formation of nations and States by the configuration of the surface
of the dry land--that is to say, by mountain chains and by river
valleys. The only natural boundaries, besides seas, are mountains and
deserts. Rivers, though convenient frontier lines for the politician
or the geographer, are not natural boundaries, but rather unite than
dissever those who dwell on their opposite banks. Thus the great
natural boundaries in Asia have been the deserts of Eastern Persia,
of Turkestan, and of Northern Arabia, with the long Himalayan chain
and the savage ranges apparently parallel to the Irawadi River, which
separate the easternmost corner of India and Burmah from South-Western
China. To a less extent the Altai and Thian Shan, and, to a still
smaller extent, the Taurus in Eastern Asia Minor, have tended to divide
peoples and States. The Caucasus, which fills the space between two
great seas, has been at all times an extremely important factor in
history, severing the nomad races of Scythia from the more civilised
and settled inhabitants of the valleys of the Phasis and the Kura.
Even to-day, when the Tsar holds sway on both sides of this chain, it
constitutes a weakness in the position of Russia, and it helps to keep
the Georgian races to the south from losing their identity in the mass
of Russian subjects.
[Sidenote: The Place of Mountains in History]
Without the Alps and the Pyrenees, the annals of Europe must have been
entirely different. The Alps, even more than the Italian climate,
proved too much for the Romano-Germanic Emperors of the Middle Ages,
who tried to rule both to the north and to the south of this wide
mountain region. The Pyrenees have not only kept in existence the
Basque people, but have repeatedly frustrated the attempts of monarchs
to dominate both France and Spain. The mass of high moorland country
which covers most of the space between the Solway Firth and the lower
course of the Tweed has had something to do with the formation of
a Scottish nation out of singularly diverse elements. The rugged
mountains of Northern and Western Scotland, and the similar though less
extensive hill country of Wales, have enabled Celtic races to retain
their language and character in both these regions.
[Sidenote: What Steam-power has Done]
On the other hand, the vast open plains of Russia have allowed the
Slavs of the districts which lie round Novgorod, Moscow, and Kiev to
spread out among and Russify the Lithuanian and Finnish, to some extent
also the Tartar, races, who originally held by far the larger part of
that area. So, too, the Ural range, which, though long, is neither
high nor difficult to pass, has opposed no serious obstacle to the
overflow of population from Russia into Siberia. That in North America
the Alleghanies have had a comparatively slight effect upon political
history, although they did for a time arrest the march of colonisation,
is due partly to the fact that they are a mass of comparatively low
parallel ranges, with fertile valleys between, partly to the already
advanced civilisation of the Anglo-Americans of the Atlantic seaboard,
who found no great difficulty in making their way across, against the
uncertain resistance of small and non-cohesive Indian tribes. A far
more formidable natural barrier is formed between the Mississippi
Valley and the Pacific slope by the Rocky Mountains, with the deserts
of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. But the discovery of steam power
has so much reduced the importance of this barrier that it does not
seriously threaten the maintenance of a united American republic.
In one respect the New World presents a remarkable contrast to the
Old. The earliest civilisations of the latter seem to have sprung up
in fertile river valleys. Those of the former are found not on the
banks of streams like the Nile or Euphrates, but on elevated plateaux,
where the heat of a tropical sun is mitigated by height above sea
level. It was in the lofty lake basin of Tezcuco and Mexico, and on the
comparatively level ground which lies between the parallel ranges of
the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, that American races had reached their
finest intellectual development, not in the far richer, but also hotter
and less healthy river valleys of Brazil, or (unless we are to except
Yucatan) on the scorching shores of the Caribbean Sea. Nature was in
those regions too strong for man, and held him down in savagery.
[Sidenote: How Nature fixes Sites of Cities]
In determining the courses of great rivers, Nature has determined the
first highways of trade and fixed the sites of many cities. Nearly all
the considerable towns founded more than three centuries ago owe their
origin either to their possessing good havens on the sea-coast, or to
the natural strength of their position on a defensible hill, or to
their standing close to a navigable river. Marseilles, Alexandria, New
York, Rio de Janeiro, are instances of the first; Athens, Edinburgh,
Prague, Moscow, of the second; Bordeaux, Cologne, New Orleans,
Calcutta, of the third. Rome and London, Budapest, and Lyons combine
the advantages of the second with those of the third. This function of
rivers in directing the lines of commerce and the growth of centres
of population has become much less important since the construction
of railroads, yet population tends to stay where it has been first
gathered, so that the fluviatile cities are likely to retain their
preponderance. Thus the river is as important to the historian as is
the mountain range or the sea.
[Sidenote: Climate and Commerce]
From the physical features of a country it is an easy transition to
the capacities of the soil. The character of the products of a region
determines the numbers of its inhabitants and the kind of life they
lead. A land of forests breeds hunters or lumbermen; a land of pasture,
which is too rough or too arid or too sterile for tillage, supports
shepherds or herdsmen probably more or less nomadic. Either kind of
land supports inhabitants few in proportion to its area. Fertile and
well-watered regions rear a denser, a more settled, and presumably a
more civilised population. Norway and Tyrol, Tibet and Wyoming, and the
Orange River Colony, can never become so densely peopled as Bengal or
Illinois or Lombardy, yet the fisheries of its coast and the seafaring
energy of its people have sensibly increased the population of Norway.
Thus he who knows the climate and the productive capacity of the
soil of any given country can calculate its prospects of prosperity.
Political causes may, of course, intervene. Asia Minor and the Valley
of the Euphrates, regions once populous and flourishing, are now thinly
inhabited and poverty-stricken because they are ruled by the Turks.
But these cases are exceptional. Bengal and Lombardy and Egypt have
supported large populations under all kinds of government. The products
of each country tend, moreover, to establish definite relations between
it and other countries, and do this all the more as population,
commerce, and the arts advance. When England was a great wool-growing
and wool-exporting country, her wool export brought her into close
political connection with the wool-manufacturing Flemish towns. She is
now a cotton-manufacturing country, needing cotton which she cannot
grow at all, and consuming wheat which she does not grow in sufficient
quantities. Hence she is in close commercial relations with the United
States on one side, which give her most of her cotton and much of her
wheat, and with India, from which she gets both these articles, and to
which she exports a large part of her manufactured cotton goods.
[Sidenote: Common Needs make for Peace]
So Rome, because she needed the corn of Egypt, kept Egypt under a
specially careful administration. The rest of her corn came from
Sicily and North Africa, and the Vandal conquest of North Africa dealt
a frightful blow to the declining Empire. In these cases the common
interest of sellers and buyers makes for peace, but in other cases
the competition of countries desiring to keep commerce to themselves
occasions war. The Spanish and Dutch fought over the trade to India in
the earlier part of the seventeenth century, when the Portuguese Indies
belonged to Spain, as the English and French fought in the eighteenth.
And a nation, especially an insular nation, whose arable soil is not
large enough or fertile enough to provide all the food it needs, has
a powerful inducement either to seek peace or else to be prepared for
maritime war. If such a country does not grow enough corn or meat at
home, she must have a navy strong enough to make sure that she will
always be able to get these necessaries from abroad. Attica did not
produce all the grain needed to feed the Athenians, so they depended on
the corn ships which came down from the Euxine, and were practically at
the mercy of an enemy who could stop those ships.
Of another natural source of wealth, the fisheries on the coast of
a country, no more need be said than that they have been a frequent
source of quarrels and even of war. The recognition of the right of
each state to the exclusive control and enjoyment of the sea for three
miles off its shores has reduced, but not entirely removed, the causes
of friction between the fishermen of different countries.
[Sidenote: Minerals and Civilisation]
Until recently, the surface of the soil was a far more important source
of wealth than was that which lies beneath the surface. There were
iron mines among the Chalybes on the Asiatic coast of the Euxine in
ancient times; there were silver mines here and there, the most famous
being those at Laurium, from which the Athenians drew large revenues,
gold mines in Spain and Dacia, copper mines in Elba, tin mines in the
south-west corner of Britain. But the number of persons employed in
mining and the industries connected therewith was relatively small both
in the ancient world and, indeed, down till the close of the eighteenth
century. The immense development of coal-mining and of iron-working
in connection therewith has now doubled, trebled, or quadrupled the
population of large areas in Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, and
the United States, adding vastly to the wealth of these countries
and stimulating in them the growth of many mechanical arts. This new
population is quite different in character from the agricultural
peasantry who in earlier days formed the principal substratum of
society. Its appearance has changed the internal politics of these
countries, disturbing the old balance of forces and accelerating the
progress of democratic principles.
[Illustration: THE PLACE OF MOUNTAINS IN HISTORY: NATURE’S BARRIERS TO
MAN’S EXPANSION
Without the Alps the annals of Europe must have been entirely
different. The mountains were too much for the emperors of the
Middle Ages, although Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general,
succeeded in crossing them two centuries before Christ, a
feat which Napoleon repeated 2,000 years later. Our engraving
illustrates Napoleon crossing the Alps.
]
Nor have minerals failed to affect the international relations of
peoples and States. It was chiefly for the precious metals that the
Spaniards explored the American Continent and conquered Mexico and
Peru. It was for the sake of capturing the ships bringing those metals
back to Europe that the English sea-rovers made their way to the
American coasts and involved England in wars with Spain. It was the
discovery in 1885 of extensive auriferous strata unexampled in the
certainty of their yield that drew a swarm of foreign immigrants into
the Transvaal, whence arose those difficulties between them and the
Dutch inhabitants previously established there which, coupled with the
action of the wealthy owners of the mines, led at last to the war of
1899 between Britain and the two South African Republics.
[Sidenote: Man’s Fight with Nature]
The productive capacity of a country is, however, in one respect very
different from those great physical features--such as temperature,
rainfall, coast configuration, surface character, geological structure,
and river system--which have been previously noted. Those features are
permanent qualities which man can affect only to a limited extent,
as when he reduces the rainfall a little by cutting down forests, or
increases it by planting them, or as when he unites an isle, like
that of Cadiz, to the mainland, cuts through an isthmus, like that
of Corinth, or clears away the bar at a river mouth, as that of the
Mississippi has been cleared.
[Sidenote: Exhausting the Mineral Wealth]
But the natural products of a country may be exhausted and even
the productive capacity of its soil diminished. Constant tillage,
especially if the same crop be raised and no manure added, will wear
out the richest soils. This has already happened in parts of Western
America. Still the earth is there; and with rest and artificial help
it will recover its strength. But timber destroyed cannot always be
induced to grow again, or at least not so as to equal the vigour
of primeval forests. Wild animals, once extirpated, are gone for
ever. The buffalo and beaver of North America, the beautiful lynxes
of South Africa and some of its large ruminants, are irrecoverably
lost for the purposes of human use, just as much as the dinornis,
though a few individuals may be kept alive as specimens. So, too, the
mineral resources of a country are not only consumable, but obviously
irreplaceable. Already some of the smaller coalfields of Europe have
been worked out, while in others it has become necessary to sink much
deeper shafts, at an increasing cost. There is not much tin left in
Cornwall, not much gold in the gravel deposits of Northern California.
The richest known goldfield of the world, that of the Transvaal
Witwatersrand, can hardly last more than thirty or forty years. Thus in
a few centuries the productive capacity of many regions may have become
quite different from what it is now, with grave consequences to their
inhabitants.
These are some of the ways in which Nature affects those economic,
social, and political conditions of the life of man the changes in
which make up history. As we have seen, that which Nature gives to
man is always the same, in so far as Nature herself is always the
same--an expression which is more popular than accurate, for Nature
herself--that is to say, not the laws of Nature, but the physical
environment of man on this planet--is in reality always changing. It is
true that this environment changes so slowly that a thousand years may
be too short a period in which man can note and record some forms of
change--such, for instance, as that by which the temperature of Europe
became colder during the approach of the glacial period and warmer
during its recession--while ten thousand years may be too short to note
any diminution in the heat which the sun pours upon the earth, or in
the store of oxygen which the earth’s atmosphere holds.
[Sidenote: Progress of Modern Invention]
[Sidenote: Man Cannot Disregard Nature]
But as we have also seen, the relation to man of Nature’s gifts
differs from age to age as man himself becomes different, and as his
power of using these gifts increases, or his need of them becomes
either less or greater. Every invention alters those relations. Water
power became less relatively valuable when steam was applied to the
generation of motive force. It has become more valuable with the new
applications of electricity. With the discovery of mineral dyes, indigo
and cochineal are now less wanted than they were. With the invention
of the pneumatic tyre for bicycles and carriages, caoutchouc is more
wanted. Mountains have become, since the making of railways, less of
an obstacle to trade than they were, and they have also become more
available as health resorts. Political circumstances may interfere
with the ordinary and normal action of natural phenomena. A race may
be attracted to or driven into a region for which it is not physically
suited, as Europeans have gone to the West Indies, and negroes were
once carried into New York and Pennsylvania. The course of trade which
Nature prescribes between different countries may be hampered or
stopped by protective tariffs; but in these cases Nature usually takes
her eventual revenges. They are instances which show, not that man can
disregard her, but that when he does so, he does so to his own loss.
It would be easy to add further illustrations, but those already given
are sufficient to indicate how multiform and pervading is the action
upon man of the physical environment, or in other words, how in all
countries, and at all times, geography is the necessary foundation
of history, so that neither the course of a nation’s growth, nor its
relations with other nations, can be grasped by one who has not come to
understand the climate, surface, and products of the country wherein
that nation dwells.
[Sidenote: There is no Unmixed Race left]
This conception of the relation of geography to history is, as has been
said, the leading idea of the present work, and has furnished the main
lines which it follows. It deals with history in the light of physical
environment. Its ground plan, so to speak, is primarily geographical,
and secondarily chronological. But there is one difficulty in the way
of such a scheme, and of the use of such a ground plan, which cannot
be passed over. That difficulty is suggested by the fact already
noted--that hardly any considerable race, and possibly no great nation,
now inhabits the particular part of the earth’s surface on which it was
dwelling when a history begins. Nearly every people has either migrated
bodily from one region to another, or has received such large infusions
of immigrants from other regions as to have become practically a new
people. Hence it is rare to find any nation now living under the
physical conditions which originally moulded its character, or the
character of some at least of its component elements. And hence it
follows that when we study the qualities, aptitudes, and institutions
of a nation in connection with the land it inhabits, we must always
have regard not merely to the features of that land, but also to those
of the land which was its earlier dwelling-place. Obviously, this
brings a disturbing element into the study of the relations between
land and people, and makes the whole problem a far more complicated one
than it appeared at first sight.
[Sidenote: Nature’s Race Factory]
Where a people has migrated from a country whose physical conditions
were similar to those under which its later life is spent, or where it
had reached only a comparatively low stage of economic and political
development before the migration, the difficulties arising from this
source are not serious. The fact that the English came into Britain
from the lands round the mouth of the Elbe is not very material to
an inquiry into their relations to their new home, because climate
and soil were similar, and the emigrants were a rude, warlike race.
But when we come to the second migration of the English, from Britain
to North America, the case is altogether different. Groups of men
from a people which had already become highly civilised, had formed
a well-marked national character, and had created a body of peculiar
institutions, planted themselves in a country whose climate and
physical features are widely diverse from those of Britain.
If, for the sake of argument, we assume the Algonquin aborigines of
Atlantic North America as they were in A.D. 1600 to have been the
legitimate product of their physical environment--I say “for the
sake of argument,” because it may be alleged that other forces than
those of physical environment contributed to form them--what greater
contrast can be imagined than the contrast between the inhabitants
of New England in this present year and the inhabitants of the same
district three centuries earlier, as Nature, and Nature alone, had
turned them out of her factory? Plainly, therefore, the history of the
United States cannot, so far as Nature and geography are concerned,
be written with regard solely, or even chiefly, to the conditions of
North American nature. The physical environment in which the English
immigrants found themselves on that continent has no doubt affected
their material progress and the course of their politics during the
three centuries that have elapsed since settlements were founded in
Virginia and on Massachusetts Bay.
[Sidenote: Beginnings of Race History]
But it is not to that environment, but to earlier days, and especially
to the twelve centuries during which their ancestors lived in England,
that their character and institutions are to be traced. Thus the
history of the American people begins in the forests of Germany,
where the foundations of their polity were laid, and is continued in
England, where they set up kingdoms, embraced Christianity, became one
nation, received an influx of Celtic, Danish, and Norman-French blood,
formed for themselves that body of customs, laws, and institutions
which they transplanted to the new soil of America, and most of which,
though changed and always changing, they still retain. The same thing
is true of the Spaniards (as also of the Portuguese) in Central
and South America. The difference between the development of the
Hispano-Americans and that of their English neighbours to the north is
not wholly, or even mainly, due to the different physical conditions
under which the two sets of colonists have lived.
It is due to the different antecedent history of the two races. So a
history of America must be a history not only of America, but of the
Spaniards, Portuguese, French, and English--one ought in strictness
to add of the negroes also--before they crossed the Atlantic. The only
true Americans, the only Americans for whom American nature can be
deemed answerable, are the aboriginal red men whom we, perpetuating the
mistake of Columbus, still call Indians.
[Sidenote: Geography as a Basis of History]
This objection to the geographical scheme of history writing is no
doubt serious when a historical treatise is confined to one particular
country or continent, as in the instance I have taken of the Continent
of North America. It is, however, less formidable in a universal
history, such as the present work, because, by referring to another
volume of the series, the reader will find what he needs to know
regarding the history of the Spaniards, English, and French in those
respective European homes where they have grown to be that which they
were when, with religion, slaughter, and slavery in their train, they
descended upon the shores of America.
Accordingly the difficulty I have pointed out does not disparage the
idea and plan of writing universal history on a geographical basis.
It merely indicates a caution needed in applying that plan, and a
condition indispensable to its utility--viz., the regard that must be
had to the stage of progress at which a people has arrived when it is
subjected to an environment different from that which had in the first
instance helped to form its type.
THE GROWTH OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
We have now considered some of the ways in which a universal history,
written with special reference to the physical phenomena of the earth
as geographical science presents them, may bring into strong relief
one large and permanent set of influences which determine the progress
or retrogression of each several branch of mankind. Upon the other
principles which preside over and direct the composition of such a
work, not much need be said. They are, of course, in the main, those
which all competent historians will follow in writing the history of
any particular people.
But a universal history which endeavours to present in a short compass
a record of the course of events in all regions and among all peoples,
since none can safely be omitted, is specially exposed to two dangers.
One is that of becoming sketchy and viewy. When a large object has to
be dealt with on a small scale, it is natural to sum up in a few broad
generalisations masses of facts which cannot be described or examined
in detail. Broad generalisations are valuable when they proceed from a
thoroughly trained mind--valuable, even if not completely verifiable,
because they excite reflection. But it is seldom possible to make them
exact. They necessarily omit most of the exceptions, and thus suggest a
greater uniformity than exists.
[Illustration:
Neurdein