NATIONS, WHETHER PROGRESSING OR STAGNATING, ARE INDEPENDENT OF THE
REGIONS IN WHICH THEY LIVE
I must now consider whether the development of peoples is affected (as
many writers have asserted) by climate, soil, or geographical situation.
And although I have briefly touched on this point in speaking of
environment,[22] I should be leaving a real gap in my theory if I did
not discuss it more thoroughly.
Suppose that a nation lives in a temperate climate, which is not hot
enough to sap its energies, or cold enough to make the soil
unproductive; that its territory contains large rivers, wide roads
suitable for traffic, plains and valleys capable of varied cultivation,
and mountains filled with rich veins of ore—we are usually led to
believe that a nation so favoured by nature will be quick to leave the
stage of barbarism, and will pass, with no difficulty, to that of
civilization.[23] We are just as ready to admit, as a corollary, that
the tribes which are burnt by the sun or numbed by the eternal ice will
be much more liable to remain in a savage state, living as they do on
nothing but barren rocks. It goes without saying, that on this
hypothesis, mankind is capable of perfection only by the help of
material nature, and that its value and greatness exist potentially
outside itself. This view may seem attractive at first sight, but it has
no support whatever from the facts of observation.
Nowhere is the soil more fertile, the climate milder, than in certain
parts of America. There is an abundance of great rivers. The gulfs, the
bays, the harbours, are large, deep, magnificent, and innumerable.
Precious metals can be dug out almost at the surface of the ground. The
vegetable world yields in abundance, and almost of its own accord, the
necessaries of life in the most varied forms; while the animals, most of
which are good for food, are a still more valuable source of wealth. And
yet the greater part of this happy land has been occupied, for
centuries, by peoples who have not succeeded, to the slightest extent,
in exploiting their treasures.
Some have started on the road to improvement. In more than one place we
come upon an attenuated kind of culture, a rudimentary attempt to
extract the minerals. The traveller may still, to his surprise, find a
few useful arts being practised with a certain ingenuity. But all these
efforts are very humble and uncoordinated; they are certainly not the
beginnings of any definite civilization. In the vast territory between
Lake Erie and the Gulf of Mexico, the River Missouri and the Rocky
Mountains,[24] there certainly existed, in remote ages, a nation which
has left remarkable traces of its presence. The remains of buildings,
the inscriptions engraved on rocks, the tumuli,[25] the mummies, show
that it had reached an advanced state of mental culture. But there is
nothing to prove a very close kinship between this mysterious people and
the tribes that now wander over its tombs. Suppose, if you will, that
there was some relation between them, whether by way of blood or of
slavery, and that thus the natives of to-day did learn from the ancient
lords of the country, the first rudiments of the arts they practise so
imperfectly; this only makes us wonder the more that they should have
found it impossible to carry any further what they had been taught. In
fact, this would supply one more reason for my belief that not every
people would be capable of civilization, even if it chose the most
favoured spot on earth as its settlement.
Indeed, civilization is quite independent of climate and soil, and their
adaptability to man’s wants. India and Egypt are both countries which
have had to be artificially fertilized;[26] yet they are famous centres
of human culture and development. In China, certain regions are
naturally fertile; but others have needed great labour to fit them for
cultivation. Chinese history begins with the conquest of the rivers. The
first benefits conferred by the ancient Emperors were the opening of
canals and the draining of marshes. In the country between the Euphrates
and the Tigris, that beheld the splendour of the first Assyrian empire,
and is the majestic scene of our most sacred recollections—in this
region, where wheat is said to grow of its own accord,[27] the soil is
naturally so unproductive that vast works of irrigation, carried out in
the teeth of every difficulty, have been needed to make it a fit abode
for man. Now that the canals are destroyed or filled up, sterility has
resumed its ancient reign. I am therefore inclined to believe that
nature did not favour these regions as much as we are apt to think. But
I will not discuss the point. I will grant, if you like, that China,
Egypt, India, and Assyria, contained all the conditions of prosperity,
and were eminently suited for the founding of powerful empires and the
development of great civilizations. But, we must also admit, these
conditions were of such a kind that, in order to receive any benefit
from them the inhabitants must have reached beforehand, by other means,
a high stage of social culture. Thus, for the commerce to be able to
make use of the great waterways, manufactures, or at any rate
agriculture, must have already existed; again, neighbouring peoples
would not have been attracted to these great centres before towns and
markets had grown up and prospered. Thus the great natural advantages of
China, India, and Assyria, imply not only a considerable mental power on
the part of the nations that profited by them, but even a civilization
going back beyond the day when these advantages began to be exploited.
We will now leave these specially favoured regions, and consider others.
When the Phœnicians, in the course of their migration, left Tylos, or
some other island in the south-east, and settled in a portion of Syria,
what did they find in their new home? A desert and rocky coast, forming
a narrow strip of land between the sea and a range of cliffs that seemed
to be cursed with everlasting barrenness. There was no room for
expansion in such a place, for the girdle of mountains was unbroken on
all sides. And yet this wretched country, which should have been a
prison, became, thanks to the industry of its inhabitants, a crown
studded with temples and palaces. The Phœnicians, who seemed for ever
condemned to be a set of fish-eating barbarians, or at most a miserable
crew of pirates, were, as a fact, pirates on a grand scale; they were
also clever and enterprising merchants, bold and lucky speculators.
“Yes,” it may be objected, “necessity is the mother of invention; if the
founders of Tyre and Sidon had settled in the plains of Damascus, they
would have been content to live by agriculture, and would probably have
never become a famous nation. Misery sharpened their wits, and awakened
their genius.”
Then why does it not awaken the genius of all the tribes of Africa,
America, and Oceania, who find themselves in a similar condition? The
Kabyles of Morocco are an ancient race; they have certainly had a long
time for reflection, and, what is more striking still, have had every
reason to imitate the customs of their betters; why then have they never
thought of a more fruitful way of alleviating their wretchedness than
mere brigandage on the high seas? Why, in the Indian archipelago, which
seems created for trade, and in the Pacific islands, where
intercommunication is so easy, are nearly all the commercial advantages
in the hands of foreigners—Chinese, Malays, and Arabs? And where
half-caste natives or other mixed races have been able to share in these
advantages, why has the trade at once fallen off? Why is the internal
exchange of commodities carried on more and more by elementary methods
of barter? The fact is, that for a commercial state to be established on
any coast or island, something more is necessary than an open sea, and
the pressure exerted by the barrenness of the land—something more, even,
than the lessons learned from the experience of others; the native of
the coast or the island must be gifted with the special talent that
alone can lead him to profit by the tools that lie to his hand, and
alone can point him the road to success.
It is not enough to show that a nation’s value in the scale of
civilization does not come from the fertility—or, to be more precise,
the infertility—of the country where it happens to live. I must also
prove that this value is quite independent of all the material
conditions of environment. For example, the Armenians, shut up in their
mountains—the same mountains where, for generations, so many other
peoples have lived and died in barbarism—had already reached a high
stage of civilization in a very remote age. Yet their country was almost
entirely cut off from others; it had no communication with the sea, and
could boast of no great fertility.
The Jews were in a similar position. They were surrounded by tribes
speaking the dialects of a language cognate with their own, and for the
most part closely connected with them in race; yet they outdistanced all
these tribes. They became warriors, farmers, and traders. Their method
of government was extremely complicated; it was a mixture of monarchy
and theocracy, of patriarchal and democratic rule (this last being
represented by the assemblies and the prophets), all in a curious
equilibrium. Under this government they lived through long ages of
prosperity and glory, and by a scientific system of emigration they
conquered the difficulties that were put in the way of their expansion
by the narrow limits of their territory. And what kind of territory was
it? Modern travellers know what an amount of organized effort was
required from the Israelite farmers, in order to keep up its artificial
fertility. Since the chosen race ceased to dwell in the mountains and
the plains of Palestine, the well where Jacob’s flocks came down to
drink has been filled up with sand, Naboth’s vineyard has been invaded
by the desert, and the bramble flourishes in the place where stood the
palace of Ahab. And what did the Jews become, in this miserable corner
of the earth? They became a people that succeeded in everything it
undertook, a free, strong, and intelligent people, and one which, before
it lost, sword in hand, the name of an independent nation, had given as
many learned men to the world as it had merchants.[28]
The Greeks themselves could not wholly congratulate themselves on their
geographical position. Their country was a wretched one, for the most
part. Arcadia was beloved of shepherds, Bœotia claimed to be dear to
Demeter and Triptolemus; but Arcadia and Bœotia play a very minor part
in Greek history. The rich and brilliant Corinth itself, favoured by
Plutus and Aphrodite, is in this respect only in the second rank. To
which city belongs the chief glory? To Athens, where the fields and
olive-groves were perpetually covered with grey dust, and where statues
and books were the main articles of commerce; to Sparta also, a city
buried in a narrow valley, at the foot of a mass of rocks which Victory
had to cross to find her out.
And what of the miserable quarter of Latium that was chosen for the
foundation of Rome? The little river Tiber, on whose banks it lay,
flowed down to an almost unknown coast, that no Greek or Phœnician ship
had ever touched, save by chance; was it through her situation that Rome
became the mistress of the world? No sooner did the whole world lie at
the feet of the Roman eagles, than the central government found that its
capital was ill-placed; and the long series of insults to the eternal
city began. The early emperors had their eyes turned towards Greece, and
nearly always lived there. When Tiberius was in Italy he stayed at
Capri, a point facing the two halves of the empire. His successors went
to Antioch. Some of them, in view of the importance of Gaul, went as far
north as Treves. Finally, an edict took away even the title of chief
city from Rome and conferred it on Milan. If the Romans made some stir
in the world, it was certainly in spite of the position of the district
from which their first armies issued forth.
Coming down to modern history I am overwhelmed by the multitude of facts
that support my theory. I see prosperity suddenly leaving the
Mediterranean coasts, a clear proof that it was not inseparably attached
to them. The great commercial cities of the Middle Ages grew up in
places where no political philosopher of an earlier time would have
thought of founding them. Novgorod rose in the midst of an ice-bound
land; Bremen on a coast almost as cold. The Hanseatic towns in the
centre of Germany were built in regions plunged, as it seemed, in
immemorial slumber. Venice emerged from a deep gulf in the Adriatic. The
balance of political power was shifted to places scarcely heard of
before, but now gleaming with a new splendour. In France the whole
strength was concentrated to the north of the Loire, almost beyond the
Seine. Lyons, Toulouse, Narbonne, Marseilles, and Bordeaux fell from the
high dignity to which they had been called by the Romans. It was Paris
that became the important city, Paris, which was too far from the sea
for purposes of trade, and which would soon prove too near to escape the
invasions of the Norman pirates. In Italy, towns formerly of the lowest
rank became greater than the city of the Popes. Ravenna rose from its
marshes, Amalfi began its long career of power. Chance, I may remark,
had no part in these changes, which can all be explained by the
presence, at the given point, of a victorious or powerful race. In other
words, a nation does not derive its value from its position; it never
has and never will. On the contrary, it is the people which has always
given—and always will give—to the land its moral, economic, and
political value.
I add, for the sake of clearness, that I have no wish to deny the
importance of geographical position for certain towns, whether they are
trade-centres, ports, or capitals. The arguments that have been brought
forward,[29] in the case of Constantinople and especially of Alexandria,
are indisputable. There certainly exist different points which we may
call “the keys of the earth.” Thus we may imagine that when the isthmus
of Panama is pierced, the power holding the town that is yet to be built
on the hypothetical canal, might play a great part in the history of the
world. But this part will be played well, badly, or even not at all,
according to the intrinsic excellence of the people in question. Make
Chagres into a large city, let the two seas meet under its walls, and
assume that you are free to fill it with what settlers you will. Your
choice will finally determine the future of the new town. Suppose that
Chagres is not exactly in the best position to develop all the
advantages coming from the junction of the two oceans; then, if the race
is really worthy of its high calling, it will remove to some other place
where it may in perfect freedom work out its splendid destiny.[30]