Auvergne, _Fortnightly Review,_ p. 741, Vol. XVI.

1874.

[1330] Wilhelm Deecke, Italy, pp. 243, 409. London, 1904.

[1331] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 252. London, 1896-1898.

[1332] L. Higgin, Spanish Life in Town and Country, pp. 27, 29, 292-293.

New York, 1902.

[1333] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 350. New York, 1897.

[1334] Von Bremer, Land of the Battaks, _Geographical Journal,_ Vol.

VII, pp. 76-80. London, 1896.

[1335] B. Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 229-232. Phila., 1891.

[1336] James Logan, The Scottish Gael or Celtic Manners, p. 78.

Hartford, 1849.

[1337] Indian Census for 1901, Vol. I, Part I, p. 93, by Risley and

Gait. Calcutta, 1903.

[1338] Elisée Reclus, Europe, Vol. I, p. 219. New York, 1882.

[1339] Heinrich von Treitschke, _Politik_, Vol. I, p, 228. Leipzig,

1897.

[1340] Archibald Little, The Far East, pp. 47, 167. Oxford, 1905.

[1341] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 243. New York, 1902.

[1342] Malthus, Essay on Population, Book II, chap. I.

[1343] Cliffe Leslie, Auvergne, _Fortnightly Review_, Vol. XVI, pp.

741-742. 1874.

[1344] Oscar P. Crosby, Tibet and Turkestan, pp. 153, 156. London and

New York, 1905. A. Little, The Far East, p. 217. Oxford, 1905.

[1345] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 227. New York, 1891.

[1346] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 218. London, 1897.

[1347] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, p. 212. New York, 1891.

[1348] G.A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, p. 188.

London, 1906.

[1349] Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, pp. 451, 452. London,

1891.

[1350] Strabo, Book XVI, chap. IV, 25.

[1351] For authorities, see Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, pp.

452-455. London, 1891. McLennan, Primitive Marriage, pp. 178-179,

184-189. Edinburgh, 1865. G.A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British

Borderland, pp. 14, 15, 88-89, 177, 305. London, 1906.

[1352] Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. 1, pp. 646-649. New York,

1887.

[1353] W.H.R. Rivers, The Todas, incorporated in W. I. Thomas' Source

Book for Social Origins, pp. 485-486. Chicago, 1909.

[1354] Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 463. London, 1891.

[1355] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 216, 217. London, 1905.

[1356] W.W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas, pp. 211-212. New York,

1891.

[1357] Oscar P. Crosby, Tibet and Turkestan, pp. 148-151. New York and

London, 1905.

[1358] Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, pp. 470-483, 547-548.

London, 1891.

[1359] Perceval Landon, The Opening of Tibet, p. 193. New York, 1905.

[1360] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 137-141. London, 1897.

[1361] Strabo, Book IV, chap. VI, 6, 7, 8, 10.

[1362] _Ibid._, Book III, chap. III, 5, 7, 8.

[1363] _Ibid_, Book VII, chap. VI, 1.

[1364] _Ibid_, Book XI, chap. XII, 4; chap. XIII, 3, 6.

[1365] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 346-349, 460-464.

London, 1897.

[1366] _Ibid_, 280-282.

[1367] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 33. London, 1905.

[1368] _Ibid_, 219-221.

[1369] Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of Russia, Vol. I,

pp. 386-390, 406-407. London, 1812.

[1370] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 246-249. London, 1902.

[1371] M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China in 1846, Vol. II,

pp. 90-93, 100-101, 129-132. Chicago, 1898.

[1372] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, pp. 131, 133-135.

New York and London, 1902-1906.

[1373] Strabo, Book V, chap. IV, II.

[1374] Article Nepal, Encyclopædia Britannica.

[1375] C. Keller, Madagascar, pp. 24-26, 72, 85. London, 1901.

[1376] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 280, 288-289. London,

1897.

[1377] Walter K. Kelly, History of Russia, Vol. II, p. 392. London,

1881.

[1378] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. II, p. 441. New York, 1859.

[1379] _Ibid._, Vol. X, pp. 208, 215, 224-225.

[1380] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 235. London, 1902.

[1381] Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. II, pp.

125, 136-137. New York, 1871.

[1382] W.K. Kelly, History of Russia, Vol. II, p. 394. London, 1881.

[1383] Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of Russia, Vol. I,

pp. 391, 404-405. London, 1812.

[1384] H. Spencer, A Visit to Andorra, _Fortnightly Review_, Vol. 67,

pp. 53-60. 1897.

[1385] Article Tyrol, Encyclopædia Britannica.

[1386] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 253-254. London,

1896-1898.

[1387] H.J. Mackinder, The Rhine, pp. 27-31, 47-49, 56, 57. London,

1908.

[1388] E.P. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 305-306. London, 1897.

[1389] B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 136,

143-146. London, 1896.

[1390] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 229-231, 248, 252-253. London,

1902.

[1391] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 243-244. London, 1905.

[1392] Niebuhr, Travels Through Arabia, Vol. II, pp. 50-51. Edinburgh,

1792.

[1393] B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community, pp. 40, 47, 110,

121, 151-154, 159. London, 1896.

[1394] Captain J. Forsythe, The Highlands of Central India, pp. 10-15,

23-24, 123-125. London, 1889.

[1395] _Ibid._, 6, 7, 10-12, 141-147.

[1396] Angus Hamilton, Afghanistan, pp. 262-268. New York, 1906.

[1397] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, pp. 98-99. London, 1905.

[1398] Merzbacher, _Aus den Hochregionen des Kaukasus_, Vol. I, pp.

55-56, 156. Leipzig, 1901.

[1399] W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 281-283, 289-290, map p.

285. New York, 1899.

[1400] _Ibid._, 282.

[1401] Article Tyrol, Encyclopædia Britannica.

[1402] Archibald Little, The Far East, 131-132. Oxford, 1905. Isabella

Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, 132-133, 146-147,

166, 174, 207-210. New York and London, 1900. S. Wells Williams, The

Middle Kingdom, Vol. I, p. 43, New York, 1904. J. Naken, _Die Provinz

Kwangtung und ihre Bevölkerung, Petermanns Geographische Mittheilungen_,

Vol. 24, p. 421. 1878.

[1403] Archibald Little, The Far East, pp. 307-308. Oxford, 1905.

[1404] E.C. Semple, The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains,

_Geographical Journal_, Vol. XVII, pp. 588-623. London, 1901.

[1405] Sir Thomas Holdich, The Origin of the Kafir of the Hindu Kush,

_Geographical Journal_, Vol. VII, p. 42. London, 1896.

[1406] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp.

259-261. New York, 1897.

[1407] Isabella Bird Bishop, Korea and Her Neighbors, pp. 21, 134-135,

140, 142. New York, 1897.

[1408] Article Waldenses, Encyclopædia Britannica.

CHAPTER XVII

THE INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE

[Sidenote: Importance of climatic influences.]

Climate enters fundamentally into all consideration of geographic

influences, either by implication or explicitly. It is a factor in most

physiological and psychological effects of environment. It underlies the

whole significance of zonal location, continental and insular. Large

territorial areas are favorable to improved variation in men and animals

partly because they comprise a diversity of natural conditions, of which

a wide range of climates forms one. This is also one advantage of a

varied relief, especially in the Tropics, where all the zones may be

compressed into a small area on the slopes of high mountains like the

Andes and Kilimanjaro. Climate fixes the boundaries of human habitation

in Arctic latitudes and high altitudes by drawing the dead-line to all

organic life. It dominates life in steppes and torrid deserts as in

sub-polar wastes. It encourages intimacy with the sea in tropical Malays

and Polynesians, and like a slave-driver, scourges on the fur-clad

Eskimo to reap the harvest of the deep. It is always present in that

intricate balance of geographic factors which produces a given

historical result, throwing its weight now into one side of the scales,

now into the other. It underlies the production, distribution and

exchange of commodities derived from the vegetable and animal kingdoms,

influences methods of agriculture, and the efficiency of human labor in

various industries.[1409] Hence it is a potent factor in the beginning and

in the evolution of civilization, so far as this goes hand in hand with

economic development.

[Sidenote: Climate in the interplay of geographic factors.]

The foregoing chapters have therefore been indirectly concerned with

climate to no small degree, but they have endeavored to treat the

subject analytically, showing climate as working with or against or in

some combination with other geographic factors. This course was

necessary, because climatic influences are so conspicuous and so

important that by the older geographers like Montesquieu[1410] and others,

they have been erected into a blanket theory, and made to explain a wide

range of social and historical phenomena which were properly the effect

of other geographic factors.

[Sidenote: Direct and indirect effects of climate.]

For a clear understanding of climatic influences, it is necessary to

adhere to the chief characteristics of the atmosphere, such as heat and

cold, moisture and aridity, and to consider the effect of zonal

location, winds and relief in the production and distribution of these;

also to distinguish between direct and indirect results of climate,

temporary and permanent, physiological and psychological ones, because

the confusion of these various effects breeds far-fetched conclusions.

The direct modification of man by climate is partly an _a priori_

assumption, because the incontestable evidences of such modification

are not very numerous, however strong the probability may be. The

effect of climate upon plant and animal life is obvious, and immediately

raises the assumption that man has been similarly influenced. But there

is this difference: in contrast to the helpless dependence upon

environment of stationary plants and animals, whose range of movement is

strictly determined by conditions of food and temperature, the great

mobility of man, combined with his inventiveness, enables him to flee or

seek almost any climatic condition, and to emancipate himself from the

full tyranny of climatic control by substituting an indirect economic

effect for a direct physical effect.

The direct results of climate are various, though some are open to the

charge of imperfect proof. Even the relation of nigrescence to tropical

heat, which seems to be established by the geographical distribution of

negroid races in the Old World, fails to find support from the facts of

pigmentation among the American Indians from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

Nevertheless climate undoubtedly modifies many physiological processes

in individuals and peoples,[1411] affects their immunity from certain

classes of diseases and their susceptibility to others, influences their

temperament, their energy, their capacity for sustained or for merely

intermittent effort, and therefore helps determine their efficiency as

economic and political agents.

While producing these direct effects, climate also influences man

indirectly by controlling the wide range of his life conditions

dependent upon the plant and animal life about him. It dictates what

crops he may raise, and has it in its power to affect radically the size

of his harvest. It decides which flocks and herds are best suited to his

environment, and therefore directs his pastoral activities, whether he

keeps reindeer, camels, llamas, horses or horned cattle. By interdicting

both agriculture and stock-raising, as in Greenland whose ice cap leaves

little surface free even for reindeer moss, it condemns the inhabitants

forever to the uncertain subsistence of the hunter. Where it encourages

the growth of large forests which harbor abundant game and yield

abundant fruits, as in the hot, moist equatorial belt and on rainy

mountain slopes, it prolongs the hunter stage of development, retards

the advance to agriculture. Climate thus helps to influence the rate and

the limit of cultural development. It determines in part the local

supply of raw material with which man has to work, and hence the

majority of his secondary activities, except where these are expended on

mineral resources. It decides the character of his food, clothing, and

dwelling, and ultimately of his civilization.

[Sidenote: Effect of climate upon relief.]

The very ground under man's feet, moreover, feels the molding hand of

climate. In one region a former age of excessive cold has glaciated the

surface and scoured off the fertile loam down to the underlying rock, or

left the land coated with barren glacial drift or more productive clays.

In another, the cold still persists and caps the land with ice and snow,

or, as in the tundra, underlays it with a stratum of frozen earth, which

keeps the surface wet and chilled even in the height of summer. In yet

other regions, abundant moisture combined with heat covers the ground

with a pad of fertile humus, while some hundred miles away drying trade

winds parch and crack the steppe vegetation, convert most of its organic

substance into gases, and leave only a small residue to enrich the soil.

Rain itself modifies the relief of the land, and therefore often decides

in a slow, cosmic way what shall be the ultimate destination of its

precious store of water. A heavy precipitation on the windward side of a

mountain range, by increasing the mechanical force of its drainage

streams, makes them bite their way back into the heart of the system and

decapitate the rivers on the leeward side, thus diminishing the volume

of water left to irrigate the rainless slope. Thus the hydra-headed

Amazon has been spreading and multiplying its sources among the Andean

valleys, to the detriment of agriculture on the dry Pacific slope; thus

the torrents of the Western Ghats, gorged by the monsoon rains from the

Indian Ocean, are slowly nipping off the streams of the ill-watered

Deccan, [See map page 484.] All these direct and indirect effects of

climate may combine to produce ultimate politico-geographical results

which manifest themselves in the expansion, power and permanence of

states.

[Sidenote: Climate limits the habitable area.]

Climatic conditions limit the habitable area of the earth. This is

their most important anthropo-geographic effect. At either pole lurks an

invincible foe, with whom expanding humanity must always reckon, and who

brooks little encroachment upon his territory. His weapon is the

restriction of organic life, without which man cannot exist. The

geographical boundaries of organic life, however, are wider than those

of human life. The consequence of this climatic control, therefore, is

not only a narrowed distribution of the human race, but a concentration

which intensifies the struggle for existence, forces the utilization of

all the available area, and thereby in every locality stimulates

adaptation to environment.

[Sidenote: Adaptability of man to climatic extremes.]

Man ranks among the most adaptable organic beings on the earth. No

climate is absolutely intolerable to him. Only the absence of food

supply or of all marketable commodities will exclude him from the most

inhospitable region. His dwellings are found from sea level up to an

altitude of 5000 meters or more, where the air pressure is little over

one half that on the coast.[1412] Seventeen per cent. of the towns and

cities of Bolivia are located at an elevation above 13,000 feet (4000

meters), while Aullagas occupies a site 15,700 feet or nearly 5000

meters above the sea.[1413] Mineral wealth explains these high Bolivian

settlements, just as it draws the Mexican sulphur miners to temporary

residence in the crater of Popocatepetl at an altitude of 17,787 feet

(5420 meters), from their permanent dwellings a thousand meters

below.[1414] The laborers employed in the construction of the Oroya

railroad in Peru became rapidly accustomed to work in the rarefied air

at an elevation of 4000 to 4800 meters. The trade routes over the Andes

and Himalayan ranges often cross passes at similar altitudes; the

Karakorum road mounts to 18,548 feet (5,650 meters). Yet these great

elevations do not prevent men going their way and doing the day's work,

although the unacclimated tenderfoot is liable to attacks of mountain

sickness in consequence of the rarefied air.[1415]

Man makes himself at home in any zone. The cold pole of the earth, so

far as recorded temperatures show, is the town of Verkhoyansk in

northeastern Siberia, whose mean January temperature is 54 F. below zero

(-48 Centigrade). Massawa, one of the hottest spots in the furnace of

Africa is the capital of the Italian colony of Eritrea. However,

extremes both of heat and cold reduce the density of population, the

scale and efficiency of economic enterprises. The greatest events of

universal history and especially the greatest historical developments

belong to the North Temperate Zone. The decisive voyages of discovery

emanated thence, though the needs of trade and the steady winds of low

latitudes combined to carry them to the Tropics. The coldest lands of

the earth are either uninhabited, like Spitzenbergen, or sparsely

populated, like northern Siberia. The hottest regions, also, are far

from being so densely populated as many temperate countries.[1416] [See

maps pages 8, 9, and 612.] The fact that they are for the most part

dependencies or former colonial possessions of European powers indicates

their retarded economic and political development. The contrast between

the Mongol Tunguse, who lead the life of hunters and herders in Arctic

Siberia, and the related Manchus, who conquered and rule the temperate

lands of China, shows how climates help differentiate various branches

of the same ethnic stock; and this contrast only parallels that between

the Eskimo and Aztec offshoots of the American Indians, the Norwegian

and Italian divisions of the white race.

[Illustration: MEAN ANNUAL ISOTHERMS AND HEAT BELTS [_Centigrade_]

0°C = 32°F. 20°C = 68°F. 30°C = 86°F.]

[Sidenote: Temperature as modified by oceans and winds.]

The zonal location of a country indicates roughly the degree of heat

which it receives from the sun. It would do this accurately if

variations of relief, prevailing winds and proximity of the oceans did

not enter as disturbing factors. Since water heats and cools more slowly

than the land, the ocean is a great reservoir of warmth in winter and of

cold in summer, and exercises therefore an equalizing effect upon the

temperature of the adjacent continents, far as these effects can be

carried by the wind. The ocean is also the great source of moisture, and

this, too, it distributes over the land through the agency of the wind.

Where warm ocean currents, like the Gulf Stream and Kuro Siwa, penetrate

into temperate or sub-polar latitudes, or where cool ones, like the

Peruvian and Benguela Currents wash the coasts of tropical regions, they

enhance the power of the ocean and wind to mitigate the extremes of

temperature on land. The warm currents, moreover, loading the air above

them with vapor, provide a store of rain to the nearest wind-swept

land. Hence both the rainfall and temperature of a given country depend

largely upon its neighboring water and air currents, and its

accessibility to the rain-bearing winds. If it occupies a marked

central position in temperate latitudes, like eastern Russia or the

Great Plains of our semi-arid West, it receives limited moisture and

suffers the extreme temperatures of a typical continental climate. The

same result follows if it holds a distinctly peripheral location, and

yet lies in the rain-shadow of a mountain barrier, like western Peru,

Patagonia and Sweden north of the sixtieth parallel. [See map page 484.]

[Sidenote: Effect of the westerlies.]

Owing to the prevalence of westerly winds in the Temperate Zones and

particularly in the North Temperate Zone, the mean annual temperature is

high on the western face of the northern continents, but drops rapidly

toward the east.[1417] This is especially true of winter temperatures,

which even near the eastern coast show the severity of a continental

climate. Sitka and New York, Trondhjem and Peking have the same mean

January temperatures, though Peking lies in about the latitude of

Madrid, over twenty-three degrees farther south.

Europe's location in the path of the North Atlantic westerlies, swept by

winds from a small and narrow ocean which has been super-heated by the

powerful Gulf Stream, secures for that continent a more equable climate

and milder winters than corresponding latitudes on the western coasts of

North America, whose winds from the wide Pacific are not so warm.[1418]

Moreover, a coastal rampart of mountains from Alaska to Mexico restricts

the beneficial influences of the Pacific climate to a narrow seaboard,

excludes them from the vast interior, which by reason of cold or aridity

or both must forever renounce great economic or historical significance,

unless its mineral resources developed unsuspected importance. In

Europe, the absence of mountain barriers across the course of these

westerly winds from Norway to central Spain, and the unobstructed avenue

offered to them by the Mediterranean Sea during fall and winter, enable

all the Atlantic's mitigating influences of warmth and moisture to

penetrate inland, and temper the climate of Europe as far east as St.

Petersburg and Constantinople. Thus several factors have combined to

give the western half of Europe an extraordinarily favorable climate.

They have therefore greatly broadened its zone of historical intensity

toward the north, pushed it up to the sixtieth parallel, while the

corresponding zone in eastern Asia finds its northern limit at the

fortieth degree.

[Sidenote: Rainfall.]

Moisture and warmth are essential to all that life upon which human

existence depends. Hence temperature and rainfall are together the most

important natural assets of a country, because of their influence upon

its productivity. The grazing capacity and wheat yield of southern

Australia increase almost regularly with every added inch of

rainfall.[1419] The map of population for the Empire of India clearly

shows that a high degree of density accompanies a high and certain

rainfall. Exceptions occur only where hilly or mountainous tracts offer

scant arable areas, or where plains and valleys are sparsely populated

owing to political troubles or unhealthiness. Nearly three-tenths of the

population are found crowded together on the one-tenth of India's level

territory which is blessed with a rainfall above the average for the

country.[1420] Deserts which yield nothing are purely climatic phenomena.

Steppes which facilitate the historical movement, and forests which

block it, are products of scant or ample precipitation. The zonal

distribution of rainfall, with its maxima in the Tropics and the

Temperate Zones, and its minima in the trade-wind belts and polar

regions, reinforces and emphasizes the influence of temperature in

determining certain great cultural and economic zones.

In equatorial regions, which have an abundant rainfall throughout the

year, agriculture is directed toward fruits and roots; only in certain

districts can it include cereals, and then only rice and maize. The

temperate grains demand some dry summer weeks for their maturity.

Excessive moisture in Ireland has practically excluded wheat-growing,

which in England and Scotland also is restricted chiefly to the drier

eastern counties.[1421] It thrives, on the other hand, in Manitoba and the

Red River region even with a short season of scant rainfall, because

this comes in the spring when moisture is most needed.[1422] Most

important to man, therefore, is the question how and when the rainfall

is distributed, and with what regularity it comes. Monsoon and

trade-wind districts labor under the disadvantage of a wet and dry

season, and a variability which brings tragic results, since it easily

reduces a barely adequate rainfall to disastrous drought. These are the

lands where wind and weather lord it over man. If the rains hold off too

long, or stop too soon, or withhold even a small portion of their

accustomed gift, famine stalks abroad.

[Sidenote: Temperature and zonal location.]

Temperature, the other important element of climate, depends primarily

upon zonal location, which has far different historical results from

central and peripheral location, continental and insular. It determines

the amount of heat received from the sun, though air and ocean currents

may redistribute that heat within certain limits, and humidity or

aridity modify its effects. Still zonal distinctions remain. The great

climatic regions of the earth, like the hot, wet equatorial belt or the

warm, dry trade-wind belts or the cool, well-watered temperate zones,

constitute, through the medium of their economic products and their

climatically imposed methods of production, so many socio-political

areas, regardless of ethnic and political boundaries. The Berber nomads

of the northern Sahara live much as the Semitic Bedouins of the Syrian

desert or the Turkoman stock of arid Turkestan. They have the same

tribal government, the same scattered distribution in small groups, the

same economic basis of subsistence, though of different races and

dominated respectively by France, Turkey and Russia. The history of the

tropical Antilles has in both its economic and political features

paralleled that of the East Indies since the early 16th century.

Temperate South America promises to follow in the historical footsteps

of temperate North America, South Africa in those of Europe and

temperate Australia.

[Sidenote: Reactions of contrasted zones.]

While people of the same latitude live approximately under the same

temperature conditions, those of contrasted zones are subjected to

markedly different influences. They develop different degrees of

civilization, wealth, economic efficiency, and density of population;

hence they give rise to great historical movements in the form of

migration, conquest, colonization, and commerce, which, like convection

currents, seek to equalize the differences and reach an equilibrium.

Nature has fixed the mutual destiny of tropical and temperate zones, for

instance, as complementary trade regions. The hot belt produces numerous

things that can never grow in colder countries, while a much shorter

list of products, coupled, however, with greater industrial efficiency,

is restricted to the Temperate Zone. This explains the enormous

importance of the East Indian trade for Europe in ancient and medieval

times, the value of tropical possessions for commercial countries like

England and Holland. It throws light upon the persistence of the

tropical plantation system in the Dutch East Indies and republican

Mexico, as formerly in the sugar and cotton fields of the Southern

States, with its relentless grip upon the throat of national life in hot

lands.

[Sidenote: Temperate products from tropical highlands.]

Tropical regions, however, may profit by the fact that their mountains

and plateaus permit the cultivation of temperate crops. India during the

last century has introduced tea culture extensively on the Assam and

Nilgiri Hills, and in the Himalayan valleys up to an altitude of 7000

feet.[1423] Besides this temperate product, it has put large areas into

cotton, chiefly in the peninsular plateau of the Deccan, and by means of

these two crops has caused a considerable readjustment in world

commerce.[1424] Nevertheless, here the infringement of the principle of

tropical production in the torrid zone is after all slight. In tropical

America, on the other hand, the case is quite different; this region

presents an interesting paradox in relation to its foreign commerce.

Here the highlands are the chief seats of population. They contain,

moreover, the most industrious and intelligent native stock, due to

geographical and historical causes running back into the ancient

civilizations, as well as the largest proportions of immigrant

Europeans. This is true not only of the Cordilleran states from northern

Mexico to the borders of Chile, but also of Brazil, whose center of

population falls on the plateau behind Rio de Janeiro and Santos. The

isolation of these high plateaus excludes them to a serious extent from

foreign trade, while their great altitude permits only temperate

products, with the exception of sub-tropical coffee, which is their only

crop meeting a great demand. The world wants, on the other hand, the

long list of lowland tropical exports which torrid America furnishes as

yet in inadequate amounts, owing to the lack of an industrious and

abundant lowland population. Commerce will eventually experience a

readjustment in these localities to the natural basis of tropical

production; but how soon or how effectively this change will take place

depends upon the question of immigration of foreign tropical peoples, or

the more difficult problem of white acclimatization.[1425]

[Sidenote: Isothermal lines in anthropo-geography.]

Despite some purely climatological objections, anthropo-geography finds

the division of climatic zones according to certain isothermal lines of

mean annual temperature the most expedient one for its purpose. The hot

zone may be taken as the belt north and south of the equator enclosed

between the annual isotherms of 20° C. (68° F.) These hold a course

generally far outside the two tropics, and in the northern continents

frequently reach the thirty-fifth parallel. The temperate climatic zones

extend from the annual isotherm of 20° C. to that of 0° C. (32° F.),

which bears little relation to the polar circles forming the limits of

the solar Temperate Zone. The north temperate climatic zone has been

further sub-divided along the annual isotherm of 5° C. (41° F.),

distinguishing thus the warmer southern belt, which forms preëminently

the zone of greatest historical intensity. The areas beyond the annual

isotherms of 0°C. belong to the barren cold zones. [See map page 612.]

[Sidenote: Historical effect of compressed isotherms.]

This isothermal division of the climatic zones is abundantly justified,

because the duration of a given degree of heat or cold in any region is

a dominant factor in its human, animal, and plant life. A map of the

mean annual isotherms of the earth is therefore eloquent of the relation

between historical development and this one phase of climate. Where the

lines run far apart, they enclose extensive areas of similar

temperature; and where they approach, they group together regions of

contrasted temperatures. The compression of climatic differences into a

small area enlivens and accentuates the process of historical

development. It produces the same sort of effect as the proximity of

contrasted reliefs. Nowhere else in the world do the tropical and

frigid climatic areas, as defined on the north and south by the annual

isothermal lines of 20°C. and 0°C. respectively, lie so near together as

in Labrador and northern Florida. Separated here by only twenty degrees

of latitude, on the opposite side of the Atlantic they diverge so

sharply as to include the whole western face of Europe, from Hammerfest

and the North Cape down to the Canary Islands and the crest of the Atlas

Mountains in Africa, a stretch of forty-two degrees of latitude. This

approximation of contrasted climatic districts in North America was an

immense force in stimulating the early economic development of the

Thirteen Colonies, and in maturing them to the point of political

autonomy. It gave New England commerce command of a nearby tropical

trade in the West Indies, of sub-tropical products in the southern

colonies, in close proximity to all the contrasted products of a cold

climate--dense northern forests for naval stores and lumber, and an

inexhaustible supply of fish from polar currents, which met a strong

demand in Europe and the Antilles. The sudden southward drop of the 0°C.

annual isothermal line toward the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes

brought the northwestern fur trade to the back gate of New York, where

it opened on the Mohawk and upper Hudson, and brought prosperity to the

young colony. Even to-day the center of collection for the Canadian fur

fields is Quebec, located at 47° north latitude, while the corresponding

point of concentration in Europe for the furs of Russia and Siberia is

Nizhni-Novgorod, which lies ten degrees farther north.[1426]

[Sidenote: Effect of slight climatic differences.]

This compression of the isotherms emphasizes the differences of national

characters produced in part by dissimilar climatic conditions. Contrasts

in temperament, manner of life, and point of view, like that between the

New Englander and Virginian, Chilean and Bolivian in the Americas,

Breton and Provençal in France, Castilian and Andalusian in Spain,

Gurkha and Bengali in India, seem to bleach out when they are located

far apart, owing to many grades of transition between; but they become

striking, stimulating, productive of important economic and political

results, when close juxtaposition enables them to react sharply one upon

the other. In effecting these nice differentiations of local types,

climate is nearly always one of the factors at work, emphasizing perhaps

an existing ethnic difference. Even the slight variations of

temperature to be found in the same zone or the same climatic region

produce distinct results, especially where they are harnessed, as is

usually the case, with some other geographic condition of relief, area

or soil, pulling in the same direction. Mexico, Peru, Italy,

Switzerland, Greece and Asia Minor, with its high plateau interior and

its contrasted Euxine and Aegean coasts, represent each a complex of

climatic differences, which, reinforced by other geographic factors,

have made in these regions a polychrome picture of national life.

[Sidenote: Effect of climate upon distribution of immigration]

Climatic contrasts aid differentiation also by influencing both natural

and artificial selection in the distribution of peoples. This effect is

conspicuous in the distribution of immigrants in all colonial lands like

Africa, South America and in every part of the United States.[1427] The

warm, moist air of the Gulf and South Atlantic States is attracting back

to the congenial habitat of the "black belt" the negroes of the North,

where, moreover, their numbers are being further depleted by a harsh

climate, which finds in them a large proportion of the unfit. The

presence of a big negro laboring class in the South, itself primarily a

result of climate, has long served to exclude foreign immigration, which

sought therefore the unoccupied lands and the congenial climate of the

more bracing North. Hence it is both a direct and indirect effect of

climate that the North shows a large proportion of aliens, and the white

population of the South an almost unadulterated English stock.

[Sidenote: Climate and race temperament.]

The influence of climate upon race temperament, both as a direct and

indirect effect, can not be doubted, despite an occasional exception,

like the cheery, genial Eskimos, who seem to carry in their sunny

natures an antidote to the cold and poverty of their environment. In

general a close correspondence obtains between climate and temperament.

The northern peoples of Europe are energetic, provident, serious,

thoughtful rather than emotional, cautious rather than impulsive. The

southerners of the sub-tropical Mediterranean basin are easy-going,

improvident except under pressing necessity, gay, emotional,

imaginative, all qualities which among the negroes of the equatorial

belt degenerate into grave racial faults. If, as many ethnologists

maintain, the blond Teutons of the north are a bleached out branch of

the brunette Mediterranean race, this contrast in temperament is due to

climate. A comparison of northern and southern peoples of the same race

and within the same Temperate Zone reveals numerous small differences of

nature and character, which can be traced back directly or indirectly to

climatic differences, and which mount up to a considerable sum total.

The man of the colder habitat is more domestic, stays more in his home.

Though he is not necessarily more moderate or continent than the

southerner, he has to pay more for his indulgences, so he is economical

in expenditures. With the southerner it is "easy come, easy go." He

therefore suffers more frequently in a crisis. The low cost of living

keeps down his wages, so that as a laborer he is poorly paid. This fact,

together with his improvidence, tends to swell the proletariat in warm

countries of the Temperate Zone; and though here it does not produce the

distressing impression of a proletariat in Dublin or Liverpool or

Boston, it is always degrading. It levels society and economic status

downward, while in the cooler countries of the Temperate Zone, the

process is upward. The laborer of the north, owing to his providence and

larger profits, which render small economies possible, is constantly

recruited into the class of the capitalist.

[Sidenote: Contrasted temperaments in the same nation.]

Everywhere a cold climate puts a steadying hand on the human heart and

brain. It gives an autumn tinge to life. Among the folk of warmer lands

eternal spring holds sway. National life and temperament have the

buoyancy and thoughtlessness of childhood, its charm and its weakness.

These distinctions and contrasts meet us everywhere. The southern

Chinese, and especially the Cantonese, is more irresponsible and

hot-blooded than the Celestial of the north, though the bitter struggle

for existence in the over-crowded Kwangtung province has made him quite

as industrious; but on his holidays he takes his pleasure in singing,

gambling, and various forms of dissipation. The southern Russian is

described as more light-hearted than his kinsman of the bleaker north,

though both are touched with the melancholy of the Slav. In this case,

however, the question immediately arises, how far the dweller of the

southern wheat lands owes his happy disposition to the easy conditions

of life in the fertile Ukraine, as opposed to the fiercer struggle for

subsistence in the glaciated lake and forest belt of the north. Similar

distinctions of climate and national temperament exist in the two

sections of Germany. The contrast between the energetic, enterprising,

self-contained Saxon of the Baltic lowland and the genial, spontaneous

Bavarian or Swabian is conspicuous, though the only geographical

advantage possessed by the latter is a warmer temperature attended by a

sunnier sky. He contains in his blood a considerable infusion of the

Alpine stock and is therefore racially differentiated from the northern

Teuton,[1428] but this hardly accounts for the difference of temperament,

because the same Alpine stock is plodding, earnest and rather stolid on

the northern slope of the Alps, but in the warm air and sunshine of the

southern slope, it abates these qualities and conforms more nearly to

the Italian type of character. The North Italian, however, presents a

striking contrast to the indolent, irresponsible, improvident citizens

of Naples, Calabria and Sicily, who belong to the contrasted

Mediterranean race, and have been longer subjected to the relaxing

effects of sub-tropical heat.

[Sidenote: Complexity of the geographic problem.]

Where the climatic difference is small, it is nevertheless often

conspicuous enough to eclipse other concomitant factors which are at

work, and hence to encourage the formation of some easy blanket theory

of climatic influences. But just because the difference is slight, all

attending geographic and ethnic circumstances ought to be scrutinized,

to insure a correct statement of the geographical equation. The contrast

between the light-hearted, gracious peasants of warm, sunny Andalusia

and the reserved, almost morose inhabitants of cool and cloudy Asturias

is the effect not only of climate but of the easy life in a fertile

river plain, opposed to the bitter struggle for existence in the rough

Cantabrian Mountains. Moreover, a strong infusion of Alpine blood has

given this group of Spanish mountaineers the patience and seriousness

which characterizes the race in other parts of continental Europe.[1429]

The conditions which have differentiated Scotch from English have been

climate, relief, location, geologic composition of the soil, and ethnic

composition of the two peoples. The divergent development of Northerners

and Southerners in America arose from contrasts in climate, soil and

area. It was not only the enervating heat and moisture of the Southern

States, but also the large extent of their fertile area which

necessitated slave labor, introduced the plantation system, and resulted

in the whole aristocratic organization of society in the South.[1430]

[Sidenote: Monotonous climatic conditions.]

When one type of climate extends monotonously over a vast area, as in

Russia. Siberia, Central Asia or immense tracts of Africa, the

differences of temperature which prick and stimulate national endeavor

in small climatic districts here lose much of their force. Their effects

flatten out into insignificance, overwhelmed by the encounter with too

large a territory. All the southern continents are handicapped by the

monotony of their zonal location. The map of annual isotherms shows

Africa quite enclosed between the two torrid lines of 20° Centigrade,

except for a narrow sub-tropical belt along the Barbary coast in the

north, and in the south an equally narrow littoral extending east and

north from the Cape of Good Hope. At first glance, the large area of

South Africa lying on the temperate side of the Tropic of Capricorn

raises hopes for a rich economic, social and cultural development here;

but these are dashed by an examination of the isotherms. Excessive heat

lays its retarding touch upon everything, while a prevailing aridity

(rainfall less than 10 inches or 25 centimeters), except on the narrow

windward slope of the eastern mountains, gives the last touch of

climatic monotony. The coastal belt of Cape Colony and Natal raise

tropical and sub-tropical products[1431] like all the rest of the

continent, while the semi-arid interior is committed with little

variations to pastoral life. [See maps pages 484 and 487.] Climatic

monotony, operating alone, would have condemned South Africa to poverty

of development, and will unquestionably always avail to impoverish its

national life. South African history has been made by its mines and by

its location on the original water route to India; the first have

dominated its economic development, and the latter has largely

determined its ethnic elements--English, Dutch, and French Huguenots,

while the magnet of the mines has drawn other nationalities and

especially a large Jewish contingent into the urban centers of the

Rand.[1432] In the background is the native Kaffir and Hottentot stocks,

whose blood filters into the lower classes of the white population. The

diversity of these ethnic elements may compensate in part for the

monotony of climatic conditions, which promise to check differentiation.

However, climatic control is here peculiarly despotic. We see how it has

converted the urban merchants of Holland and the skillful Huguenot

artisan of France into the crude pastoral Boer of the Transvaal.

In contrast to South Africa, temperate South America has an immense

advantage in its large area lying outside the 20°C. isotherm, and in the

wide range of mean temperatures (from 20°C. to 5°C.) found between the

Tropic of Capricorn and Tierra del Fuego. Climate and relief have

combined to make the mouth of the La Plata River the site of the largest

city of the southern hemisphere. Buenos Ayres, with a population of over

a million, reflects its large temperate hinterland.

[Sidenote: The effects of Arctic cold.]

Frigid zones and the Tropics alike suffer from monotony, of Arctic the

one of cold and the other of heat. The Arctic climatic belt, extending

from the isotherm of 0°C. (32°F.) to the pole, includes inhabited

districts where the mean annual temperature is less than -15°C. (or

5°F.), as at the Greenland village of Etah on Smith's Sound and the

Siberian town of Verkhoyansk. Here the ground is covered with, ice or

snow most of the year, and permanently frozen below the surface. Animal

and plant life are reduced to a minimum on the land, so that man, with

every poleward advance of his thin-strung settlements, is forced more

and more to rely on the sea for his food. Hence he places his villages

on narrow strips of coast, as do the Norse of Finmarken, the Eskimo and

the Tunguse inhabiting the Arctic rim of Asia. Products of marine

animals make the basis of his domestic economy. Farther inland, which

means farther south, all tribes live by hunting and fishing. The

Eurasian Hyperboreans find additional subsistence in their reindeer

herds, which they pasture on the starchy lichen (Cladonia rangiferina)

of the tundra. [See maps pages 103, 153.]

[Sidenote: Similarity of cultural development.]

Though these Arctic folk are sprung from diverse race stocks, close

vicinal location around an enclosed sea has produced some degree of

blood relationship. But whatever their origins, the harsh conditions of

their life have imposed upon them all a similar civilization. All

population is sparse and more or less nomadic, since agriculture alone

roots settlement. They have the same food, the same clothing, the same

types of summer and winter dwellings, whether it is the earth hut of the

Eskimo or of the coast Lapp, the Siberian Yukagirs of the Kolima River,

or the Samoyedes of northeastern Russia.[1433] The spur of necessity has

aroused their ingenuity to a degree found nowhere in the drowsy Tropics

of Africa. Dread of cold led the Yakuts of the Lena Valley to glaze the

windows of their huts with slabs of ice, which are better nonconductors

of heat and cold, and can be made more perfectly air-tight than glass.

Hence these windows have been adopted by Russian colonists. The Eskimo

devised the oil lamp, an invention found nowhere else in primitive

America, and fishing tackle so perfect that white men coming to fish in

Arctic waters found it superior to their own.

Owing to the inexorable restriction of their natural resources, contact

with European commerce has impoverished the Hyperborean natives. It has

caused the rapid and ruthless exploitation of their meager resources,

which means eventual starvation. So long as the Ostyaks, before the

coming of the Russians, were sole masters of the vast forests of the Obi

Valley, they commanded a supply of fish and fur animals which sufficed

for their sparse population. But the greed of the Russian fish dealers

and fur traders, and the devastating work of the lumbermen have made

double war upon Ostyak sources of subsistence.[1434] The appearance of the

white man in Alaskan waters was the signal for the indiscriminate

killing of seal and other marine animals, till the Eskimo's supply of

food and furs has been seriously invaded, from Greenland to the

outermost Aleutian Islands. In all this wide territory, climatic

conditions forbid any substitute for the original products, except the

domesticated reindeer on the tundra of the mainland; but this would

necessitate the transformation of the Eskimo from a hunting to a

pastoral people. This task the government at Washington has undertaken,

but with scant success.

[Sidenote: Cold and health]

In contrast to the numerous indirect effects of a frigid climate, no

direct physiological effect can be positively ascribed to intense cold.

It lays no bodily handicap on health and energy, as does the excessive

heat of the Tropics. The coldest regions where tillage is possible are

tolerable places of residence, because their winters are intensely dry.

That of central Siberia, which is drier than the driest desert, makes

tent life comfortable in the coldest season, provided the tenter be clad

in furs. The low temperatures of the Canadian Northwest for the same

reason have not repelled settlers even from the Southern States.

Negroes, however, meet a climatic barrier in America at the isotherm of

5° Centigrade (41° F.). They are found in New England and Nova Scotia,

generally with a large admixture of white blood; but there and farther

north where the climate is moist as well as cold, they show a fatal

tendency to pulmonary diseases.

[Sidenote: The small amount of tropical emigration]

The acclimatization of tropical people in temperate regions will never

be a question of widespread importance. The negroes were involuntary

immigrants to America, under conditions that can never recur. Their

concentration in the "black belt," where they find the heat and moisture

in which they thrive, and their climatically conditioned exclusion from

the more northern states are matters of local significance. Economic and

social retardation have kept the hot belt relatively underpopulated. The

density map shows much the largest part of it with a population less

than 25 to the square mile. Only the small portion contained in India,

southernmost China, and Java shows a density over 125 to the square mile

(or 50 to the square kilometer). This density has to rise to 500 or more

to the square mile before emigration begins. The would-be exiles then

have a wide choice of new homes in other tropical lands, where they find

congenial climate and phases of economic development into which they

will fit. East Indian coolies are found in Cape Colony, Natal, Zanzibar,

Trinidad, and British Guiana, where they constitute 38 per cent. of the

population.

[Sidenote: Effects of tropical climate.]

The redundant population of crowded western and southern Europe also

seek these sparsely inhabited Tropics, but they come heavily handicapped

by the necessity of acclimatization. They leave their homes from

Trondhjem and Stockholm in the north to the Mediterranean in the south,

where the mean annual temperatures vary from 5° to 17° C, (41° to 63°

F.), to seek the Torrid Zone which averages 25° C. or 77° F. over most

of its territory. The effects of a tropical climate are due to intense

heat, to its long duration without the respite conferred by a bracing

winter season, and its combination with the high degree of humidity

prevailing over most of the Torrid Zone. These are conditions

advantageous to plant life, but hardly favorable to human development.

They produce certain derangements in the physiological functions of

heart, liver, kidneys and organs of reproduction. Bodily temperature

rises, while susceptibility to disease and rate of mortality show an

increase ominous for white colonization. The general effect is intense

enervation; this starts a craving for stimulants and induces habits of

alcoholism which are accountable for many bodily ills usually attributed

to direct climatic influences. Transfer to the Tropics tends to relax

the mental and moral fiber, induces indolence, self-indulgences and

various excesses which lower the physical tone.[1435] The social control

of public opinion in the new environment is weak, while temptation, due

to both climatic and social causes, is peculiarly strong. The presence

of an inferior, more or less servile native population, relaxes both

conscience and physical energy just when both need a tonic. The result

is general enervation, deterioration both as economic and political

agents.

[Sidenote: Historical significance of deterioration]

This is the effect of climate which has had the most far-reaching and

persistent historical consequences. Our study of the historical

movements of peoples in the northern hemisphere revealed a steady influx

from colder into tropical and sub-tropical lands, followed always by

enervation and loss of national efficiency, due partly to the

debilitating heat of the new habitat, partly to its easier conditions of

living, whether the intruders came as conquerors and appropriated the

fat of the land, or as immigrant colonists who dropped into slack

methods of agriculture, because rain and sun and soil made their

reluctant labor scarcely necessary. Everywhere in the Tropics the

enervating effects of heat, moisture, and abundance make not only the

natives averse to steady work, but start the energetic European

immigrant down the same easy descent to Avernus. Passing over the

deterioration of the Aryans in India, the Persians in Mesopotamia, and

the Vandals in Africa, we find that modern instances show the

transformation to be very rapid. The French who since 1715 have occupied

the islands of Réunion and Mauritius have lost much of their thrift and

energy, though their new homes lie just within the southern tropic, and

are blessed with an oceanic climate. Yet the volunteer troops sent by

Réunion to aid in the recent subjugation of the Hovas in Madagascar

proved to be utterly useless.[1436] The Spaniards who come to-day to

Mexico have great energy, born of their former hard conditions of life

in Spain. But their children are reared in a country whose mean annual

temperature, even on the plateau, exceeds that of Spain by 10°C. (or

18°F.), a difference equal to that between Mobile and New York, or

Madrid and Christiania. Hence they are less energetic and vigorous,

while the third generation are typical Mexicans in their easy-going way

of life.[1437] The Germans who recently have colonized southern Brazil in

great numbers show a similar deterioration under similar increase of

mean annual temperature, combined with somewhat greater humidity, which

intensifies the debilitating effects of the heat. An investigation made

in 1900 by the International Harvester Company of America revealed the

fact that the German farmer in the State of Santa Catharina rarely

cultivated over one acre of grain.[1438] Much of the iron in the blood and

conscience of the New England missionary stock which went to Hawaii two

generations ago has been dissolved out by the warm rain and balmy air of

the islands.

[Sidenote: The problem of acclimatization.]

In all these instances the white race has been successfully

transplanted. It has domiciled itself on the borders of the Tropics and

has propagated its kind, though it has abated some of the vigorous

qualities which characterized it in its temperate fatherland. In the

real Tropics like India, Cochin China, the Malay Archipelago, and

Central Africa, the whole perplexing and urgent problem of European

colonization turns on the difficulty or impossibility of

acclimatization; and this in turn affects the whole economic, ethnic and

political destiny of present colonial holdings. If acclimatization is

impossible, the alternative is an imported ruling class, constantly

invalided and as constantly renewed, aided by a similar commercial body

acting as superintendents of labor; the whole machine of government and

economic exploitation is supported by a permanent servile native

population, doing the preeminently tropical work of agriculture, which

is so fatal to the white man in a torrid climate. This means that the

conquering white race of the Temperate Zone is to be excluded by adverse

climatic conditions from the productive but undeveloped Tropics, unless

it consents to hybridization, like the Spaniards and Portuguese of

tropical America. In that national struggle for existence which is a

struggle for space, it means an added advantage for the Mediterranean

peoples, that they are more tolerant of a torrid climate than the blond

Teutons, whose disability in this regard is pronounced; it means that

the aptitude of the Chinese for a wide range of climatic accommodation,

from the Arctic circle to the equator, lends color to "the yellow

peril."

[Sidenote: Historical importance of the temperate zones.]

In contrast to the monotonous extremes of climate in the hot and cold

zones, temperate lands are characterized by the intermediate degrees of

annual temperature and marked seasonal diversity which are so favorable

to human development. In Arctic lands labor is paralyzed by cold as it

is by heat in the enervating and overproductive Tropics. In one, the

growing season is too short and ill-favored; in the other, too long to

stimulate man to sustained industry. Hence the Temperate Zones, whose

climate avoids both these extremes and abounds in contrasts, whose

summers are productive enough to supply food for the winter, and whose

winters give both motive and energy for the summer's work, are richer in

cultural possibilities and hence in historical importance.

[Sidenote: Effects of contrasted seasons.]

The advantage of the Temperate Zone is not only its moderate and

adequate allowance of heat, but its contrast of seasons. Beyond the

range of a vertical sun, grades of temperature change rapidly from

latitude to latitude and from summer to winter. The seasons bring

variety of activities, which sharply react upon one another.

Manufactures were in their origin chiefly winter industries, as they

still are in small isolated communities. The modern factory system

flourishes best in cooler parts of the Temperate Zone, where the

agricultural demands of the summer, spreading over a shorter period,

leave a longer time for winter work, and where that once long winter of

the Glacial Period, by the scouring action of the ice cap, has reduced

the fertile area of the northern fields. The factory system is also

favored, as Heinrich von Treitschke maintains, by the predominance of

cool or cold weather, which facilitates the concentration of numerous

workmen in large buildings, and renders possible long labor hours the

year round,[1439]--conditions unthinkable in a warm climate. The iron and

steel industries which have grown up about Birmingham, Alabama, find

that the long hot summers and mild winters reduce the efficiency of

their skilled labor imported from the North.

[Sidenote: Effects of length of seasons.]

[Sidenote: Effect of long winters.]

The length of the seasons is of conspicuous importance. It determines,

for instance, whether a given climate permits continuous field work with

summer and winter crops, whether field work is possible at all, and how

long it is interrupted by excessive cold. Buckle maintains that climate

not only enervates or invigorates man, but affects also the constancy of

his work and his capacity for sustained labor throughout the year. He

considers "that no people living in a very northern latitude have ever

possessed that steady and unflinching industry for which the inhabitants

of temperate regions are remarkable" and assigns as a reason "that the

severity of the weather, and, at some seasons, the deficiency of light,

render it impossible for the people to continue their usual out-of-door

employments." The result of this he finds to be desultory habits of

work, which help to make the national character fitful and capricious.

He cites in illustration of his principle the people of the Scandinavian

and Iberian peninsulas, whom he finds marked "by a certain instability

and fickleness of character," owing to the fact that in Norway and

Sweden agricultural labor experiences long interruptions, due to the

severity of the winter and the shortness of the days; in Spain and

Portugal owing to the heat and drought of summer.[1440] The extreme

continental climate of northern of Russia with its violent contrast of

the seasons, its severe and protracted winters, enables Leroy-Beaulieu

to make a safer application of this principle to the empire of the

Czars, which, unlike Scandinavia, feels no ameliorating effect from the

mild Atlantic winds and commands no alternative industries like dairy

farming, fisheries, and maritime trade.[1441] Hence Leroy-Beaulieu

attributes the unsystematic, desultory habits of work prevailing among

the northern peasants to the long intermission of labor in winter, and

to the alternation of a short period of intense activity with a long

period of enforced idleness. He finds them resembling southern peoples

in their capacity for sudden spurts of energy rather than sustained

effort, thinks them benumbed by the sloth of the far north, which is not

unlike the sloth of the south.[1442]

The dominant continental and central location of Russia enables its

climatic extremes to operate with little check. The peripheral location

of Scandinavia in the path of the Atlantic winds modifies its climate to

a mild oceanic type, and its dominant maritime situation gives its

people the manifold resources of a typical coast land. Hence Buckle's

estimate of national character in the Scandinavian Peninsula has little

basis as to fact or cause. Irregularity of agricultural labor does not

mean here cessation of all labor, and hence does not produce the

far-reaching effect ascribed to it. Only about one-third of the

Norwegian population is engaged in agriculture. The restriction of its

arable and meadow land to 3 per cent. of the whole territory, and the

fact that a large proportion of the people are employed in shipping and

the fisheries,[1443] are due to several geographic factors besides

climate. The same thing is true of Sweden in a modified degree.

[Sidenote: Complexity of climatic effects.]

Caution should be exercised in drawing conclusions from climate alone or

from only one phase of its influence. The duration and intensity of the

seasons affects not only the manner of work, but the whole mode of life

of a people. On the Yukon, in Iceland, and the high mountain valleys of

the Alps, winter puts a check not only upon out-of-door labor, but upon

all public or community life. Intercourse stops or is greatly

restricted. The outside world drops away. In Iceland, the law courts are

in session only in summer when the roads by sea and land are open. In

the Kentucky mountains the district schools close before Christmas, when

the roads become impassable from rain and snow; the summer is the gala

time for funeral services, for only then can the preacher or

"circuit-rider" reach the graves made in the winter. Therefore the

funerals in one community accumulate, so to speak, and finally, when

leisure comes after the August harvest, they make the occasion for

important social gatherings. Much of the influence of winter lies in its

power to isolate.

It is the economic effects of such periods of enforced idleness which

are most obvious, both in their power to restrict national wealth and

keep down density of population. When long, they limit subsistence to

the products of a short growing season, except where local mining adds

considerable sources of revenue. In the Russian government of Yaroslaf,

located on the northernmost bend of the Volga within the agricultural

belt, and containing the chief inland wheat market of the Empire, the

field labor of four months must support the population for the remaining

eight months of the year. The half of Russia included in the cold forest

zone of the north maintains meagerly a sparse population, and can hope

for an increase of the same only by the encouragement of Industrial

pursuits. Here the long winter leisure has created the handicrafts on

which so many villages rely, and which in turn have given rise to

peddling,[1444] as we have seen it do in high mountain regions where

altitude intensifies and prolongs the winter season. Agricultural and

industrial life are still undivorced, just as in primitive communities.

The resulting population has also the primitive mark of great sparsity,

so that modern industry, which depends upon a concentrated labor force,

is here inhibited. Hence Russian manufactures, which are so active in

the governments of Vladimir, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, cease beyond

the sixtieth parallel, which defines the northern limit of the

agricultural belt and the beginning of the forest and the fur zone.[1445]

[See maps pages 8 and 612.]

[Sidenote: Social effects of long winters.]

The rigorous climate of Russia was undoubtedly one cause for the

attachment of the peasants to the soil in 1593. This measure was

resorted to at a time when the Muscovite dominion from its center in

Great Russia had recently been extended at the expense of the Tartars,

and had thus embraced fertile southern lands, which tempted the northern

peasant away from his unfruitful fields.[1446] This attraction, coupled

with the free and hopeful life of the frontier, met the migrant instinct

bred in the peasant by the wide plains and far horizon of Russia, so

that the north threatened to be left without cultivators. Later, the

harsh climatic conditions of the north were advanced as an argument

against the abolition of serfdom, on the ground that this system alone

secured to the landed proprietor a steady labor supply, and guaranteed

to the peasant his maintenance during the long, idle winter.

The duration and severity of the cold season has put a drag upon the

wheel of enterprise in Canada, as opposed to the warmer United States.

The prairies of the Canadian Northwest, whose fertile soil should early

have attracted settlement, were a closed land till railroads could pour

into it every summer from the warmer south and east a seasonal tide of

laborers. These follow the harvest as it advances from point to point,

and then withdraw in autumn either to the lumber camps of eastern

Canada, Minnesota and Wisconsin, or to seek other forms of out-door

labor in the more southern states, thus lifting from the Canadian farmer

the burden of their winter support.

In the lower latitudes of the Temperate Zones, where the growing season

is long and the dormant period correspondingly short and mild, we find

agriculture based upon clearly distinguished winter and summer crops, as

in the northern Punjab (30° to 34° N. L.);[1447] or producing a quick

succession of valuable crops, where the fertility of the soil can be

maintained by manures or irrigating streams, as in many of the warmer

Southern States and in Spain[1448] respectively. In Argentine, where

tillage is extensive, land abundant, and population sparse, where, in

fact, "skimp farming" is the rule, the shrewd cultivator takes advantage

of the long growing season to stretch out his period of sowing and

reaping, and thus tills a larger area. The International Harvester

Company of America, investigating the reason for the small number of

reaping machines employed in Argentine in proportion to the area under

cultivation, found that the simple climatic condition of a long growing

season enabled one reaper to serve about twice the acreage usual in the

United States, because it could work twice as long.[1449]

[Sidenote: Zones of culture.]

Over and beyond slight local variations of climate and season within the

same zone, which contribute their quota to economic and historical

results, it is the fundamental differences between the hot, cold and

temperate climatic zones that produce the most conspicuous and abiding

effects. These broad belts, each with its characteristic climatic

conditions and appropriate civilization, form so many girdles of culture

around the earth. They have their dominant features of heat and cold,

variously combined with moisture and aridity, which give a certain zonal

stamp to human temperature and development.

The two cold belts have little claim to the name of cultural zones,

since their inability to support more than an insignificant population

has made them almost a negligible factor in history. [Compare maps pages

8, 9, and 612.] The discoveries and settlements of the Northmen in

Greenland remained a barren historical event, though the vikings' ships

reached a new hemisphere. Iceland is the only land in this sub-arctic

region which ever figured upon the stage of history; and its rôle was

essentially passive. Such prominence as it acquired was due to its

island nature and its situation in a swirl of the Gulf Stream, which

ameliorates the worst climatic effects of its far northern location, and

brings it just within the upper limit of the temperate belt. The wide

sub-arctic lowlands of Russia and Siberia, which, from the Ural

Mountains to the lower Amur River, stretch the cold zone well below the

sixtieth parallel, have at times in the last three centuries and

especially in the past decade thrown their great mass into the scale of

eastern Asiatic history. This has been possible because the hot summer

characteristic of continental climates forces the July isotherm of 20°C.

northward over the vast heated surface of Asia nearly to the sixtieth

parallel, well within the borders of Siberia. It gives that belt the

short but warm growing season with protracted hours of sunshine which

is so favorable to cereals, lending to Omsk, Tomsk, Vitimsk and all the

stretch of Russian settlements in Siberia, an admirable summer climate

like that of the Canadian Northwest.[1450]

[Sidenote: The cradle of civilization.]

The North Temperate Zone is preëminently the culture zone of the earth.

It is the seat of the most important, most steadily progressive

civilizations, and the source of all the cultural stimuli which have

given an upward start to civilization in other zones during the past

three centuries. It contains the Mediterranean basin, which was the

pulsing heart of ancient history, and all the modern historically

important regions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The temperate

belt of the southern hemisphere also is following its lead, since

European civilization has been transplanted to other parts of the world.

This is the zone which least suffers from the drawbacks of climatic

monotony or extremes, and best combines, especially in the northern

hemisphere, the wide range of annual and seasonal variety so favorable

to economic and cultural development, with the incalculable advantage of

large land area.

Man grew in the temperate zone, was born in the Tropics. There, in his

primitive, pre-civilized state, he lived in a moist, warm, uniform

climate which supplied abundantly his simple wants, put no strain upon

his feeble intellect and will. That first crude human product of

Nature's Pliocene workshop turned out in the steaming lowland of Java,

and now known to us as the _Pithecanthropus erectus_, found about him

the climatic conditions generally conceded to have been necessary for

man in his helpless, futile infancy. Where man has remained in the

Tropics, with few exceptions he has suffered arrested development. His

nursery has kept him a child. Though his initial progress depended upon

the gifts which Nature put into his hands, his later evolution depended

far more upon the powers which she developed within him. These have no

limit, so far as our experience shows; but their growth is painful,

reluctant. Therefore they develop only where Nature subjects man to

compulsion, forces him to earn his daily bread, and thereby something

more than bread. This compulsion is found in less luxurious but more

salutary geographic conditions than the Tropics afford, in an

environment that exacts a tribute of labor and invention in return for

the boon of life, but offers a reward certain and generous enough to

insure the accumulation of wealth which marks the beginning of

civilization.[1451]

Most of the ancient civilizations originated just within the mild but

drier margin of the Temperate Zone, where the cooler air of a short

winter acted like a tonic upon the energies relaxed by the lethargic

atmosphere of the hot and humid Tropics; where congenial warmth

encouraged vegetation, but where the irrigation necessary to secure

abundant and regular crops called forth inventiveness, coöperation, and

social organization, and gave to the people their first baptism of

redemption from savagery to barbarism. Native civilizations of limited

development have arisen in the Tropics, but only where, as in Yemen,

Mexico and Peru, a high, cool, semi-arid plateau, a restricted area of

fertile soil, and a protected location alternately coddled and spurred

the nascent people.

As the Tropics have been the cradle of humanity, the Temperate Zone has

been the cradle and school of civilization. Here Nature has given much

by withholding much. Here man found his birthright, the privilege of the

struggle.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XVII

[1409] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 15. London, 1904.

[1410] Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Vol. I, Book XIV. London, 1906.

[1411] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 574-578. New York, 1899.

[1412] Julius Hann, Handbook of Climatology, Part I, pp. 223-224. New

York, 1903.

[1413] Isaiah Bowman, Distribution of Population in Bolivia, _Bulletin

of Geographical Society of Philadelphia_, Vol. VII, pp. 40, 41.

[1414] Ratzel, _Aus Mexico_, p. 415, Note 14. Breslau, 1878.

[1415] Julius Hann, Handbook of Climatology, Part I, pp. 224-227. New

York, 1903.

[1416] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 23. London, 1904.

[1417] Julius Hann, Handbook of Climatology, Part I, pp. 171-173. New

York, 1903.

[1418] _Ibid_., pp. 188-189.

[1419] _Ibid_., pp. 57-58.

[1420] Risley and Gait, Census of India for 1901, Vol. I, Part 1, pp.

14-21, map p. 4. Calcutta, 1903.

[1421] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 173-174.

London, 1904.

[1422] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 65-66. London, 1904.

[1423] _Ibid_., 126-128. Holdich, India, p. 259. London, 1905.

[1424] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 114, 382. London, 1904.

[1425] J. Russell Smith, The Economic Importance of the Tropical

Plateaus in America, House Doc. 460, 58-3--53, pp. 829-835. Washington,

1904.

[1426] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 160. London, 1904.

[1427] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions,

Chap. XV. Boston, 1903.

[1428] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 215-238. New York, 1899.

[1429] _Ibid_., p. 276, Map p. 274.

[1430] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, p.

280-283. Boston, 1903.

[1431] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 434, 436. London, 1904.

[1432] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 1009. New York, 1902.

[1433] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 218-225. London,

1896-1898.

[1434] _Ibid_., Vol. II, p. 217.

[1435] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Chap. XXI. New York, 1899.

[1436] Dr. C. Keller, Madagascar, Mauritius, and Other East African

Islands, pp. 172-175. London, 1901.

[1437] Matthias Romero, Mexico and the United States, Vol. I, p. 79. New

York, 1898.

[1438] From a personal interview with the supervising agent for South

America.

[1439] Heinrich von Treitschke, _Politik_, Vol. I, p. 212 et seq.

Leipzig, 1897.

[1440] Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. I, p. 32.

New York, 1884.

[1441] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 320-324. London, 1904.

[1442] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 6,

139-144. New York, 1893.

[1443] Norway, Official Publication, p. 308. Christiania, 1900.

[1444] A. Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 19, 142, 327.

New York, 1893.

[1445] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 214, 315. London, 1904.

[1446] A. Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 412-413. New

York, 1893.

[1447] Holdich, India, pp. 255-257. London, 1905.

[1448] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 329. London, 1904.

[1449] From an interview with the supervising agent for South America.

[1450] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 356. London, 1904.

[1451] Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. I, pp.

31-33. New York, 1884.