INFLUENCES OF ON THE BASIS OF RATZEL'S SYSTEM OF ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY BY ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE AUTHOB OF "AMERICAN BISTORT AND ITS GEOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS" NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY LONDON: CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD. COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY August, 1923 PRINTED I\ 7 THE U. S. A. SRLE TO THE MEMORY OF FRIEDRICH RATZEL Hither, as to their fountain, other stars Repairing, in their golden urns draw light MILTON. ^O^ PREFACE THE present book, as originally planned over seven years ago, was to be a simplified paraphrase or restatement of the principles embodied in Friedrich Ratzel's Anthropo-Geog- raphie. The German work is difficult reading even for Ger- mans. To most English and American students of geogra- phic environment it is a closed book, a treasure-house bolted and barred. Ratzel himself realized "that any English form could not be a literal translation, but must be adapted to the Anglo-Celtic and especially to the Anglo-American mind." The writer undertook, with Ratzel's approval, to make such an adapted restatement of the principles, with a view to making them pass current where they are now unknown. But the initial stages of the work revealed the necessity of a radical modification of the original plan. Ratzel performed the great service of placing anthropo- geography on a secure scientific basis. He had his fore- runners in Montesquieu, Alexander von Humboldt, Buckle, Ritter, Kohl, Peschel and others ; but he first investigated the subject from the modern scientific point of view, constructed his system according to the principles of evolution, and based his conclusions on world-wide inductions, for which his pre- decessors did not command the data. To this task he brought thorough training as a naturalist, broad reading and travel, a profound and original intellect, and amazing fertility of thought. Yet the field which he had chosen was so vast, and its material so complex, that even his big mental grasp could not wholly compass it. His conclusions, therefore, are not al- ways exhaustive or final. Moreover, the very fecundity of his ideas often left him no time to test the validity of his principles. He enunciates one brilliant generalization after another. Sometimes he re- veals the mind of a seer or poet, throwing out conclusions which are highly suggestive, on the face of them convincing, vi PREFACE but which on examination prove untenable, or at best must be set down as unproven or needing qualification. But these were just the slag from the great furnace of his mind, slag not always worthless. Brilliant and far-reaching as were his conclusions, he did not execute a well-ordered plan. Rather he grew with his work, and his work and its problems grew with him. He took a mountain-top view of things, kept his eyes always on the far horizon, and in the splendid sweep of his scientific conceptions sometimes overlooked the details near at hand. Herein lay his greatness and his limitation. These facts brought the writer face to face with a serious problem. Ratzel's work needed to be tested, verified. The only solution was to go over the whole field from the begin- ning, making research for the data as from the foundation, and checking off the principles against the facts. This was especially necessary, because it was not always obvious that Ratzel had based his inductions on sufficiently broad data; and his published work had been open to the just criticism of inadequate citation of authorities. It was imperative, moreover, that any investigation of geographic environment for the English-speaking world should meet its public well supported both by facts and authorities, because that public had not previously known a Ritter or a Peschel. The writer's own investigation revealed the fact that Rat- ael's principles of anthropo-geography did not constitute a complete, well-proportioned system. Some aspects of the subject had been developed exhaustively, these of course the most important ; but others had been treated inadequately, others were merely a hint or an inference, and yet others were represented by an hiatus. It became necessary, there- for, to work up certain important themes with a thorough- ness commensurate with their significance, to reduce the scale of others, and to fill up certain gaps with original contribu- tions to the science. Always it was necessary to clarify the original statement, where that was adhered to, and to throw it into the concrete form of expression demanded by the Anglo-Saxon mind. One point more. The organic theory of society and state permeates the Anthropo-geographie, because Ratzel formu- PREFACE vii lated his principles at a time when Herbert Spencer exercised a wide influence upon European thought. This theory, now generally abandoned by sociologists, had to be eliminated from any restatement of Ratzel's system. Though it was applied in the original often in great detail, it stood there nevertheless rather as a scaffolding around the finished edi- fice; and the stability of the structure after this scaffolding is removed shows how extraneous to the whole it was. The theory performed, however, a great service in impressing Ratzel's mind with the life-giving connection between land and people. The writer's own method of research has been to compare typical peoples of all races and all stages of cultural devel- opment, living under similar geographic conditions. If these peoples of different ethnic stocks but similar environments manifested similar or related social, economic or historical development, it was reasonable to infer that such similarities were due to environment and not to race. Thus, by exten- sive comparison, the race factor in these problems of two unknown quantities was eliminated for certain large classes of social and historical phenomena. The writer, moreover, has purposely avoided definitions, formulas, and the enunciation of hard-and-fast rules ; and has refrained from any effort to delimit the field or define the relation of this new science of anthropo-geography to the older sciences. It is unwise to put tight clothes on a grow- ing child. The eventual form and scope of the science, the definition and organization of its material must evolve grad- ually, after long years and many efforts of many workers in the field. The eternal flux of Nature runs through an- thropo-geography, and warns against precipitate or rigid conclusions. But its laws are none the less well founded be- cause they do not lend themselves to mathematical finality of statement. For this reason the writer speaks of geographic factors and influences, shuns the word geographic determi- nant, and speaks with extreme caution of geographic control. The present volume is offered to the public with a deep sense of its inadequacy ; with the realization that some of its principles may have to be modified or their emphasis altered viii PREFACE after wider research; but also with the hope that this effort may make the way easier for the scholar who shall some day write the ideal treatise on anthropo-geography. In my work on this book I have only one person to thank, the great master who was my teacher and friend dur- ing his life, and after his death my inspiration. ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE. LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY. January, 1911. CONTENTS PREFACE . CHAPTER I. OPERATION OF GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY Man a product of the earth's surface Persistent effect of geo- graphic barriers Recurrent influences of nature-made high- ways Regions of historical similarity Persistence of climatic influences Relation of geography to history Mul- tiplicity of geographic factors Evolution of geographic relations Interplay of geographic factors Direct and indirect effects of environment Indirect effects in differ- entiation of colonial peoples General importance of in- direct effects Time element Previous habitat Trans- planted religions Partial response to environment The larger conception of environment Unity of the earth and the human race 1 CHAPTER II. CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES Four classes of influences Physical effects of environment Stat- ure and environment Effects of dominant activities Physical effects of climate Pigmentation in relation to heat and light Pigmentation and altitude Difficulty of generalization from geographic distribution Psychical ef- fects In Religion In mind and character In language The great man in history Economic and social effects Size of the social group Effects on movements of peoples Segregation and accessibility Change of habitat 32 CHAPTER III. SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO THE LAND People and land Political geography Political versus social geography Land basis of society Morgan 's societas Land bond in primitive hunter tribes In fisher tribes In pastoral tribes Land and state Strength of the land bond in the state Evolution of land tenure Land and food supply Advance from natural to artificial basis of subsistence Land basis in relation to agriculture Migra- tory and sedentary agriculture Geographic checks to pro- gress in economic and social development Native animal and plant life as factors in progress Density of population under different cultural and geographic conditions Ita relation to government Territorial expansion of the statt Artificial checks to population Extra-territorial rela- tions of state and people Theory of progress from the standpoint of geography Progressive dependence of man upon nature 51 x CONTENTS CHAPTER IV. MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES IN THKTR GEOGRAPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE Universality of such movements The name Historical Movement Its evolution Its importance in history Geographical in- terpretation of historical movement Mobility of primitive peoples Civilization and mobility Migration and ethnic mingling Cultural modification during migration The transit land War as form of historical movement Slavery Military colonies Withdrawal and flight Natural re- gions of asylum Emigration and colonization Commerce as a form of historical movement Movements due to reli- gion Historical movement and race distribution Zonal distribution Movements to like or better geographic con- ditions Their direction Return movements Regions of attraction and repulsion Psychical influences in certain movements Two results of historical movement Differen- tiation and area Differentiation and isolation Geographic conditions of heterogeneity and homogeneity Assimi- lation Elimination of unfit variants through historical movement Geographical origins 74 CHAPTER V. GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION The importance of geographical location Content of the term location Intercontinental location Natural versus vicinal location Naturally defined location Vicinal location Vicinal groups of similar or diverse race and culture Thalassic vicinal location Complementary locations Con- tinuous and scattered location Central versus peripheral location Mutual relations between center and periphery Inland and coastward expansion Reaction between center and periphery Periphery in colonization Dominant historical side Change of historical front Contrasted historical sides One-sided historical location Scattered location Due to adverse geographic conditions leland way stations on maritime routes Scattered location of primitive peoples Ethnic islands of expansion and decline Discontinuous distribution Contrasted location Geo- graphical polarity Geographical marks of growth and de- cline Interpretation of scattered and marginal location Contrast between ethnic islands of growth and decline. . . . 129 CHAPTER VI. GEOGRAPHICAL AREA The size of the earth Relation of area to life Area and differ- entiation The struggle for space National area an in- dex of social and political development The Oikoumene The unity of the human species in relation to the earth Isolation and differentiation Monotonous race type of small area Wide race distribution and inner diversities CONTENTS xi Large area a guarantee of racial or national permanence Weakness of small states Protection of large area to primitive peoples Contrast of large and small areas in bio-geography Political domination of large areas Area and literature Small geographic base of primitive so- cieties Influence of small, confined areas The process of territorial growth Historical advance from small to large areas Gradations in area and in development Prelim- inaries to ethnic and political expansion Significance of sphere of influence or activity Nature of expansion in new and old countries Relation of ethnic to political ex- pansion" Relation of people and state to political bound- ary Expansion of civilization Cultural advantages of large political area Politico-economic advantages Polit- ical area and the national horizon National estimates of area Limitations of small tribal conceptions Evolution of territorial policies Colonial expansion The mind of colonials 168 CHAPTER VII. GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES The boundary zone in Nature Oscillating boundaries of the habitable area of the earth Wallace's Line a typical boundary zone Boundaries as limits of expansion Bound- ary zone as index of growth or decline Breadth of boundary zone Broad frontier zones of active expansion Value of barrier boundaries The sea as the absolute boundary Natural boundaries as bases of ethnic and po- litical boundaries Primitive waste boundaries Alien in- trusions into border wastes Politico-economic significance of the waste boundary Common boundary districts Tariff free zones Boundary zones of mingled race ele- ments Assimilation of civilization in boundary zones Relation of ethnic and cultural assimilation The border zone of assimilation in political expansion Tendency to- ward defection along political frontiers The spirit of colonial frontiers Free border states as political survivals Guardians of the marches Lawless citizens deported to political frontiers Drift of lawless elements to the fron- tiers Asylums beyond the border 204 CHAPTER VIII. 7 COAST PEOPLES The coast a zone of transition The inner edge Shifting of the inner edge Outer edge in original settlement In early navigation In colonization Inland advance of colonies Interpenetration of land and sea Ratio of shore-line to area Criticism of the formula Accessibility of coasts from hinterland Accessibility of coasts from the sea Embayed coasts Contrasted coastal belts Evolution of ports Influence of offshore islands Previous habitat of xii CONTENTS coast-dwellers Habitability of coasts as a factor in mari- time development Geographic conditions for brilliant maritime development Scope and importance of seaward expansion Ethnic contrast between coast and interior peoples Ethnic amalgamations of coastlands Lingua franca a product of coasts Coast-dwellers as middlemen Differentiation of coast from inland people Early civi- lization of coasts Progress from thalassic to oceanic coasts Importance of geographic location of coasts His- torical decline of certain coasts Complex interplay of geographic factors in coastlands 242 CHAPTER IX. OCEANS AND ENCLOSED SEAS The water a factor in man 's mobility Oceans and seas the fac- tor of union in universal history Origin of navigation Primitive forms Relation of river to marine navigation Retarded and advanced navigation Geographic condi- tions in Polynesia Mediterranean versus Atlantic seaman- ship Three geographic stages of maritime development Enclosed seas as areas of ethnic and cultural assimilation Assimilation facilitated by ethnic kinship Importance of zonal and continental location of enclosed seas Thalas- sic character of the Indian Ocean Limitations of small area in enclosed seas Successive maritime periods in his- tory Contrasted historical roles of northern and southern hemispheres Size of the ocean Neutrality of the seas Mare dausum and Mare liberum 292 CHAPTER X. MAN'S RELATION TO THE WATER The protection of a water frontier Pile villages of ancient times Modern pile dwellings Their geographic distribution River-dwellers in old and popular lands Man 's encroach- ment upon the sea by reclamation of land The struggle with the water Mound villages in river flood-plains Social and political gain by control of the water A factor in early civilization of arid lands The economy of the water Fisheries Factors in maritime expansion Fisheries as nurseries of seamen Anthropo-geographic importance of navigation 318 CHAPTER XL THE ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY OF RIVERS Rivers as intermediaries between land and sea Sea navigation merges into river navigation Historical importance of seas and oceans influenced by their debouching streams Lack of coast articulations supplied by rivers River highways as basis of commercial preeminence Importance of rivers in large countries Rivers as highways of expansion De- terminants of routes in arid or semi-arid lands Increasing CONTENTS xiii historical importance of rivers from source to mouth Value of location at hydrographic centers Effect of current upon trade and expansion Importance of mouth to up- stream people Prevention of monopoly of river mouths Motive for canals in lower course Watershed canals for extension of inland waterways Eivers and railroads Natural unity of every river system In arid lands as com- mon source of water supply Tendency towards ethnic and cultural unity in a river valley Identity of country with river valley Rivers as boundaries of races and peoples Rivers as political boundaries Fluvial settle- ments and peoples Boatman tribes or castes River is- lands as protected sites River and lake islands as robber strongholds River peninsulas River islands as sites of trading posts and colonies Swamps as barriers and boundaries Swamps as regions of survivals Swamps as places of refuge The spirit of the marshes Economic and political importance of lakes Lakes as nuclei of states Lakes as fresh-water seas .............................. 336 CHAPTER CONTINENTS AND THEIR PENINSULAS Insularity of the land-masses Classification of land-masses ac- cording to size and location Effect of the size of land- masses Independence due to location versus independence due to size Continental convergence and ethnic kinship Africa's location The Atlantic abyss Geographical character of the Pacific Pacific affinities of North Amer- ica The Atlantic face of America as the infant Orient of the world The Atlantic abyss in the movements of peoples Races and continents Contrast of the northern and southern continents Effects of continental structure upon historical development Structure of North and South America Cultural superiority of Pacific slope Indians Coast articulations of continents Importance of size in continental articulations Peninsular conditions most favor- able to historical development The continental base of peninsulas Continental base a zone of transition Conti- nental base the scene of invasion and war Peninsular ex- tremities as areas of isolation Ethnic unity of penin- sulas Peninsulas as intermediaries ..................... 380 CHAPTER xrn. ISLAND PEOPLES Physical relationship between islands and peninsulas Character of insular flora and fauna Paradoxical influences of island habitat on man Conservative and radical tendencies born of isolation and accessibility Islands as nurseries and dis- seminators of distinctive civilizations Limitation of small area in insular history Sources of ethnic stock of islands on nearest mainland. Ethnic divergence with increased xiv CONTENTS isolation Differentiation of peoples and civilizations in islands Differentiation of language Unification of race in islands Remoter sources of island populations Double sources Mixed population of small thalassic isles Signifi- cant location of island way stations Thalassic islands as goals of maritime expansion Political detachability of islands Insular weakness based upon small area Island fragments of broken empires Area and location as factors in political autonomy of islands Historical effects of island isolation in primitive retardation Later stimulation of development Excessive isolation Protection of an is- land environment Islands as places of refuge Islands as places of survival Effects of small area in islands Economic limitations of their small area Dense popula- tion of islands Geographic causes of this density Oceanic climate as factor Relation of density to size Density affected by a focal location for trade Overflow of island population and colonies to the mainland Preco- cious development of island agriculture Intensive tillage Emigration and colonization from islands Recent emi- gration from islands Maritime enterprise as outlet Arti- ficial checks to population Polyandry Infanticide Low valuation of human life 409 CHAPTER XIV. PLAINS, STEPPES AND DESERTS Relief of the sea floor Mean elevations of the continents Distribution of relief Homologous reliefs and homologous histories Anthropo-geography of lowlands Extensive plains unfavorable to early development Conditions for fusion in plains Retardation due to monotonous environ- ment Influence of slight geographic features in plains Plains and political expansion Arid plains Nomadism Pastoral life Pastoral nomads of Arctic plains Histor- ical importance of steppe nomads Mobility of pastoral nomads Seasonal migrations Marauding expeditions Forms of defense against nomad depredations Pastoral life as a training for soldiers Capacity for political or- ganization and consolidation Centralization versus decen- tralization in nomadism Spirit of independence among nomads Resistance to conquest Curtailment of nomadism Supplementary agriculture of pastoral nomadism Irri- gation ancl horticulture Scant diet of nomads Effects of a diminishing water supply Checks to population Trad* of nomads Pastoral nomnds as middlemen Desert mar- kets Nomad industries Arid lands as areas of arrested development Mental and moral qualities of nomads Religion of pastoral nomads 473 CHAPTER XV. MOUNTAIN BARRIERS AND THEIR PASSES Man as part of the mobile envelope of the earth Inaccessibility XV of mountains Mountains as transit regions Transition forms of relief between highlands and lowlands Pied- mont belts as boundary zones Density of population in piedmont belts Piedmont towns and cities Piedmonts as colonial or backwoods frontiers Mountain carriers Power of mountain barriers to block or deflect historical move- ment Significance of mountain valleys Longitudinal val- leys Passes in mountain barriers Breadth of mountain barriers Dominant transmontane routes Height and form of mountain barriers Contrasted accessibility of opposite slopes Political and ethnic effects Persistence of barrier nature Importance of mountain passes Geographic con- ditions affecting the historical importance of passes Passes determine the transmontane routes Navigable river approaches to passes Types of settlement in the valley approaches Pass cities and their markets Pass peoples Their political importance 524 CHAPTER XVI. INFLUENCES OF A MOUNTAIN ENVIRONMENT Zones of altitude Politico-economic value of a varied relief Re- lief and climate Altitude zones of economic and cultural development Altitude and density belts in tropical high- lands Increasing density where altitude confers safety Geographic conditions affecting density of mountain popu- lation Terrace agriculture Its geographical distribution Terrace agriculture in mountainous islands Among sav- age peoples Fertilizing terrace lands Economy of level land Mountain pastures and stock-raising Life and in- dustry of the summer herdsmen Communal ownership of mountain pastures Hay making in high mountains Winter industries of mountain peoples Overpopulation and emigration Preventive checks to increase of popula- tion Religious celibacy Polyandry Marauding tenden- cies in mountaineers Historical consequences of mountain raiding Conquest of mountain regions Political dismem- berment of mountain peoples Types of mountain states Significance of their small size Mountain isolation and differentiation Survival of primitive races in mountains Diversity of peoples and dialects Constriction of moun- tain areas of ethnic survival Isolation and retardation of mountain regions Mental and moral qualities of mountain people 557 CHAPTER XVII. THE INFLUENCES OF CLIMATE UPON MAN Importance of climatic influences Climate in the interplay of geographic factors Its direct and indirect effects Cli- mate determines the habitable area of the earth Effect of climate upon relief and hence upon man Man 's adapta- bility to climatic extremes Temperature as modified by xvi CONTENTS oceans and winds Rainfall Temperature and zonal loca- tion Mutual reactions of contrasted zones Isothermal lines in anthropo-geography Historical effects of com- pressed isotherms Historical effects of slight climatic dif- ferences Their influence upon distribution of immigration Temperature and race temperament Complexity of this problem Monotonous climatic conditions Effects of Arctic cold Effect of monotonous heat The tropics as goals of migration The problem of acclimatization Historical importance of the temperate zone Contrast of the seasons Duration of the seasons Effect of long winters and long summers Zones of culture Temperate zone as cradle of civilization 607 INDEX . 639 LIST OF MAPS. DENSITY OF POPULATION IN THK EASTERN HEMISPHERE 8 DENSITY OP POPULATION IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE 9 POWELL'S MAP OP INDIAN LINGUISTIC STOCKS 54 PRIMITIVE INDIAN STOCKS OP SOUTH AMERICA 101 ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF INDIA 102 ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF ASIA 103 ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF AFRICA 105 DISTRIBUTION OF WILD AND CIVILIZED TRIBES IN THE PHILIPPINES . . 147 DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION IN THE PROVINCE OF FINMARKEN... 153 DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1800 156 THE SLAV-GERMAN BOUNDARY IN EUROPE 223 ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF EUSSIA 225 THE GERMAN NORTH SEA COAST 243 ANCIENT PHOENICIAN AND GREEK COLONIES 251 RIPARIAN VILLAGES OF THE LOWER ST. LAWRENCE 365 LAKE OF THE FOUR FOREST CANTONS 374 THE ANNUAL RAINFALL OF THE WORLD 484 THE CULTURAL REGIONS OF AFRICA AND ARABIA 487 DISTRIBUTION OF KELIGIONS IN THE OLD WORLD 513 DENSITY OF POPULATION IN ITALY 559 MEAN ANNUAL ISOTHERMS AND HEAT BELTS . . . 612 THE INFLUENCES OF GEOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT CHAPTER I THE OPERATION OF GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY MAN is a product of the earth's surface. This means not*** a merely that he is a child of the earth, dust of her dust ; but p * IC that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits, given him his problems of navigation or irrigation, and at the same time whispered hints for their solution. She has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul. On the mountains she has given him leg muscles of iron to climb the slope ; along the coast she has left these weak and flabby, but given him instead vigorous development of chest and arm to handle his paddle or oar. In the river valley she attaches him to the fertile soil, circumscribes his ideas and ambitions by a dull round of calm, exacting duties, narrows his outlook to the cramped horizon of his farm. Up on the wind-swept plateaus, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pas- ture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hard- ship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herd gives him leisure for contemplation, and the wide- ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take on a certain gigantic simplicity ; religion becomes monotheism, God becomes one, unrivalled like the sand of the desert and the grass of the steppe, stretching on and on without break or change. Chew- ing over and over the cud of his simple belief as the one food of his unfed mind, his faith becomes fanaticism ; his big spacial GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY Stability of geographic factors in history. Persistent effect of remoteness. ideas, born of that ceaseless regular wandering, outgrow the land that bred them and bear their legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests. Man can no more be scientifically studied apart from the ground which he tills, or the lands over which he travels, or the seas over which he trades, than polar bear or desert cactus can be understood apart from its habitat. Man's relations to his environment are infinitely more numerous and complex than those of the most highly organized plant or animal. So complex are they that they constitute a legitimate and neces- sary object of special study. The investigation which they receive in anthropology, ethnology, sociology and history is piecemeal and partial, limited as to the race, cultural develop- ment, epoch, country or variety of geographic conditions taken into account. Hence all these sciences, together with history so far as history undertakes to explain the causes of events, fail to reach a satisfactory solution of their problems largely because the geographic factor which enters into them all has not been thoroughly analyzed. Man has been so noisy about the way he has "conquered Nature," and Nature has been so silent in her persistent influence over man, that the geographic factor in the equation of human development has been over- looked. In every problem of history there are two main factors, variously stated as heredity and environment, man and his geographic conditions, the internal forces of race and the ex- ternal forces of habitat. Now the geographic element in the long history of human development has been operating strongly and operating persistently. Herein lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem , plastic, progressive, retrogressive man. History tends to repeat itself largely owing to this steady, unchanging geographic element. If the ancient Roman consul in far-away Britain often assumed an independence of action and initiative unknown in the provincial governors of Gaul, and if, centuries later, Roman Catholicism in England main- tained a similar independence towards the Holy See, both facts GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 3 have their cause in the remoteness of Britain from the center of political or ecclesiastical power in Rome. If the inde- pendence of the Roman consul in Britain was duplicated later by the attitude of the Thirteen Colonies toward England, and again within the young Republic by the headstrong self- reliance, impatient of government authority, which charac- terized the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths in their ag- gressive Indian policy, and led them to make war and conclude treaties for the cession of land like sovereign states ; and if this attitude of independence in the over-mountain men reap- peared in a spirit of political defection looking toward seces- sion from the Union and a new combination with their British neighbor on the Great Lakes or the Spanish beyond the Missis- sippi, these are all the identical effects of geographical remote- ness made yet more remote by barriers of mountain and sea. This is the long reach which weakens the arm of authority, no matter what the race or country or epoch. As with geographical remoteness, so it is with geographical Effect of proximity. The history of the Greek peninsula and the Greek proximity. people, because of their location at the threshold of the Orient, has contained a constantly recurring Asiatic element. This comes out most often as a note of warning; like the motif of Ortrud in the opera of "Lohengrin," it mingles ominously in every chorus of Hellenic enterprise or pzean of Hellenic vic- tory, and finally swells into a national dirge at the Turkish conquest of the peninsula. It comes out in the legendary his- tory of the Argonautic Expedition and the Trojan War; in the arrival of Phoenician Cadmus and Phrygian Pelops in Grecian lands ; in the appearance of Tyrian ships on the coast of the Peloponnesus, where they gather the purple-yielding murex and kidnap Greek women. It appears more conspicu- ously in the Asiatic sources of Greek culture ; more dramatic- ally in the Persian Wars, in the retreat of Xenophon's Ten Thousand, in Alexander's conquest of Asia, and Hellenic domi- nation of Asiatic trade through Syria to the Mediterranean. Again in the thirteenth century the lure of the Levantine trade led Venice and Genoa to appropriate certain islands and promontories of Greece as commercial bases nearer to Asia. In 1396 begins the absorption of Greece into the Asiatic em- GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY Persistent effect of natural barriers. pire of the Turks, the long dark eclipse of sunny Hellas, till it issues from the shadow in 1882 with the achievement of Greek independence. If the factor is not one of geographical location, but a natural barrier, such as a mountain system or a desert, its effect is just as persistent. The upheaved mass of the Car- pathians served to divide the westward moving tide of the Slavs into two streams, diverting one into the maritime plain of northern Germany and Poland, the other into the channel of the Danube Valley which guided them to the Adriatic and the foot of the Alps. This same range checked the westward ad- vance of the mounted Tartar hordes. The Alps long retarded Roman expansion into central Europe, just as they delayed and obstructed the southward advance of the northern bar- barians. Only through the partial breaches in the wall known as passes did the Alps admit small, divided bodies of the invaders, like the Cimbri and Teutons, who arrived, therefore, with weakened power and at intervals, so that the Roman forces had time to gather their strength between successive attacks, and thus prolonged the life of the declining empire. So in the Middle Ages, the Alpine barrier facilitated the resis- tance of Italy to the German emperors, trying to enforce their claim upon this ancient seat of the Holy Roman Empire. It was by river-worn valleys leading to passes in the ridge that Etruscan trader, Roman legion, barbarian horde, and German army crossed the Alpine ranges. To-day well-made highways and railroads converge upon these valley paths and summit portals, and going is easier; but the Alps still collect their toll, now in added tons of coal consumed by engines and in higher freight rates, instead of the ancient imposts of physical exhaustion paid by pack animal and heavily ac- coutred soldier. Formerly these mountains barred the weak and timid ; to-day they bar the poor, and forbid transit to all merchandise of large bulk and small value which can not pay the heavy transportation charges. Similarly* the wide barrier of the Rockies, prior to the opening of the first overland rail- road, excluded all but strong-limbed and strong-hearted pioneers from the fertile valleys of California and Oregon, just as it excludes coal and iron even from the Colorado mines, GEOGRAPHIC FACTQRS IN HISTORY 5 and checks the free movement of laborers to the fields and factories of California, thereby tightening the grip of the labor unions upon Pacific coast industries. As the surface of the earth presents obstacles, so it offers Persistent channels for the easy movement of humanity, grooves whose e direction determines the destination of aimless, unplanned made j. ^_ migrations, and whose termini become, therefore, regions of wa ys. historical importance. Along these nature-made highways his- tory repeats itself. The maritime plain of Palestine has been an established route of commerce and war from the time of Sennacherib to Napoleon. 1 The Danube Valley has admitted to central Europe a long list of barbarian invaders, covering the period from Attila the Hun to the Turkish besiegers of Vienna in 1683. The history of the Danube Valley has been one of warring throngs, of shifting political frontiers, and unassimilated races ; but as the river is a great natural high- wa3 r , every neighboring state wants to front upon it and strives to secure it as a boundary. The movements of peoples constantly recur to these old grooves. The unmarked path of the voyageur's canoe, bring- ing out pelts from Lake Superior to the fur market at Mont- real, is followed to-day by whaleback steamers with their car- goes of Manitoba wheat. To-day the Mohawk depression through the northern Appalachians diverts some of Canada's trade from the Great Lakes to the Hudson, just as in the seventeenth century it enabled the Dutch at New Amsterdam and later the English at Albany to tap the fur trade of Canada's frozen forests. Formerly a line of stream and por- tage, it carries now the Erie Canal and New York Central Railroad. 2 Similarly the narrow level belt of land extending from the mouth of the Hudson to the eastern elbow of the lower Delaware, defining the outer margin of the rough hill country of northern New Jersey and the inner margin of the smooth coastal plain, has been from savage days such a natural thoroughfare. Here ran the trail of the Lenni-Lenapi In- dians ; a little later, the old Dutch road between New Amster- dam and the Delaware trading-posts; yet later the King's Highway from New York to Philadelphia. In 1838 it be- came the route of the Delaware and Raritan Canal, and more 6 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY Regions of histori- cal similar- ity. recently of the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and Philadelphia. 3 The early Aryans, in their gradual dispersion over north- western India, reached the Arabian Sea chiefly by a route running southward from the Indus-Ganges divide, between the eastern border of the Rajputana Desert and the western foot of the Aravalli Hills. The streams flowing down from this range across the thirsty plains unite to form the Lurii River, which draws a dead-line to the advance of the desert. Here a smooth and well-watered path brought the early Aryans of India to a fertile coast along the Gulf of Cambay. 4 In the palmy days of the Mongol Empire during the seven- teenth century, and doubtless much earlier, it became an estab- lished trade route between the sea and the rich cities of the upper Ganges. 5 Recently it determined the line of the Raj- putana Railroad from the Gulf of Cambay to Delhi. 6 Bary- gaza, the ancient seaboard terminus of this route, appears in Pliny's time as the most famous emporium of western India, the resort of Greek and Arab merchants. 7 It reappears later in history with its name metamorphosed to Baroche or Broach, where in 1616 the British established a factory for trade, 8 but is finally superseded, under Portuguese and English rule, by nearby Surat. Thus natural conditions fix the channels in which the stream of humanity most easily moves, deterniim within certain limits the direction of its flow, the velocity and volume of its current. Every new flood tends to fit itself ap- proximately into the old banks, seeks first these lines of least resistance, and only when it finds them blocked or pre-empted does it turn to more difficult paths. Geographical environment, through the persistence of its influence, acquires peculiar significance. Its effect is not n stricted to a given historical event or epoch, but, except when temporarily met by some strong counteracting force, tend make itself felt under varying guise in all succeeding history. It is the permanent element in the shifting fate of races. Islands show certain fundamental points of agreement which can be distinguished in the economic, ethnic and kprtorical development of England, Japan, Melanesian Fiji, Polynesian New Zealand, and pre-historic Crete. The great belt of GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 7 deserts and steppes extending across the Old World gives us a vast territory of rare historical uniformity. From time imme- morial they have borne and bred tribes of wandering herds- men ; they have sent out the invading hordes who, in suc- cessive waves of conquest, have overwhelmed the neighboring river lowlands of Eurasia and Africa. They have given birth in turn to Scythians, Indo-Aryans, Avars, Huns, Saracens, Tartars and Turks, as to the Tuareg tribes of the Sahara, the Sudanese and Bantu folk of the African grasslands. But whether these various peoples have been Negroes, Hamites, Semites, Indo-Europeans or Mongolians, they have always been pastoral nomads. The description given by Herodotus of the ancient Scythians is applicable in its main features to the Kirghis and Kalmuck who inhabit the Caspian plains to-day. The environment of this dry grassland operates now to produce the same mode of life and social organization as it did 2,400 years ago; stamps the cavalry tribes of Cossacks as it did the mounted Huns, energizes its sons by its dry bracing air, toughens them by its harsh conditions of life, or- ganizes them into a mobilized army, always moving with its pastoral commissariat. Then when population presses too hard upon the meager sources of subsistence, when a summer drought burns the pastures and dries up the water-holes, it sends them forth on a mission of conquest, to seek abundance in the better watered lands of their agricultural neighbors. Again and again the productive valleys of the Hoangho, Indus, Ganges, Tigris and Euphrates, Nile, Volga, Dnieper and Danube have been brought into subjection by the imperi- ous nomads of arid Asia, just as the "hoe-people" of the Niger and upper Nile have so often been conquered by the herdsmen of the African grasslands. Thus, regardless of race or epoch Hyksos or Kaffir history tends to repeat itself in these rainless tracts, and involves the better watered districts along their borders when the vast tribal movements extend into these peripheral lands. Climatic influences are persistent, often obdurate in their Climatic control. Arid regions permit agriculture and sedentary life * uences ' only through irrigation. The economic prosperity of Egypt to-day depends as completely upon the distribution of the Nile 8 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 10 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY The re- lation of geography to history. waters as in the days of the Pharaohs. The mantle of the ancient Egyptian priest has fallen upon the modern British engineer. Arctic explorers have succeeded only by imitating the life of the Eskimos, adopting their clothes, food, fuel, dwellings, and mode of travel. Intense cold has checked both native and Russian development over that major portion of Siberia lying north of the mean annual isothern of degree C. (32 degrees F.) ; and it has had a like effect in the correspond- ing part of Canada. (Compare maps pages 8 and 9.) It allows these sub-arctic lands scant resources and a population of less than two to the square mile. Even with the intrusion of white colonial peoples, it perpetuates the savage economy of the native hunting tribes, and makes the fur trader their mod- ern exploiter, whether he be the Cossack tribute-gatherer of the lower Lena River, or the factor of the Hudson Bay Company. The assimilation tends to be ethnic as well as economic, because the severity of the climate excludes the white woman. In the same way the Tropics are a vast melting-pot. The debili- tating effects of heat and humidity, aided by tropical diseases, soon reduce intruding peoples to the dead level of economic inefficiency characteristic of the native races. These, as the fittest, survive and tend to absorb the new-comers, pointing to hybridization as the simplest solution of the problem of tropical colonization. The more the comparative method is applied to the study of history and this includes a comparison not only of different countries, but also of successive epochs in the same country the more apparent becomes the influence of the soil in which humanity is rooted, the more permanent and necessary is that influence seen to be. Geography's claim to make scien- tific investigation of the physical conditions of historical events is then vindicated. "Which was there first, geography or history?" asks Kant. And then comes his answer: "Geog- raphy lies at the basis of history." The two are inseparable. History takes for its field of investigation human events in various periods of time; anthropo-geography studies exist- ence in various regions of terrestrial space. But all historical development takes place on the earth's surface, and therefore is more or less molded by its geographic setting. Geography, GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 11 to reach accurate conclusions, must compare the operation of its factors in different historical periods and at different stages of cultural development. It therefore regards history in no small part as a succession of geographical factors embodied in events. Back of Massachusetts' passionate abolition move- ment, it sees the granite soil and boulder-strewn fields of New England ; back of the South's long fight for the maintenance of slavery, it sees the rich plantations of tidewater Virginia and the teeming fertility of the Mississippi bottom lands. This is the significance of Herder's saying that "history is geography set into motion." What is to-day a fact of geog- raphy becomes to-morrow a factor of history. The two sci- ences cannot be held apart without doing violence to both, without dismembering what is a natural, vital whole. All his- torical problems ought to be studied geographically and all geographic problems must be studied historically. Ever}' map has its date. Those in the Statistical Atlas of the United States showing the distribution of population from 1790 to 1890 embody a mass of history as well as of geography. A map of France or the Russian Empire has a long historical perspective ; and on the other hand, without that map no change of ethnic or political boundary, no modification in routes of communication, no system of frontier defences or of colonization, no scheme of territorial aggrandizement can be understood. ' The study of physical environment as a factor in history Multi- was unfortunately brought into disrepute by extravagant and P ill-founded generalization, before it became the object of factors investigation according to modern scientific methods. And even to-day principles advanced in the name of anthropo- geography are often superficial, inaccurate, based upon a body of data too limited as to space and time, or couched in terms of unqualified statement which exposes them to criticism or refutation. Investigators in this field, moreover, are prone to get a squint in their eye that makes them see one geographic factor to the exclusion of the rest; whereas it belongs to the very nature of physical environment to combine a whole group of influences, working all at the same -time under the law of the resolution of forces. In this plexus of influences, some 12 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY operate in one direction and some in another; now one loses its beneficent effect like a medicine long used or a garment outgrown; another waxes in power, reinforced by a new geo- graphic factor which has been released from dormancy by the expansion of the known world, or the progress of invention and of human development. Evolution These complex geographic influences cannot be analyzed p geograph- an( j t ne | r strength estimated except from the standpoint of lations evolution. That is one reason these half-baked geographic principles rest heavy on our mental digestion. They have been formulated without reference to the all-important fact that the geographical relations of man, like his social and political organization, are subject to the law of development. Just as the embryo state found in the primitive Saxon tribe has passed through many phases in attaining the political character of the present British Empire, so every stage in this maturing growth has been accompanied or even preceded by a steady evolution of the geographic relations of the English people. Owing to the evolution of geographic relations, the physi- cal environment favorable to one stage of development may be adverse to another, and vice versa. For instance, a small, isolated and protected habitat, like that of Egypt, Phrenicia, Crete and Greece, encourages the birth and precocious growth of civilization; but later it may cramp progress, and lend the stamp of arrested development to a people who were once the model for all their little world. Open and wind-swept Russia, lacking these small, warm nurseries where Nature could cuddle her children, has bred upon its boundless plains a mas- sive, untutored, homogeneous folk, fed upon the crumbs of culture that have fallen from the richer tables of Europe. But that item of area is a variable quantity in the equation. It changes its character at a higher stage of cultural develop- ment. Consequently, when the Muscovite people, instructed by the example of western Europe, shall have grown up intel- lectually, economically and politically to their big territory, its area will become a great national asset. Russia will come into its own, heir to a long-withheld inheritance. Many of its previous geographic disadvantages will vanish, like the GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 13 diseases of childhood, while its massive size will dwarf many previous advantages of its European neighbors. This evolution of geographic relations applies not only to Evolution the local environment, but also to the wider world relations of f world a people. Greeks and Syrians, English and Japanese, take relations - a different rank among the nations of the earth to-day from that held by their ancestors 2,000 years ago, simply because the world relations of civilized peoples have been steadily ex- panding s-ince those far-back days of Tyrian and Athenian su- premacy. The period of maritime discoveries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shifted the foci of the world relations of European states from enclosed seas to the rim of the Atlan- tic. Venice and Genoa gave way to Cadiz and Lagos, just as sixteen centuries before Corinth and Athens had yielded their ascendency to Rome and Ostia. The keen but circumscribed trade of the Baltic, which gave wealth and historical pre- eminence to Liibeck and the other Hanse Towns of northern Germany from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, lost its relative importance when the Atlantic became the maritime field of history. Maritime leadership passed westward from Liibeck and Stralsund to Amsterdam and Bristol, as the his- torical horizon widened. England, prior to this sudden dis- location, lay on the outskirts of civilized Europe, a terminal land, not a focus. The peripheral location which retarded her early development became a source of power when she accumulated sufficient density of population for colonizing enterprises, and when maritime discovery opened a way to trans-oceanic lands. 9 Meanwhile, local geographic advantages in the old basins remain the same, although they are dwarfed by the develop- ment of relatively greater advantages elsewhere. The broken coastline, limited area and favorable position of Greece make its people to-day a nation of seamen, and enable them to ab- sorb by their considerable merchant fleet a great part of the trade of the eastern Mediterranean, 10 just as they did in the days of Pericles ; but that youthful Aegean world which once constituted so large a part of the-rrikoumene, has shrunken to a modest province, and its highways to local paths. The coast cities of northern Germany still maintain a large com- 14 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY merce in the Baltic, but no longer hold the pre-eminence of the old Hanse Towns. The glory of the Venetian Adriatic is gone; but that the sea has still a local significance is proven by the vast sums spent by Austria and Hungary on their hand-made harbors of Trieste and Fiume. 11 The analytical geographer, therefore, while studying a given combination of geographic forces, must be prepared for a momentous read- justment and a new interplay after any marked turning point in the economic, cultural, or world relations of a people. Interplay of Skepticism as to the effect of geographic conditions upon geographic human development is apparently justifiable, owing to the multiplicity of the underlying causes and the difficulty of distinguishing between stronger and weaker factors on the one hand, as between permanent and temporary effects on the other. We see the result, but find it difficult to state the equation producing this result. But the important thing is to avoid seizing upon one or two conspicuous geographic ele- ments in the problem and ignoring the rest. The physical environment of a people consists of all the natural conditions to which they have been subjected, not merely a part. Geog- / raphy admits no single blanket theory. The slow historical development of the Russian folk has been due to many geo- graphic causes to excess of cold and deficiency of rain, an outskirt location on the Asiatic border of Europe exposed to the attacks of nomadic hordes, a meager and, for the most part, ice-bound coast which was slowly acquired, an undiversi- fied surface, a lack of segregated regions where an infant civil- ization might be cradled, and a vast area of unfenced plains wherein the national energies spread out thin and dissipated themselves. The better Baltic and Black Sea coasts, the fer- tility of its Ukraine soil, and location next to wide-awake Ger- many along the western frontier have helped to accelerate progress, but the slow-moving body carried too heavy a drag. The law of the resolutions of forces applies in geography as in the movement of planets. Failure to recognize this fact often enables superficial critics of anthropo-geography to make a brave show of argument. The analysis of these inter- acting forces and of their various combinations requires care- ful investigation. Let us consider the interplay of the forces GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 15 of land and sea apparent in every country with a maritime Land and location. In some cases a small, infertile, niggardly countr} 7 Bea in co ~ conspires with a beckoning sea to drive its sons out upon the oper on * deep ; in others a wide territory with a generous soil keeps its well-fed children at home and silences the call of the sea. In ancient Phoenicia and Greece, in Norway, Finland, New Eng- land, in ^avage Chile and Tierra del Fuego, and the Indian coast district of British Columbia and southern Alaska, a long, broken shoreline, numerous harbors, outlying islands, abundant timber for the construction of ships, difficult com- munication by land, all tempted the inhabitants to a seafaring life. While the sea drew, the land drove in the same direction. There a hilly or mountainous interior putting obstacles in the way of landward expansion, sterile slopes, a paucity of level, arable land, an excessive or deficient rainfall withholding from agriculture the reward of tillage some or all of these factors combined to compel the inhabitants to seek on the sea the live- lihood denied by the land. Here both forces worked in the same direction. In England conditions were much the same, and from the sixteenth century produced there a predominant maritime de- velopment which was due not solely to a long indented coast- line and an exceptional location for participating in European and American trade. Its limited island area, its large extent of rugged hills and chalky soil fit only for pasturage, and the lack of a really generous natural endowment, 12 made it slow to answer the demands of a growing population, till the industrial development of the nineteenth century exploited its mineral wealth. So the English turned to the sea to fish, to trade, to colonize. Holland's conditions made for the same development. She united advantages of coastline and position with a small infertile territory, consisting chiefly of water-soaked grazing lands. When at the zenith of her mari- time development, a native authority estimated that the soil of Holland could not support more than one-eighth of her inhabitants. The meager products of the land had to be eked out by the harvest of the sea. Fish assumed an important place in the diet of the Dutch, and when a process of curing it was discovered, laid the foundation of Holland's export 16 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY trade. A geographical location central to the Baltic and North Sea countries, and accessible to France and Portugal, combined with a position at the mouth of the great German rivers made it absorb the carrying trade of northern Europe. 13 Land and sea cooperated in its maritime development. Land Often the forces of land and sea are directly opposed. If a and sea country's geographic conditions are favorable to agriculture and offer room for growth of population, the land forces pre- vail, because man is primarily a terrestrial animal. Such a country illustrates what Chisholm, with Attic nicety of speech, calls "the influence of bread-power on history," 14 as opposed to Mahan's sea-power. France, like England, had a long coastline, abundant harbors, and an excellent location for maritime supremacy and colonial expansion ; but her larger area and greater amount of fertile soil put off the hour of a redundant population such as England suffered from even in Henry VIII's time. Moreover, in consequence of steady con- tinental expansion from the twelfth to the eighteenth century and a political unification which made its area more effective for the support of the people, the French of Richelieu's time, except those from certain districts, took to the sea, not by national impulse as did the English and Dutch, but rather under the spur of government initiative. They therefore achieved far less in maritime trade and colonization. 15 In ancient Palestine, a long stretch of coast, poorly equipped with harbors but accessible to the rich Mediterranean trade, failed to offset the attraction of the gardens and orchards of the Jezreel Valley and the pastures of the Judean hills, or to overcome the land-born predilections and aptitudes of the desert-bred Jews. Similarly, the river-fringed peninsulas of Virginia and Maryland, opening wide their doors to the in- coming sea, were powerless, nevertheless, to draw the settlers away from the riotous productiveness of the wide tidewater plains. Here again the geographic force of the land out- weighed that of the sea and became the dominant factor in directing the activities of the inhabitants. The two antagonistic geographic forces may be both of the land, one born of a country's topography, the other of its location. Switzerland's history has for centuries shown the 17 conflict of two political policies, one a policy of cantonal and communal independence, which has sprung from the di- vision of that mountainous country into segregated districts, and the other one of political centralization, dictated by the necessity for cooperation to meet the dangers of Switzerland's central location mid a circle of larger and stronger neighbors. Local geographic conditions within the Swiss territory fixed the national ideal as a league of "sovereign cantons," to use the term of their constitution, enjoying a maximum of indi- vidual rights and privileges, and tolerating a minimum of interference from the central authority. Here was physical dismemberment coupled with mutual political repulsion. But a location at the meeting' place of French, German, Austrian and Italian frontiers laid upon them the distasteful necessity of union within to withstand aggressions crowding upon them from without. Hence the growth of the Swiss constitution since 1798 has meant a fight of the Confederation against the canton in behalf of general rights, expanding the functions of the central government, contracting those of canton and commune. 16 Every country forms an independent whole, and as such ^ocal an d finds its national history influenced by its local climate, soil, n . . ... geographic relief, its location whether inland or maritime, its river high- f ac t rs. ways, and its boundaries of mountain, sea, or desert. But it is also a link in a great chain of lands, and therefore may feel a shock or vibration imparted at the remotest end. The grad- ual desiccation of western Asia which took a fresh start about 2,000 years ago caused that great exodus and displacement of peoples known as the Volkerzcanderung, and thus con- tributed to the downfall of Rome; it was one factor in the Saxon conquest of Britain and the final peopling of central Europe. The impact of the Turkish hordes hurling them- selves against the defenses of Constantinople in 1453 was felt only forty years afterward by the far-off shores of savage America. Earlier still it reached England as the revival of learning, and it gave Portugal a shock which started its navi- gators towards the Cape of Good Hope in their search for a sea route to India. The history of South Africa is intimately connected with the Isthmus of Suez. It owes its Portuguese, 18 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY Direct and indirect effects of environ- ment. Dutch, and English populations to that barrier on the Medi- terranean pathway to the Orient; its importance as a wny station on the outside route to India fluctuates with every crisis in the history of Suez. The geographic factors in history appear now as conspicu ous direct effects of environment, such as the forest warfare of the American Indian or the irrigation works of the Pueblo tribes, now as a group of indirect effects, operating through the economic, social and political activities of a people. These remoter secondary results are often of supreme importance; they are the ones which give the final stamp to the national temperament and character, and yet in them the causal con- nection between environment and development is far from ob- vious. They have, therefore, presented pitfalls to the precipi- tate theorizer. He has either interpreted them as the direct effect of some geographic cause from which they were wholly divorced and thus arrived at conclusions which further investi- gation failed to sustain ; or seeing no direct and obvious con- nection, he has denied the possibility of a generalization. Montesquieu ascribes the immutability of religion, manners, custom and laws in India and other Oriental countries to their warm climate. 17 Buckle attributes a highly wrought imagina- tion and gross superstition to all people, like those of India, living in the presence of great mountains and vast plains, knowing Nature only in its overpowering aspects, which excite the fancy and paralyze reason. He finds, on the other hand, an early predominance of reason in the inhabitants of a coun- try like ancient Greece, where natural features are on a small scale, more comprehensible, nearer the measure of man him- self. 18 The scientific geographer, grown suspicious of the om- nipotence of climate and cautious of predicating immediate psychological effects which are easy to assert but difficult to prove, approaches the problem more indirectly and reaches a different solution. He finds that geographic conditions have condemned India to isolation. On the land side, a great sweep of high mountains has restricted intercourse with the interior ; on the sea side, the deltaic swamps of the Indus and Ganges Rivers and an unbroken shoreline, backed by mountains on the west of the peninsula and by coastal marshes and lagoons on GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 19 the east, have combined to reduce its accessibility from the ocean. The effect of such isolation is ignorance, superstition, and the early crystallization of thought and custom. Ig- norance involves the lack of material for comparison, hence a restriction of the higher reasoning processes, and an unscien- tific attitude of mind which gives imagination free play. In contrast, the accessibilty of Greece and its focal location in the ancient world made it an intellectual clearing-house for the eastern Mediterranean. The general information gathered there afforded material for wide comparison. It fed the bril- liant reason of the Athenian philosopher and the trained imagination which produced the masterpieces of Greek art and literature. Heinrich von Treitschke, in his recent "Politik," imitates Indirect the direct inference of Buckle when he ascribes the absence mental of artistic and poetic development in Switzerland and the Al- effects< pine lands to the overwhelming aspect of nature there, its majestic sublimity which paralyzes the mind. 19 He reinforces his position by the fact that, by contrast, the lower mountains and hill country of Swabia, Franconia and Thuringia, where nature is gentler, stimulating, appealing, and not overpower- ing, have produced many poets and artists. The facts are incontestable. They reappear in France in the geographical distribution of the awards made by the Paris Salon of 1896. Judged by these awards, the rough highlands of Savoy, Al- pine Provence, the massive eastern Pyrenees, and the Auvergne Plateau, together with the barren peninsula of Brittany, are singularly lacking in artistic instinct, while art flourishes in all the river lowlands of France. Moreover, French men of letters, by the distribution of their birthplaces, are essentially products of fluvial valleys and plains, rarely of upland and mountain. 20 This contrast has been ascribed to a fundamental ethnic distinction between the Teutonic population of the lowlands and the Alpine or Celtic stock which survives in the isolation of highland and peninsula, thus making talent an attribute of race. But the Po Valley of northern Italy, whose popula- tion contains a strong infusion of this supposedly stultifying Alpine blood, and the neighboring lowlands and hill country GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY Indirect effects in differentia- tion of colonial peoples. of Tuscany show an enormous preponderance of intellectual and artistic power over the highlands of the peninsula. 21 Hence the same contrast appears among different races under- like geographic conditions. Moreover, in France other social phenomena, such as suicide, divorce, decreasing birth-rate, and radicalism in politics, show this same startling parallelism of geographic distribution, 22 and these cannot be attributed to the stimulating or depressing effect of natural scenery upon the human mind. Mountain regions discourage the budding of genius because they are areas of isolation, confinement, remote from the great currents of men and ideas that move along the river valleys. They are regions of much labor and little leisure, of poverty to-day and anxiety for the morrow, of toil-cramped hands and toil-dulled brains. In the fertile alluvial plains are wealth, leisure, contact with many minds, large urban centers where commodities and ideas are exchanged. The two contrasted en- vironments produce directly certain economic and social re- sults, which, in turn, become the causes of secondary intel- lectual and artistic effects. The low mountains of central Germany which von Treitschke cites as homes of poets and artists, owing to abundant and varied mineral wealth, are the seats of active industries and dense populations, 23 while their low reliefs present no serious obstacle to the numerous high- ways across them. They, therefore, afford all conditions for culture. Let us take a different example. The rapid modification in physical and mental constitution of the English transplanted to North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand has been the result of several geographic causes working through the economic and social media ; but it has been ascribed by Darwin and others to the effect of climate. The prevailing energy and initiative of colonists have been explained by the stimulating atmosphere of their new homes. Even Natal has not escaped this soft impeachment. But the enterprise of colonials has cropped out under almost every condition of heat and cold, aridity and humidity, of a habitat at sea-level and on high plateau. This blanket theory of climate cannot, therefore, cover the case. Careful analysis 21 supersedes it by a whole group of geographic factors working directly and indirectly. The first of these was the dividing ocean which, prior to the introduction of cheap ocean trans- portation and bustling steerage agents, made a basis of artifi- cial selection. Then it was the man of abundant energy who, cramped by the narrow environment of a Norwegian farm or Irish bog, came over to America to take up a quarter-section of prairie land or rise to the eminence of Boston police ser- geant. The Scotch immigrants in America who fought in the Civil War were nearly two inches taller than the average in the home country. 24 But the ocean barrier culled superior qualities of mind and character also independence of political and religious conviction, and the courage of those convictions, whether found in royalist or Puritan, Huguenot or English Catholic. Such colonists in a remote country were necessarily few and Indirect could not be readily reinforced from home. Their new and en * ect isolated geographical environment favored variation. Hered- . . . , T isolation, ity passed on the characteristics of a small, highly selected group. The race was kept pure from intermixture with the aborigines of the country, owing to the social and cultural abyss which separated them, and to the steady withdrawal of the natives before the advance of the whites. The homogeneity of island peoples seems to indicate that individual variations are in time communicated by heredity to a whole population under conditions of isolation ; and in this way modifications due to artificial selection and a changed environment become widely spread. Nor is this all. The modified type soon becomes established, because the abundance of land at the disposal of the colonists and the consequent better conditions of living encourage a rapid increase of population. A second geographic factor of mere area here begins to operate. Ease in gaining subsistence, the greater independence of the individual and the family, emancipation from carking care, the hopeful attitude of mind engendered by the consciousness of an almost unlimited oppor- tunity and capacity for expansion, the expectation of large returns upon labor, and, finally, the profound influence of this hopefulness upon the national character, all combined, GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY General importance of indirect effects. produce a social rejuvenation of the race. New conditions present new problems which call for prompt and original solu- tion, make a demand upon the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the individual, and therefore work to the same end as his previous removal from the paraly/ing effect of custom in the old home country. Activity is youth and sluggishness or par- alysis is age. Hence the energy, initiative, adaptability, and receptivity to new ideas all youthful qualities which char- acterize the Anglo-Saxon American as well as the English Afri- cander, can be traced back to the stimulating influences, not of a bracing or variable climate, but of the abundant opportuni- ties offered by a great, rich, unexploilcd country. Variation under new natural conditions, when safe-guarded by isolation, tends to produce modification of the colonial type ; this is the direct effect of a changed environment. But the new econ- omic and social activities of a transplanted people become the vehicle of a mass of indirect geographic influences which con- tribute to the differentiation of the national character. The tendency to overlook such links between conspicuous effects and their remote, less evident geographic causes has been common in geographic investigation. This direct rather than indirect approach to the heart of the problem has led to false inferences or to the assumption that reliable conclusions were impossible. Environment influences the higher, mental life of a people chiefly through the medium of their economic and social life; hence its ultimate effects should be traced through the latter back to the underlying cause. But rarely has this been done. Even so astute a geographer as Strabo, though he recognizes the influence of geographic isolation in differentiating dialects and customs in Greece, 25 ascribes some national characteristics to the nature of the country, especially to its climate, and the others to education and institutions. He thinks that the nature of their respective lands had nothing to do with making the Athenians cultured, the Spartans and Thebans ignorant ; that the predilection for natural science in Babylonia and Egypt was not a result of environment but of the institutions and education of those countries. 28 But here arise the questions, how far custom and education in their turn depend upon environment ; to what degree natural condi- GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 23 tions, molding economic and political development, may through them fundamentally affect social customs, education, culture, and the dominant intellectual aptitudes of a people. It is not difficult to see, back of the astronomy and mathe- matics and hydraulics of Egypt, the far off sweep of the rain- laden monsoons against the mountains of Abyssinia and the creeping of the tawny Nile flood over that river-born oasis. Plutarch states in his "Solon" that after the rebellion of Indirect Kylon in 612 B.C. the Athenian people were divided into as political many political factions as there were physical types of country a d in Attica. The mountaineers, who were the poorest party, wanted something like a democracy ; the people of the plains, comprising the greatest number of rich families, were clamor- ous for an oligarchy ; the coast population of the south, inter- mediate both in social position and wealth, wanted something between the two. The same three-fold division appeared again in 564 B.C. on the usurpation of Peisistratus. 27 Here the connection between geographic condition and political opinion is clear enough, though the links are agriculture and com- merce. New England's opposition to the War of 1812, cul- minating in the threat of secession of the Hartford Conven- tion, can be traced back through the active maritime trade to the broken coastline and unproductive soil of that glaciated country. In all democratic or representative forms of government permitting free expression of popular opinion, history shows that division into political parties tends to follow geographical lines of cleavage. In our own Civil War the dividing line between North and South did not always run east and west. The mountain area of the Southern Appalachians supported the Union and drove a wedge of disaffection into the heart of the South. Mountainous West Virginia was politically op- posed to the tidewater plains of old Virginia, because slave labor did not pay on the barren "upright" farms of the Cum- berland Plateau ; whereas, it was remunerative on the wide fertile plantations of the coastal lowland. The ethics of the question were obscured where conditions of soil and topog- raphy made the institution profitable. In the mountains, as also in New England, a law of diminishing financial returns 24 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY had for its corollary a law of increasing moral insight. In this case, geographic conditions worked through the medium of direct economic effects to more important political and ethical results. The roots of geographic influence often run far under- ground before coming to the surface, to sprout into some flow- ering growth ; and to trace this back to its parent stem is the necessary but not easy task of the geographer. fime The complexity of this problem does not end here. The clement. modification of human development by environment is a nat- ural process ; like all other natural processes, it involves the cumulative effects of causes operating imperceptibly but per- sistently through vast periods of time. Slowly and deliber- ately does geography engrave the sub-titles to a people's his- tory. Neglect of this time element in the consideration of geographic influences accounts equally for many an exagger- ated assertion and denial of their power. A critic undertakes to disprove modification through physical environment by showing that it has not produced tangible results in the last fifty or five hundred years. This attitude recalls the early ge- ologists, whose imaginations could not conceive the vast ages necessary in a scientific explanation of geologic phenomena. The theory of evolution has taught us in science to think in larger terms of time, so that we no longer raise the ques- tion whether European colonists in Africa can turn into ne- groes, though we do find the recent amazing statement that the Yankee, in his tall, gaunt figure, "the colour of his skin, and the formation of his hair, has begun to differentiate him- self from his European kinsman and approach the type of the aboriginal Indians." 2 Evolution tells the story of modifica- tion by a succession of infinitesimal changes, and emphasizes the permanence of a modification once produced long after the causes for it cease to act. The mesas of Arizona. th earth sculpture of the Grand Canyon remain as monuments to the erosive forces which produced them. So a habitat li upon man no ephemeral impress ; it affects him in one way at a low stage of his development, and differently at a later or higher stage, because the man himself and his relation to his environment have been modified in the earlier period; but GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 25 traces of that earlier adaptation survive in his maturer life. Hence man's relation to his environment must be looked at through the perspective of historical development. It would be impossible to explain the history and national character of the contemporary English solely by their twentieth century response to their environment, because with insular conserva- tism they carry and cherish vestiges of times when their islands represented different geographic relations from those of to- day. Witness the wool-sack of the lord chancellor. We can- not understand the location of modern Athens, Rome or Berlin from the present day relations of urban populations to their environment, because the original choice of these sites was dic- tated by far different considerations from those ruling to-day. In the history of these cities a whole succession of geographic factors have in turn been active, each leaving its impress of which the cities become, as it were, repositories. The importance of this time element for a solution of an- Effect of thropo-geographic problems becomes plainer, where a certain a previous locality has received an entirely new population, or where a given people by migration change their habitat. The result in either case is the same, a new combination, new modifications superimposed on old modifications. And it is with this sort of case that anthropo-geography most often has to deal. So restless has mankind been, that the testimony of history and ethnology is all against the assumption that a social group has ever been subjected to but one type of environment during its long period of development from a primitive to a civilized society. Therefore, if we assert that a people is the product of the country which it inhabits at a given time, we forget that many different countries which its forbears occupied have left their mark on the present race in the form of inherited aptitudes and traditional customs acquired in those remote ancestral habitats. The Moors of Granada had passed through a wide range of ancestral experiences ; they bore the impress of Asia, Africa and Europe, and on their expulsion from Spain carried back with them to Morocco traces of their peninsula life. A race or tribe develops certain characteristics in a certain region, then moves on, leaving the old abode but not all the 26 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IX HISTORY accretions of custom, social organization and economic method there acquired. These travel on with the migrant people; some are dropped, others are preserved because of utility, sentiment or mere habit. For centuries after the settlement of the Jews in Palestine, traces of their pastoral life in the grasslands of Mesopotamia could be discc rm-il in their social and political organization, in their ritual and literature. Sur- vivals of their nomadic life in Asiatic steppes still persist among the Turks of Europe, after six centuries of sedentary life in the best agricultural land of the Balkan Peninsula. One of these appears in their choice of meat. They eat chiefly sheep and goats, beef very rarely, and swine not at all. 29 The first two thrive on poor pastures and travel well, so that they are admirably adapted to nomadic life in arid lands; the last two, far less so, but on the other hand are the regular con- comitant of agricultural life. The Turk's taste to-day, there- fore, is determined by the flocks and herds which he once pas- tured on the Trans-Caspian plains. The finished terrace agriculture and methods of irrigation, which the Saracens had learned on the mountain sides of Yemen through a school- ing of a thousand years or more, facilitated their economic conquest of Spain. Their intelligent exploitation of the coun- try's resources for the support of their growing numbers in the favorable climatic conditions which Spain offered was a light-hearted task, because of the severe training which they had had in their Arabian home. The origin of Roman political institutions is intimately connected with conditions of the naturally small territory where arose the greatness of Rome. But now, after two thou- sand years we see the political impress of this narrow origin spreading to the governments of an area of Europe immeasur- ably larger than the region that gave it birth. In the United States, little New England has been the source of the strong- est influences modifying the political, religious and cultural life of half a continent ; and as far as Texas and California these influences bear the stamp of that narrow, unproductive environment which gave to its sons energy of character and planted ideals - religions. Ideas especially are light baggage, and travel with migrant GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 27 peoples over many a long and rough road. They are wafted like winged seed by the wind, and strike root in regions where they could never have originated. Few classes of ideas bear so plainly the geographic stamp of their origin as religious ones, yet none have spread more widely. The abstract monotheism sprung from the bare grasslands of western Asia made slow but final headway against the exuberant forest gods of the early Germans. Religious ideas travel far from their seed- beds along established lines of communication. We have the almost amusing episode of the brawny Burgundians of the fifth century, who received the Arian form of Christianity by way of the Danube highway from the schools of Athens and Alexandria, valiantly supporting the niceties of Greek reli- gious thought against the Roman version of the faith which came up the Rhone Valley. If the sacred literature of Judaism and Christianity take weak hold upon the western mind, this is largely because it is written in the symbolism of the pastoral nomad. Its figures of speech reflect life in deserts and grasslands. For these figures the western mind has few or vague corresponding ideas. It loses, therefore, half the import, for instance, of the Twenty-third Psalm, that picture of the nomad shepherd guiding his flock across parched and trackless plains, to bring them at evening, weary, hungry, thirsty, to the fresh pas- tures and waving palms of some oasis, whose green tints stand out in vivid contrast to the tawny wastes of the encompassing sands. "He leadeth me beside the still waters," not the noisy rushing stream of the rainy lands, but the quiet desert pool that reflects the stars. What real significance has the tropical radiance of the lotus flower, the sacred symbol of Bud- dhism, for the Mongolian lama in the cold and arid borders of Gobi or the wind-swept highlands of sterile Tibet? And yet these exotic ideas live on, even if they no longer bloom in the uncongenial soil. But to explain them in terms of their pres- ent environment would be indeed impossible. A people may present at any given time only a partial re- Partial sponse to their environment also for other reasons. This may response be either because their arrival has been too recent for the new tc environ - habitat to make its influence felt ; or because, even after long 28 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY residence, one overpowering geographic factor has operated to the temporary exclusion of all others. Under these circum- stances, suddenly acquired geographic advantages of a high order or such advantages, long possessed but tardily made available by the release of national powers from more pressing tasks, may institute a new trend of historical development, resulting more from stimulating geographic conditions than from the natural capacities or aptitudes of the people them- selves. Such developments, though often brilliant, are likely to be short-lived and to end suddenly or disastrously, because not sustained by a deep-seated national impulse animating the whole mass of the people. They cease when the first enthusi- asm spends itself, or when outside competition is intensified, or the material rewards decrease. The case An illustration is found in the mediaeval history of Spain. P am< The intercontinental location of the Iberian Peninsula ex- posed it to the Saracen conquest and to the constant reinforce- ments to Islam power furnished by the Mohammedanized Ber- bers of North Africa. For seven centuries this location was the dominant geographic factor in Spain's history. It made the expulsion of the Moors the sole object of all the Iberian states, converted the country into an armed camp, made the gentle- man adventurer and Christian knight the national ideal. It placed the center of political control high up on the barren plateau of Castile, far from the centers of population and culture in the river lowlands or along the coast. It excluded the industrial and commercial development which was giving bone and sinew to the other European states. The release of the national energies by the fall of Granada in 1492 and the now ingrained spirit of adventure enabled Spain and Portugal to utilize the unparalleled advantage of their geographical position at the junction of the Mediterranean and Atlantic highways, and by their great maritime explorations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to become foremost among European colonial powers. But the development was sporadic, not supported by any widespread national movement. In a few decades the maritime preeminence of the Iberian Peninsula began to yield to the competition of the Du f ch and English, who were, so to speak, saturated with their own GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 29 maritime environment. Then followed the rapid decay of the sea power of Spain, followed by that of Portugal, till by 1648 even her coasting trade was in the hands of the Dutch, and Dutch vessels were employed to maintain com- munication with the West Indies. 30 We have a later instance of sporadic development under Sporadic the stimulus of new and favorable geographic conditions, with response a similar anti-clirnax. The expansion of the Russians across to * new the lowlands of Siberia was quite in harmony with the genius of that land-bred people; but when they reached Bering Sea, the enclosed basin, the proximity of the American continent, the island stepping-stones between, and the lure of rich seal- skins to the fur-hunting Cossacks determined a sudden mari- time expansion, for which the Russian people were unfitted. Beginning in 1747, it swept the coast of Alaska, located its American administrative center first on Kadiak, then on Bara- nof Island, and by 1812 placed its southern outposts on the California coast near San Francisco Bay and on the Farralone Islands. 31 Russian convicts were employed to man the crazy boats built of green lumber on the shores of Bering Sea, and Aleutian hunters with their bidarkas were impressed to catch the seal. 32 The movement was productive only of countless shipwrecks, many seal skins, and an opportunity to satisfy an old grudge against England. The territory gained was sold to the United States in 1867. This is the one instance in Russian history of any attempt at maritime expansion, and also of any withdrawal from territory to which the Muscovite power had once established its claim. This fact alone would indicate that only excessively tempting geographic condi- tions led the Russians into an economic and political venture which neither the previously developed aptitudes of the people nor the conditions of population and historical development on the Siberian seaboard were able to sustain. The history and culture of a people embody the effects of The previous habitats and of their final environment; but this larger con- environment means something more than local geographic C conditions. It involves influences emanating from far beyond ment the borders. No country, no continent, no sea, mountain or river is restricted to itself in the influence which it either exer- 30 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY cises or receives. The history of Austria cannot be understood merely from Austrian ground. Austrian territory is part of the Mediterranean hinterland, and therefore has been linked historically with Rome, Italy, and the Adriatic. It is a part of the upper Danube Valley and therefore shares much of its history with Bavaria and Germany, while the lower Danube has linked it with the Black Sea, Greece, the Russian steppes, and Asia. The Asiatic Hungarians have pushed forward their ethnic boundary nearly to Vienna. The Austrian capital has seen the warring Turks beneath its walls, and shapes its for- eign policy with a view to the relative strength of the Sultan and the Czar. Unity of The earth is an inseparable whole. Each country or sea the earth. j s physically and historically intelligible only as a portion of that whole. Currents and wind-systems of the oceans modify the climate of the nearby continents, and direct the first daring navigations of their peoples. The alternating monsoons of the Indian Ocean guided Arab merchantmen from ancient times back and forth between the Red Sea and the Malabar coast of India. 83 The Equatorial Current and the northeast trade-wind carried the timid ships of Columbus across the Atlantic to America. The Gulf Stream and the prevailing westerlies later gave English vessels the advantage on the re- turn voyage. Europe is a part of the Atlantic coast. This is a fact so significant that the North Atlantic has become a European sea. The United States also is a part of the Atlan- tic coast : this is the dominant fact of American history. China forms a section of the Pacific rim. This is the fact back of the geographic distribution of Chinese emigration to Annam, Tonkin, Siam, Malacca, the Philippines, East Indies, Borneo, Australia, Hawaiian Islands, the Pacific Coast States, British Columbia, the Alaskan coast southward from Bristol Bay in Bering Sea, Ecuador and Peru. As the earth is one, so is humanity. Its unity of species points to some degree of communication through a long pre- historic past. Universal history is not entitled to the name unless it embraces all parts of the earth and all peoples, whether savage or civilized. To fill the gaps in the written record it must turn to ethnology and geography, which by GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY 31 tracing the distribution and movements of primitive peoples can often reconstruct the most important features of their history. Anthropo-geographic problems are never simple. They must all be viewed in the long perspective of evolution and the historical past. They require allowance for the dominance of different geographic factors at different periods, and for a possible range of geographic influences wide as the earth itself. In the investigator they call for pains-taking analysis and, above all, an open mind. -3 NOTES TO CHAPTER I 1. George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 149-157. New York, 1897. 2. A. P. Brigham, Geographic Influences in American History, Chap. I. Boston, 1903. 3. E. H. Whitbeck, Geographic Influences in the Development of New Jersey, Journal of Geography, Vol. V, No. 6. January, 1908. 4. Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, p. 372. London and New York, 1902-1906. 5. Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, 1641-1667. Vol. I, chap. V and map. London, 1889. 6. Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 305. London, 1905. 7. Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 464-465, 469. London, 1883. 8. Imperial Gazetteer for India, Vol. Ill, p. 109. London, 1885. 9. G. G. Chisholm, The Relativity of Geographic Advantages, Scottish Geog. Mag., Vol. XIII, No. 9, Sept. 1897. 10. Hugh Eobert Mill, International Geography, p. 347. New York, 1902. 11. Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 228-230. London, 1903. 12. H. J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 317-323. Lon- don, 1904. 13. Captain A. T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 36-38. Boston, 1902. 14. G. G. Chisholm, Economic Geography, Scottish Geog. Mag., March, 1908. 15. Captain A. T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 37- 38. Boston, 1902. 16. Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 123, 124, 145-147. Philadelphia, 1891. 17. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, Book XIV, chap. IV. 18. Henry Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. I, pp. 86-106. 32 GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IX HISTORY 19. Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, p. 225. Leipzig, 1897. This whole chapter on Land und Leute is suggestive. 20. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 524-525. New York, 1899. 21. Ibid., 526. 22. Ibid., 517-520, 533-536. 23. Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 256-257, 268-271. London, 1903. 24. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 89. New York, 1899. 25. Strabo, Book VII, chap. I, 2. 26. Strabo, Book II, chap. Ill, 7. 27. Plutarch, Solon, pp. 13, 29, 154. 28. Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 244-245. New York, 1902-1906. 29. Roscher, National-oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 33, note 3. Stutt- gart, 1888. 30. Captain A. T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 41- 42, 50-53. Boston, 1902. 31. H. Bancroft, History of California, Vol. I, pp. 298, 628-635. San Francisco. 32. Agnes Laut, Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 64-82. New York, 1905. 33. Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 351, 470- 471. London, 1883. ' K v<^/ '"' -^--l.'..^**- **-"' ~ ''? ~^'^- .->' CHAPTER II ^ CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES INTO almost every anthropo-geographical problem the ele- ment of environment enters in different phases, with different modes of operation and varying degrees of importance. Since the causal conception of geography demands a detailed anal- ysis of all the relations between environment and human devel- opment, it is advisable to distinguish the various classes of geographic influences. Four fundamental classes of effects can be distinguished. Physical 1 v _The first class includes direct physical effects of environ- effects - ment, similar to those exerted on plants and animals by their habitat. Certain geographic conditions, more conspicuously those of climate, apply certain stimuli to which man, like the lower animals, responds by an adaption of his organ- ism to his environment. Many physiological peculiarities of man are due to physical effects of environment, which doubt- less operated very strongly in the earliest stages of human development, and in those shadowy ages contributed to the differentiation of races. The unity of the human species is as clearly established as the diversity of races and peoples, whose divergences must be interpreted chiefly as modifications in response to various habitats in long periods of time. /- Such modifications have probably been numerous in the Variation persistent and unending movements, shif tings, and migrations and natural which have made up the long prehistoric history of man. If the origin of species is found in variability and inheritance, vari- ation is undoubtedly influenced by a change of natural condi- tions. To quote Darwin, "In one sense the conditions of life may be said, not only to cause variability, either directly or indirectly, but likewise to include natural selection, for the conditions determine whether this or that variety shall sur- vive." 1 The variability of man does not mean that every ex- 34 CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES ternal influence leaves its mark upon him, but that man as an organism, by the preservation of beneficent variations and the elimination of deleterious ones, is gradually adapted to his environment, so that he can utilize most completely that which it contributes to his needs. This self-maintenance under out- ward influences is an essential part of the conception of life which Herbert Spencer defines as the correspondence between internal conditions and external circumstances, or August Comte as the harmony between the living being and the sur- rounding medium or milieu. According to Virchow, the distinction of races rests upon hereditary variations, but heredity itself cannot become active till the characteristic or Zustand is produced which is to be handed down. 2 But environment determines what variation shall become stable enough to be passed on by heredity. For instance, we can hardly err in attributing the great lung capacity, massive chests, and abnormally large torsos of the Quichua and Aymara Indians inhabiting the high Andean plateaus to the Tariffed air found at an altitude of 10,000 or 15,000 feet above sea level. Whether these have been acquired by centuries of extreme lung expansion, or represent the survival of a chance variation of undoubted advantage, they are a product of the environment. They are a serious handicap when the Aymara Indian descends to the plains, where he either dies off or leaves descendants with diminishing chests. 3 [See map page 101.] Stature Darwin holds that many slight changes in animals and and en- plants, such as size, color, thickness of skin and hair, have been onmen . produced through food supply and climate from the external conditions under which the forms lived. 4 Paul Ehrenreich, while regarding the chief race distinctions as permanent forms, not to be explained by external conditions, nevertheless con- cedes the slight and slow variation of the sub-race under . changing conditions of food and climate as beyond doubt. 5 I Stature is partly a matter of feeding and hence of geographic i condition. In mountain regions, where the food resources are ' scant, the varieties of wild animals are characterized by smaller size in general than are corresponding species in the lowlands. It is a noticeable fact that dwarfed horses or ponies have origi- CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 35 nated in islands, in Iceland, the Shetlands, Corsica and Sar- dinia. This is due either to scanty and unvaried food or to excessive inbreeding, or probably to both. The horses intro- duced into the Falkland Islands in 1764 have deteriorated so in size and strength in a few generations that they are in a fair way to develop a Falkland variety of pony. 6 On the other hand, Mr. Homer Davenport states that the pure-bred Ara- bian horses raised on his New Jersey stock farm are in the third generation a hand higher than their grandsires imported from Arabia, and of more angular build. The result is due to more abundant and nutritious food and the elimination of long desert journeys. The low stature of the natives prevailing in certain "misery spots" of Europe, as in the A_uvergne Plateau of southern France, is due in part to race, in part to a disastrous artificial selection by the emigration of the taller and more robust in- dividuals, but in considerable part to the harsh climate and starvation food-yield of that sterile soil ; for the children of the region, if removed to the more fertile valleys of the Loire and Garonne, grow to average stature. 7 The effect of a scant and uncertain food supply is especially clear in savages, who have erected fewer buffers between themselves and the pressure of environment. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert are shorter than their Hottentot kindred who pasture their flocks and herds in the neighboring grasslands. 8 Samoyedes, Lapps, and other hyperborean races of Eurasia are shorter than their more southern neighbors, the physical record of an immemorial struggle against cold and hunger. The stunted forms and wretched aspect of the Snake Indians inhabiting the Rocky Mountain deserts distinguished these clans from the tall buf- falo-hunting tribes of the plains. 9 Any feature of geographic environment tending to affect directly the physical vigor and strength of a people cannot fail to prove a potent factor in their history. Oftentimes environment modifies the physique of a people Physical indirectly by imposing upon them certain predominant activi- ties, which may develop one part of the body almost to the point of deformity. This is the effect of increased use or dis- use which Darwin discusses. He attributes the thin leffs and o thick arms of the Payaguas Indians living along the Paraguay River to generations of lives spent in canoes, with the lower extremities motionless and the arm and chest muscles in con- stant exercise. 10 Livingstone found these same characteristics of broad chests and shoulders with ill-developed legs among the Barotse of the upper Zambesi; 11 and they have been ob- served in pronounced form, coupled with distinctly impaired powers of locomotion, among the Tlingit, Tsimshean, and Haida Indians of the southern Alaskan and British Columbia coast, where the geographic conditions of a mountainous and almost strandless shore interdicted agriculture and necessi- tated sea-faring activities. 12 An identical environment has produced a like physical effect upon the canoemen of Tierra del Fuego 13 and the Aleutian Islanders, who often sit in their boats twenty hours at a time. 14 These special adaptations are temporary in their nature and tend to disappear with change of occupation, as, for instance, among the Tlingit In- dians, who develop improved leg muscles when employed as laborers in the salmon canneries of British Columbia. Effects of Both the direct and indirect physical effects of environ- elimate. ment thus far instanced are obvious in themselves and easily explained. Far different is it with the majority of physical effects, especially those of climate, whose mode of operation is much more obscure than was once supposed. The modern geographer does not indulge in the naive hypothesis of the last century, which assumed a prompt and direct effect of environment upon the form and features of man. Carl Ritter regarded the small, slit eyes and swollen lids of the Turkoman as "an obvious effect of the desert upon the organism." Stan- hope Smith ascribed the high shoulders and short neck of the Tartars of Mongolia to their habit of raising their shoulders to protect the neck against the cold; their small, squinting eyes, overhanging brows, broad faces and high cheek bones, to the effect of the bitter, driving winds and the glare of the snow, till, he says, "every feature by the action of the cold is harsh and distorted." 15 These profound influences of a severe climate upon physiognomy he finds also among the Lapps, northern Mongolians, Samoyedes and Eskimo. Most of these problems are only secondarily grist for the CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 37 geographer's mill. For instance, when the Aryans descended to the enervating lowlands of tropical India, and in that de- bilitating climate lost the qualities which first gave them su- premacy, the change which they underwent was primarily a physiological one. It can be scientifically described and ex- plained therefore only by physiologists and physico-chemists ; and upon their investigations the geographer must wait before he approaches the problem from the standpoint of geographi- cal distribution. Into this sub-class of physical effects come Acclimat- all questions of acclimatization. 16 These are important to the lzatlon - anthropo-geographer, just as they are to colonial governments like England or France, because they affect the power of na- tional or racial expansion, and fix the historical fate of tropical lands. The present populations of the earth represent physi- cal adaptation to their environments. The intense heat and humidity of most tropical lands prevent any permanent occu- pation by a native-born population of pure whites. The ca- tarrhal zone north of the fortieth parallel in America soon exterminates the negroes. 17 The Indians of South America, though all fundamentally of the same ethnic stock, are variously acclimated to the warm, damp, forested plains of the Amazon ; to the hot, dry, treeless coasts of Peru ; and to the cold, arid heights of the Andes. The habitat that bred them tends to hold them, by restricting the range of climate which they can endure. In the zone of the Andean slope lying between 4,000 and 6,000 feet of alti- tude, which produces the best flavored coffee and which must be cultivated, the imported Indians from the high plateaus and from the low Amazon plains alike sicken and di >v after a short time ; so that they take employment on these coffee plan- tations for only three or five months, and then return to their own homes. Labor becomes nomadic on these slopes, and in the intervals these farm lands of intensive agriculture show the anomaly of a sparse population only of resident managers. 18 Similarly in the high, dry Himalayan valley of the upper Indus, over 10,000 feet above sea level, the natives of Ladak are restricted to a habitat that yields them little margin of food for natural growth of population but forbids them to emigrate in search of more, applies at the same time the 38 CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES lash to drive and the leash to hold, for these highbinders soon die when they reach the plains. 19 Here are two antagonistic geographic influences at work from the same environment, one physical and the other social-economic. The Ladaki have reached an interesting resolution of these two forces by the institution of polyandry, which keeps population practically stationary. Pigmen- The relation of pigmentation to climate has long interested tation geographers as a question of environment; but their specula- tions on the subject have been barren, because the preliminary investigations of the physiologist, physicist and chemist are still incomplete. The general fact of increasing nigrescence from temperate towards equatorial regions is conspicuous enough, despite some irregularity of the shading. 20 This fact points strongly to some direct relation between climate and pigmentation, but gives no hint how the pigmental processes are affected. The physiologist finds that in the case of the negro, the dark skin is associated with a dense cuticle, diminished perspiration, smaller chests and less respirator v power, a lower temperature and more rapid pulse, 21 all which variations may enter into the problem of the negro's coloring. The question is therefore by no means simple. Yet it is generally conceded by scientists that pigment is a protective device of nature. The negro's skin is comparatively insensitive to a sun heat that blisters a white man. Living- stone found the bodies of albino negroes in Bechuana Land always blistered on exposure to the sun, 22 and a like effect has been observed among albino Polynesians, and Melanesians of Fiji. 23 Paul Ehrenreich finds that the degree of coloration de- pends less upon annual temperature than upon the direct effect of the sun's rays ; and that therefore a people dwelling in a cool, dry climate, but exposed to the sun may be darker than another in a hot, moist climate but living in a dense forest. The forest-dwelling Botokudos of the upper San Francisco River in Brazil are fairer than the kindred Kayapo tribe, who inhabit the open campos ; and the Arawak of the Purus River forests are lighter than their fellows in the central Matto Grosso. 24 Sea-faring coast folk, who are constantly exposed to the sun, especially in the Tropics, show a deeper pigmenta- CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 39 tion than their kindred of the wooded interior. 25 The coast Moros of western Mindanao are darker than the Subanos, their Malay brethren of the back country, the lightness of whose color can be explained by their forest life. 26 So the Duallas of the Kamerun coast of Africa are darker than the Bakwiri inhabiting the forested mountains just behind them, though both tribes belong to the Bantu group of people. 27 Here light, in contradistinction to heat, appears the dominant factor in pigmentation. A recent theory, advanced by von Schmae- del in 1895, rests upon the chemical power of light. It holds that the black pigment renders the negro skin insensitive to the luminous or actinic effects of solar radiation, which are far more destructive to living protoplasm than the merely calorific effects. 28 Coloration responds to other more obscure influences of en- Pigmenta- vironment. A close connection between pigmentation and ele- ^ on an< * vation above sea level has been established : a high altitude a l u e * operates like a high latitude. Blondness increases appreciably on the higher slopes of the Black Forest, Vosges Mountains, and Swiss Alps, though these isolated highlands are the stronghold of the brunette Alpine race. 29 Livi, in his treatise on military anthropometry, deduced a special action of moun- tains upon pigmentation on observing a prevailing increase of blondness in Italy above the four-hundred meter line, a phenomenon which came out as strongly in Basilicata and Calabria provinces of the south as in Piedmont and Lombardy in the north. 30 The dark Hamitic Berbers of northern Africa have developed an unmistakable blond variant in high valleys of the Atlas range, which in a sub-tropical region rises to the height of 12,000 feet. Here among the Kabyles the popula- tion is fair; grey, blue or green eyes are frequent, as is also reddish blond or chestnut hair. 31 Waitz long ago affirmed this tendency of mountaineers to lighter coloring from his study of primitive peoples. 32 The modification can not be attributed wholly to climatic contrast between mountain and plain. Some other factor, like the economic poverty of the environment and the poor food-supply, as Livi suggests, has had a hand in the result ; but just what it is or how it has operated cannot yet be defined. 33 40 CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES Difficulty of general- ization. Psychical effects. Enough has been said to show that the geographer can formulate no broad generalization as to the relation of pig- mentation and climate from the occurrence of the darkest skins in the Tropics ; because this fact is weakened by the ap- pearance also of lighter tints in the hottest districts, and of darker ones in arctic and temperate regions. The geographer must investigate the questions when and where deeper shades develop in the skins of fair races ; what is the significance of dark skins in the cold zones nnd of fair ones in hot zones. His answer must be based largely on the conclusions of physiolo- gists and physicists, and only when these have reached a satisfactory solution of each detail of the problem can the geographer summarize the influence of environment upon pig- mentation. The rule can therefore safely be laid down that in all investigation of geographic influences upon the permanent physical characteristics of races, the geographic distribution of these should be left out of consideration till the last, since it so easily misleads. 3 * Moreover, owing to the ceaseless move- ments of mankind, these effects do not remain confined to the region that produced them, but pass on with the wandering throng in whom they have once developed, and in whom they endure or vanish according as they prove beneficial or deleteri- ous in the new habitat. II. More varied and important are the psychical effects of geographic environment. As direct effects they are doubtless bound up in many physiological modifications; and as influ- ences of climate, they help differentiate peoples and races in point of temperament. They are reflected in man's religion and his literature, in his modes of thought and figures of speech. Blackstone states that "in the Isle of Man, to take away a horse or ox was no felony, but a trespass, because of the difficulty in that little territory to conceal them or to carry them off; but to steal a pig or a fowl, which is easily done, was a capital misdemeanour, and the offender punished with death." The judges or deemsters in this island of fishermen swore to execute the laws as impartially "as the herring's back- bone doth lie in the middle of the fish." 3 The whole mythol- ogy of the Polynesians is an echo of the encompassing ocean. The cosmography of every primitive people, their first crude CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 41 effort in the science of the universe, bears the impress of their habitat. The Eskimo's hell is a place of darkness, storm and intense cold; 36 the Jew's is a place of eternal fire. Buddha, born in the steaming Himalayan piedmont, fighting the lassi- tude induced by heat and humidity, pictured his heaven as Nirvana, the cessation of all activity and individual life. Intellectual effects of environment may appear in the en- Indirect richment of a Language in one direction to a rare nicety of e ^ ect upon expression ; but this may be combined with a meager vocabu- lary in all other directions. The greatest cattle-breeders among the native Africans, such as the Hereros of western Damara- land and the Dinkas of the upper White Nile, have an amazing choice of words for all colors describing their animals brown, dun, red, white, dapple, and so on in every gradation of shade and hue. The Samoyedes of northern Russia have eleven or twelve terms to designate the various grays and browns of their reindeer, despite their otherwise low cultural develop- ment. 37 The speech of nomads has an abundance of expres- sions for cattle in every relation of life. It includes different words for breeding, pregnancy, death, and slaughtering in relation to every different kind of domestic animal. The Mag- yars, among whom pastoral life still survives on the low plains of the Danube and Theiss, have a generic word for herd, csorda, and special terms for herds of cattle, horses, sheep, and swine. 38 While the vocabulary of Malays and Poly- nesians is especially rich in nautical terms, the Kirghis shep- herd tribes who wander over the highlands of western Asia from the Tian Shan to the Hindu Kush have four different terms for four kinds of mountain passes. A daban is a diffi- cult, rocky defile; an art is very high and dangerous; a bel is a low, easy pass, and a Jcutal is a broad opening between low hills. 39 To such influences man is a passive subject, especially in the earlier stages of his development ; but there are more important influences emanating from his environment which affect him as an active agent, challenge his will by fur- nishing the motives for its exercise, give purpose to his activi- ties, and determine the direction which they shall take. 40 These mold his mind and character through the media of his 42 CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES economic and social life, and produce effects none the less important because they are secondary. About these anthropo- geography can reach surer conclusions than regarding direct psychical effects, because it can trace their mode of operation as well as define the result. Direct psychical effects are more matters of conjecture, whose causation is asserted rather than proved. They seem to float in the air, detached from the solid ground under foot, and are therefore subject matter for tin psychologist rather than the geographer. The great What of the great man in this geographical interpretation man in o f history ? It seems to take no account of him, or to put him history. - n ^ o ^ me lting-pot with the masses. Both are to some extent true. As a science, anthropo-geography can deal only with large averages, and these exclude or minimize the exceptional individual. Moreover, geographic conditions which give this or that bent to a nation's purposes and determine its aggre- gate activities have a similar effect upon the individual ; but he may institute a far-seeing policy, to whose wisdom only gradually is the people awakened. The acts of the great man are rarely arbitrary or artificial; he accelerates or retard the normal course of development, but cannot turn it counter to the channels of natural conditions. As a rule he is a product of the same forces that made his people. He moves with them and is followed by them under a common impulse. Daniel Boone, that picturesque figure leading the van of the westward movement over the Allegheny Mountains, was born of his frontier environment and found a multitude of his kind in that region of backwoods farms to follow him into the wil- derness. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, in the Louisiana Pur- chase, carried out the policy of expansion adumbrated in Gov- ernor Spottswood's expedition with the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe over the Blue Ridge in 1712. Jefferson's daring consummation of the purchase without government authority showed his community of purpose with the majority of the people. Peter the Great's location of his capital at St. Peters- burg, usually stigmatized as the act of a despot, was made in response to natural conditions offering access to the Baltic nations, just as certainly as ten centuries before similar con- ditions and identical advantages led the early Russian mer- CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 43 chants to build up a town at nearby Novgorod, in easy water } connection with the Baltic commerce. 41 ^.JLUr-Geographic conditions influence the economic and so- Economic cial development of a people by the abundance, paucity, or a " d 8 general character of the natural resources, by the local ease or difficulty of securing the necessaries of life, and by the possibility of industry and commerce afforded by the en- vironment. From the standpoint of production and exchange, these influences are primarily the subject matter of economic and commercial geography ; but since they also permeate national life, determine or modify its social structure, con- demn it to the dwarfing effects of national poverty, or open to it the cultural and political possibilities resident in national wealth, they are legitimate material also for anthropo-geog- raphy. They are especially significant because they determine the Size of size of the social group. This must be forever small in areas of limited resources or of limited extent, as in the little islands of the world and the yet smaller oases. The desert of Chinese Turkestan supports, in certain detached spots of river-born fertility, populations like the 60,000 of Kashgar, and from this size groups all the way down to the single families which Younghusband found living by a mere trickle of a stream flowing down the southern slope of the Tian Shan. Small islands, according to their size, fertility, and command of trade, may harbor a sparse and scant population, like the five hundred souls struggling for an ill-fed existence on the barren Westman Isles of Iceland ; or a compact, teeming, yet abso- lutely small social group, like that crowding Malta or the Bermudas. Whether sparsely or compactly distributed, such groups suffer the limitations inherent in their small size. They are forever excluded from the historical significance at- taching to the large, continuously distributed populations of fertile continental lands. f\ IV^jrjhe next class belongs exclusively to the domain of Effect upon geography, because it embraces the influence of the features movements of the earth's surface in directing the movements and ultimate * >eo * > w distribution of mankind. It includes the effect of natural barriers, like mountains, deserts, swamps, and seas, in ob- 44 CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES structing or deflecting the course of migrating people and in giving direction to national expansion; it considers the tendency of river valleys and treeless plains to facilitate such movements, the power of rivers, lakes, bays and oceans either to block the path or open a highway, according as navigation is in a primitive or advanced stage; and finally the influence of all these natural features in determining the territory which a people is likely to occupy, and the boundaries which shall separate from their neighbors. River The lines of expansion followed by the French and English routes. j n j.jj e se ttlement of America and also the extent of territory covered by each were powerfully influenced by geographic con- ditions. The early French explorers entered the great east- west waterway of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, whioh carried them around the northern end of the Appalachian barrier into the heart of the continent, planted them on the low, swampy, often navigable watershed of the Mississippi, and started them on another river voyage of nearly two thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Here were the conditions and temptation for almost unlimited expansion ; hence French Canada reached to the head of Lake Superior, and French Louisiana to the sources of the Mis- souri. To the lot of the English fell a series of short rivers with fertile valleys, nearly barred at their not distant sources by a wall of forested mountains, but separated from one another by low watersheds which facilitated lateral expansjon over a narrow belt between mountains and sea. Here a region of mild climate and fertile soil suited to agriculture, enclosed by strong natural boundaries, made for compact settlement, in contrast to the wide diffusion of the French. Later, when a growing population pressed against the western barrier, mountain gates opened at Cumberland Gap and the Mohawk Valley; the Ohio River and the Great Lakes became interior thoroughfares, and the northwestern prairies lines of least resistance to the western settler. Rivers played the same part in directing and expediting this forward movement, as did the Lena and the Amoor in the Russian ad- vance into Siberia, the Humber and the Trent in the progress of the Angles into the heart of Britain, the Rhone and Danube in the march of the Romans into central Europe. The geographical environment of a people may be such as Segrega- te segregate them from others, and thereby to preserve or ti n an( * even intensify their natural characteristics ; or it may expose acces8lblllt y them to extraneous influences, to an infusion of new blood and new ideas, till their peculiarities are toned down, their distinct- ive features of dialect or national dress or provincial customs eliminated, and the people as a whole approach to the com- posite type of civilized humanity. A land shut off by moun- tains or sea from the rest of the world tends to develop a homogeneous people, since it limits or prevents the intrusion of foreign elements ; or when once these are introduced, it encourages their rapid assimilation by the strongly interactive life of a confined locality. Therefore large or remote islands are, as a rule, distinguished by the unity of their inhabitants in point of civilization and race characteristics. Witness Great Britain, Ireland, Japan, Iceland, as also Australia and New Zealand at the time of their discovery. The high- lands of the Southern Appalachians, which form the "mount- ain backyards" of Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, are peopled by the purest English stock in the United States, descendants of the backwoodsmen of the late eighteenth century. Difficulty of access and lack of arable land have combined to discourage immigration. In consequence, foreign elements, including the elsewhere ubiquitous negro, are want- ing, except along the few railroads which in recent years have penetrated this country. Here survive an eighteenth century English, Christmas celebrated on Twelfth Night, the spinning wheel, and a belief in Joshua's power to arrest the course of the sun. 42 An easily accessible land is geographically hospitable to all new-comers, facilitates the mingling of peoples, the exchange of commodities and ideas. The amalgamation of races in such regions depends upon the similarity or diversity of the ethnic elements and the duration of the common occupation. The broad, open valley of the Danube from the Black Sea to Vienna contains a bizarre mixture of several stocks Turks, Bulgarians, various families of pure Slavs, Roumanians, Hun- garians, and Germans. These elements are too diverse and 46 CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES their occupation of the valley too recent for amalgamation to have advanced very far as yet. The maritime plain and open river valleys of northern France show a com]:L'le fusion of the native Celts with the Saxons, Franks, and Normans who have successively drifted into the region, just as the Teutonic and scanter Slav elements have blended in the Baltic plains from the Elbe to the Vistula. Change of Here are four different classes of geographic influences, habitat. a ll which may become active in modifying a people when it changes its habitat. Many of the characteristics acquired in the old home still live on, or at best yield slowly to the new environment. This is especially true of the direct physical and psychical effects. But a country may work a prompt and radical change in the social organization of an immigrant people by the totally new conditions of economic life which it presents. These may be either greater wealth or poverty of natural resources than the race has previously known, new stimulants or deterrents to commerce and intercourse, and new conditions of climate which affect the efficiency of the work- man and the general character of production. From these a whole complex mass of secondary effects may follow. J> The Aryans and Mongols, leaving their homes in the cool barren highlands of Central Asia where nature dispensed her gifts with a miserly hand, and coming down to the hot, low, fertile plains of the Indian rivers, underwent several funda- mental changes in the process of adaptation to their new en- vironment. An enervating climate did its work in slaking their energies ; but more radical still was the change wrought by the contrast of poverty and abundance, enforced ascrtirism and luxury, presented by the old and new home. The rest- less, tireless shepherds became a sedentary, agricultural peo- ple; the abstemious nomads, spare, sinewy, strangers to in- dulgence became a race of rulers, revelling in luxury, lord- ing it over countless subjects; finally, their numbers increased rapidly, no longer kept down by the scant subsistence of arid grasslands and scattered oases. In a similar way, the Arab of the desert became transformed into the sedentary lord of Spain. In the luxuriance of field and orchard which his skilful methods of irrigation and til- CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 47 lage produced, in the growing predominance of the intellectual over the nomadic military life, of the complex affairs of city and mart over the simple tasks of herdsman or cultivator, he lost the benefit of the early harsh training and therewith his hold upon his Iberian empire. Biblical history gives us the picture of the Sheik Abraham, accompanied by his nephew Lot, moving up from the rainless plains of Mesopotamia with his flocks and herds into the better watered Palestine. There his descendants in the garden land of Canaan became an agri- cultural people ; and the problem of Moses and the Judges was to prevent their assimilation in religion and custom to the settled Semitic tribes about them, and to make them preserve the ideals born in the starry solitudes of the desert. The change from the nomadic to the sedentary life repre- Retro- sents an economic advance. Sometimes removal to strongly *p contrasted geographic conditions necessitates a reversion to a . . . lower economic type of existence. The French colonists who came to Lower Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies found themselves located in a region of intense cold, where arable soil was inferior in quality and limited in amount, producing no staple like the tobacco of Virginia or the wheat of Maryland or the cotton of South Carolina or the sugar of the West Indies, by which a young colony might secure a place in European trade. But the snow-wrapped forests of Canada yielded an abundance of fur-bearing animals, the fineness and thickness of whose pelts were born of this frozen north. Into their remotest haunts at the head of Lake Supe- rior or of Hudson Bay, long lines of rivers and lakes opened level water roads a thousand miles or more from the crude little colonial capital at Quebec. And over in Europe beaver hats and fur-trimmed garments were all the style! So the plodding farmer from Normandy and the fisherman from Poitou, transferred to Canadian soil, were irresistibly drawn into the adventurous life of the trapper and fur-trader. The fur trade became the accepted basis of colonial life; the voyageur and courier de bois, clad in skins, paddling up ice- rimmed streams in their birch-bark canoes, fraternizing with Indians who were their only companions in that bleak interior, and married often to dusky squaws, became assimilated to the 48 CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES savage life about them and reverted to the lower hunter stage of civilization. 43 The Boeri Another pronounced instance of rapid retrogression under of South new un f a vorable geographic conditions is afforded by the South African Boer. The transfer from the busy commercial cities of the Rhine mouths to the far-away periphery of the world's trade, from the intensive agriculture of small deltaic gardens and the scientific dairy farming of the moist Nether- lands to the semi-arid pastures of the high, treeless veldt, where they were barred from contact with the vivifying sea and its ship-borne commerce, has changed the enterprising seventeenth century Hollander into the conservative pastoral Boer. Dutch cleanliness has necessarily become a tradition to a people who can scarcely find water for their cattle. The comfort and solid bourgeois elegance of the Dutch home lost its material equipment in the Great Trek, when the long wagon journey reduced household furniture to its lowest terms. House-wifely habits and order vanished in the semi- nomadic life which followed. 44 The gregarious instinct, bred by the closely-packed population of little Holland, was trans- formed to a love of solitude, which in all lands character- izes the people of a remote and sparsely inhabited frontier. It is a common saying that the Boer cannot bear to see another man's smoke from his stoep, just as the early Trans- Allegheny pioneer was always on the move westward, because he could not bear to hear his neighbor's watch-dog bark. Even the Boer language has deteriorated under the effects of isolation and a lower status of civilization. The native Taal differs widely from the polished speech of Holland ; it preserves some fea- tures of the High Dutch of two centuries ago, but has lost inflexions and borrowed words for new phenomena from the English, Kaffirs and Hottentots ; can express no ab- stract ideas, only the concrete ideas of a dull, work-a-day world. 45 The new habitat may eliminate many previously acquired characteristics and hence transform a people, as in the case of the Boers; or it may intensify tribal or national traits, as in the seafaring propensities of the Angles and Saxons when transferred to Britain, and of the seventeenth century Eng- CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 49 lish when transplanted to the indented coasts of New England ; or it may tolerate mere survival or the slow dissuetude of qualities which escape any particular pressure in the new environment, and which neither benefit nor handicap in the modified struggle for existence. NOTES TO CHAPTER H 1. Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. V, p. 166. New York, 1895. 2. R. Virchow, Bassenbildung und Erblichkeit, Bastian Festschrift, pp. 14, 43, 44. Berlin, 1896. 3. Darwin, Descent of Man, pp. 34-35. New York, 1899. 4. Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. I, pp. 8-9. New York, 1895. 5. P. Ehrenreich, Die Urbewohner Brasiliens, p. 30. Braunschweig, 1897. 6. Ratzel, Die Erde und das Leben, Vol. I, pp. 364, 365. Leipzig and Vienna, 1901. 7. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 79-86, 96, 100. New York, 1899. 8. T. Waitz, Anthropology, pp. 57-58. Edited by J. F. Collingwood. London, 1863. 9. Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. I, pp. 198-200, 219. Philadelphia, 1853. 10. Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 33. New York, 1899. 11. D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, p. 266. New York, 1858. 12. Alaska, Eleventh Census Report, pp. 54, 56. Washington, 1893, and Albert P. Niblack, The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia, p. 237. Washington, 1888. 13. Fitz-Roy, Voyage of the Beagle, Vol. II, pp. 130-132, 137, 138. London, 1839. 14. H. Bancroft, Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 88-89. San Francisco, 1886. 15. S. Stanhope Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Com- plexion and Figure in the Human Species, pp. 103-110. New Brunswick and New York, 1810. 16. For full discussion see A. R. Wallace 's article on acclimatization in Encyclopedia Britanica, and W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe. Chap. XXI. New York, 1899. 17. D. G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 39-41. Philadelphia, 1901. 18. Darwin, Descent of Man, pp. 34-35. New York, 1899. 19. E. F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 137-138. London, 1897. 20. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 58-71, Map. New York, 1898. 21. Ibid., p. 566. D. G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 29-30. Phila- delphia, 1901. 22. D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, p. 607. New York, 1858. 23. Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, p. 83. New York, 1859. , t 50 CLASSES OF GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCES 24. P. Ehrenreich, Die Urbeivohner Brasilicns, p. 32. Braunschweig, 1897. 25. T. Waitz, Anthropology, pp. 46-49. Edited by Collingwood, Lon- don, 1863. 26. Philippine Census, Vol. I, p. 552. Washington, 1903. 27. F. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. Ill, p. 106. London, 1908. 28. Major Charles E. Woodruff, The Effect of Tropical Light on the White Man, New York, 1905, is a suggestive but iiot convincing discus- sion of the theory. 29. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 74-77. New York, 1899. 30. Quoted in G. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, p. 73. London and New York, 1901. 31. Ibid., pp. 63-69, 74-75. 32. T. Waitz, Anthropology, pp. 44-45. Edited by J. F. Collingwood, London, 1863. 33. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 76. New York, 1899. 34. For able discussion, see Topinard, Anthropology, pp. 385-392. Tr. from French, London, 1894. 35. J. Johnson, Jurisprudence of the Isle of Man, pp. 44, 71. Edin- burgh, 1811. 36. Charles F. Hall, Arctic Researches and Life among the Eskimo, p. 571. New York, 1866. Franz Boas, The Central Eskimo, Sixth Annual Eeport of the Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 588-590. Washington, 1888. 37. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 35. London, 1896-1898. 38. Roscher, National-OeJconomik des AcTcerbaues, p. 34, note 8. Stutt- gart, 1888. 39. Elisee Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants, Asia, Vol. I, p. 171. New York, 1895. 40. Alfred Hettner, Die Geographie dcs MenscJien, pp. 409-410 in Geographische Zeitschrift, Vol. XIII, No. 8. Leipzig, 1907. 41. S. B. Boulton, The Russian Empire, pp. 60-64. London, 1882. 42. E. C. Semple, The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains, The Geographical Journal, Vol. XVII, No. 6, pp. 588-623. London, 1901. 43. E.-C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, pp. 25-31. Boston, 1903. The Influence of Geographic Environment on the Lower St. Lawrence, Bull. Amer. Geog. Society, Vol. XXXVI, p. 449- 466. -New York, 1904. 44. A. R. Colquhoun, Africander Land, pp. 200-201. New York, 1906. 45. Ibid., pp. 140-145. James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. 398. New York, 1897. CHAPTER III SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO THE LAND EVERY clan, tribe, state or nation includes two ideas, a People people and its land, the first unthinkable without the other. an< i History, sociology, ethnology touch only the inhabited areas of the earth. These areas gain their final significance because of the people who occupy them; their local conditions of climate, soil, natural resources, physical features and geo- graphic situation are important primarily as factors in the development of actual or possible inhabitants. A land is fully comprehended only when studied in the light of its influence upon its people, and a people cannot be understood apart from the field of its activities. More than this, human activities are fully intelligible only in relation to the various geographic conditions which have stimulated them in different parts of the world. The principles of the evolution of navi- gation, of agriculture, of trade, as also the theory of popula- tion, can never reach their correct and final statement, unless the data for the conclusions are drawn from every part of the world, and each fact interpreted in the light of the local conditions whence it sprang. Therefore anthropology, soci- ology and history should be permeated by geography. In history, the question of territory, by which is meant Political mere area in contrast to specific geographic conditions geography has constantly come to the front, because a state obviously involved land and boundaries, and assumed as its chief func- tion the defence and extension of these. Therefore political geography developed early as an offshoot of history. Politi- cal science has often formulated its principles without regard to the geographic conditions of states, but as a matter of fact, the most fruitful political policies of nations have almost in- variably had a geographic core. Witness the colonial policy of Holland, England, France and Portugal, the free-trade 52 SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND Political versus social geography. policy of England, the militantism of Germany, the whole complex question of European balance of power and the Bosporus, and the Monroe Doctrine of the United States. Dividing lines between political parties tend to follow ap- proximately geographic lines of cleavage ; and these make themselves apparent at recurring intervals of national up- heaval, perhaps with centuries between, like a submarine vol- canic rift. In England the southeastern plain and the north- western uplands have been repeatedly arrayed against each other, from the Roman conquest which embraced the lowlands up to about the 500-foot contour line, 1 through the War of the Roses and the Civil War, 2 to the struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the great Reform Bill of 1832. 3 Though the boundary lines have been only roughly the same and each district has contained opponents of the dominant local party, nevertheless the geographic core has been plain enough. The land is a more conspicuous factor in the history of states than in the history of society, but not more necessary and potent. Wars, which constitute so large a part of political history, have usually aimed more or less directly at acquisition or retention of territory; they have made every petty quar- rel the pretext for mulcting the weaker nation of part of its land. Political maps are therefore subject to sudden and radical alterations, as when France's name was wiped off the North American continent in 1763, or when recently Spain's sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere was obliterated. But the race stocks, languages, customs, and institutions of both France and Spain remained after the flags had departed. The reason is that society is far more deeply rooted in the land than is a state, does not expand or contract its area so readily. Society is always, in a sense, adscripta glebae; an expanding state which incorporates a new piece of territory inevitably incorporates its inhabitants, unless it exterminates or expels them. Yet because racial and social geography change slowly, quietly and imperceptibly, like all those fundamental processes which we call growth, it is not so easy and obvious a task to formulate a natural law for the territorial relations of the various hunter, pastoral nomadic, agricultural, and SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 53 industrial types of society as for those of the growing state. Most systems of sociology treat man as if he were in some Land way detached from the earth's surface; they ignore the land basis basis of society. The anthropo-geographer recognizes the various social forces, economic and psychologic, which soci- ologists regard as the cement of societies ; but he has some- thing to add. He sees in the land occupied by a primitive iribe or a highly organized state the underlying material bond holding society together, the ultimate basis of their fundamental social activities, which are therefore derivatives from the land. He sees the common territory exercising an integrating force, weak in primitive communities where the group has established only a few slight and temporary rela- tions with its soil, so that this low social complex breaks up readily like its organic counterpart, the low animal organism found in an amoeba; he sees it growing stronger with every advance in civilization involving more complex relations to the land, with settled habitations, with increased density of population, with a discriminating and highly differentiated use of the soil, with the exploitation of mineral resources, and finally with that far-reaching exchange of commodities and ideas which means the establishment of varied extra-territorial relations. Finally, the modern society or state has grown into every foot of its own soil, exploited its every geographic ad- vantage, utilized its geographic location to enrich itself by international trade, and when possible, to absorb outlying territories by means of colonies. The broader this geographic base, the richer, more varied its resources, and the more favorable its climate to their exploitation, the more numerous and complex are the connections which the members of a social group can establish with it, and through it with each other; or in other words, the greater may be its ultimate historical significance. The polar regions and the subtropical deserts, on the other hand, permit man to form only few and inter- mittent relations with any one spot, restrict economic methods to the lower stages of development, produce only the small, weak, loosely organized horde, which never evolves into a state so long as it remains in that retarding environment. 54 SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LA\D Morgan's Man in his larger activities, as opposed to his mere physi- ological or psychological processes, cannot be studied apart from the land which he inhabits. Whether we consider him >ingly or in a group family, clan, tribe or state we must al- u :iys consider him or his group in relation to a piece of land. The ancient Irish sept, Highland clan, Russian mir, Cherokee hill-town, Bedouin tribe, and the ancient Helvetian canton, like the political state of history, have meant always a group of people and a bit of land. The first presupposes the second. In all cases the form and size of the social group, the nature of its activities, the trend and limit of its development will be strongly influenced by the size and nature of its habitat. The land basi? is Always present, in spite of Morgan's artificial distinction between a theoretically landless societas, held together only by the bond of common blood, and the political clvitas based upon land. 4 Though primitive society found its conscious bond in common blood, nevertheless the land bond was always there, and it gradually asserted its fundamental character with the evolution of society. The savage and barbarous groups which in Morgan's classi- fication would fall under the head of societas have nevertheless a clear conception of their ownership of the tribal lands which they use in common. This idea is probably of ver}- primitive origin, arising from the association of a group with its habi- tat, whose food supply they regard as a monopoly. 5 This is true even of migratory hunting tribes. They claim a cer- tain area whose boundaries, however, are often ill-defined and subject to fluctuations, because the lands are not held by per- manent occupancy and cultivation. An exceptional case is that of the Shoshone Indians, inhabiting the barren Utah basin and the upper valleys of the Snake and Salmon Rivers, who are accredited with no sense of ownership of the soil. In their natural state they roved about in small, totally unor- ganized bands or single families, and changed their locations so widely, that they seemed to lay no claim to any particular portion. The hopeless sterility of the region and its poverty of game kept its destitute inhabitants constantly on the move to gather in the meager food supply, and often restricted the social group to the family. 6 Here the bond between lard LINGUISTIC ^STOCKS OF AMERICAN INDIANS NORTH OF MEXICO BY J. W. POWELL. SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 55 and tribe, and hence between the members of the tribe, was the weakest possible. The usual type of tribal ownership was presented by the Land bond Comanches, nomadic horse Indians who occupied the grassy in hunter plains of northern Texas. They held their territory and the game upon it as the common property of the tribe, and jeal- ously guarded the integrity of their domain. 7 The chief Algonquin tribes, who occupied the territory between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, had each its separate domain, within which it shifted its villages every few years; but its size depended upon the power of the tribe to repel en- croachment upon its hunting grounds. Relying mainly on the chase and fishing, little on agriculture, for their subsis- tence, their relations to their soil were superficial and transi- tory, their tribal organization in a high degree unstable. 8 Students of American ethnology generally agree that most of the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi were occupying definite areas at the time of the discovery, and were to a con- siderable extent sedentary and agricultural. Though nomadic within the tribal territory, as they moved with the season in pursuit of game, they returned to their villages, which were shifted only at relatively long intervals. 9 The political organization of the native Australians, low as they were in the social scale, seems to have been based chiefly on the claim of each wretched wandering tribe to a definite territory. 10 In north central Australia, where even a very sparse population has sufficed to saturate the sterile soil, tribal boundaries have become fixed and inviolable, so that even war brings no transfer of territory. Land and people are identified. The bond is cemented by their primitive re- ligion, for the tribe's spirit ancestors occupied this special territory. 11 In a like manner a very definite conception of tribal ownership of land prevails among the Bushmen and Bechuanas of South Africa ; and to the pastoral Hereros the alienation of their land is inconceivable. 12 [See map page 105.] A tribe of hunters can never be more than a small horde, because the simple, monotonous savage economy permits no concentration of population, no division of labor except that between the sexes, and hence no evolution of classes. The 56 SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND common economic level of all is reflected in the simple social organization, 13 which necessarily has little cohesion, because the group must be prepared to break up and scatter in smaller divisions, when its members increase or its savage supplies decrease even a little. Such primitive groups cannot grow into larger units, because these would demand more roots sent down into the sustaining soil ; but they multiply by fission, like the infusorial monads, and thereafter lead independent exist- ences remote from each other. This is the explanation of mul- tiplication of dialects among savage tribes. Land Fishing tribes have their chief occupation determined by their habitats, which are found along well stocked rivers, lakes, or coastal fishing grounds. Conditions here encourage an early adoption of sedentary life, discourage wandering except for short periods, and facilitate the introduction of agriculture wherever conditions of climate and soil permit. Hence these fisher folk develop relatively large and permanent social groups, as testified by the ancient lake-villages of Switz- erland, based upon a concentrated food-supply resulting from a systematic and often varied exploitation of the local re- sources. The cooperation and submission to a leader necessary in pelagic fishing often gives the preliminary training for higher political organization. 14 All the primitive stocks of the Brazilian Indians, except the mountain Ges, are fishermen and agriculturists ; hence their annual migrations are kept within narrow limits. Each linguistic group occupies a fixed and relatively well defined district. 15 Stanley found along the Congo large permanent villages of the natives, who were en- gaged in fishing and tilling the fruitful soil, but knew little about the country ten miles back from the river. These two generous means of subsistence are everywhere combined in Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia; there they are asso- ciated with dense populations and often with advanced po- litical organization, as we find it in the feudal monarchy of Tonga and the savage Fiji Islands. 16 Fisher tribes, therefore, get an early impulse forward in civilization ; 1T and even where conditions do not permit the upward step to agriculture, these tribes have permanent relations with their land, form stable social groups, and often utilize their location on a natural SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 57 highway to develop systematic trade. For instance, on the northwest coast of British Columbia and Southern Alaska, the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshean Indians have portioned out all the land about their seaboard villages among the separate families or households as hunting, fishing, and berrying grounds. These are regarded as private property and are handed down from generation to generation. If they are used by anyone other than the owner, the privilege must be paid for. Every salmon stream has its proprietor, whose summer camp can be seen set up at the point where the run of the fish is greatest. Combined with this private property in land there is a brisk trade up and down the coast, and a tendency toward feudalism in the village communities, owing to the association of power and social distinction with wealth and property in land. 18 Among pastoral nomads, among whom a systematic use of Land their territory begins to appear, and therefore a more definite bond in relation between land and people, we find a more distinct P 88 * ! notion than among wandering hunters of territorial ownership, the right of communal use, and the distinct obligation of common defense. Hence the social bond is drawn closer. The nomad identifies himself, with a certain district, which be- longs to his tribe by tradition or conquest, and has its clearly defined boundaries. Here he roams between its summer and winter pastures, possibly one hundred and fifty miles apart, visits its small arable patches in the spring for his limited agricultural ventures, and returns to them in the fall to reap their meager harvest. Its springs, streams, or wells assume enhanced value, are things to be fought for, owing to the prevailing aridity of summer; while ownership of a certain tract of desert or grassland carries with it a certain right in the bordering settled district as an area of plunder. 19 The Kara-Kirghis stock, who have been located since the sixteenth century on Lake Issik-Kul, long ago portioned out the land among the separate families, and determined their limits by natural features of the landscape. 20 Sven Hedin found on the Tarim River poles set up to mark the boundary between the Shah-yar and Kuchar tribal pastures. 21 John de Piano Carpini, traveling over southern Russia in 1246, im- 58 SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND Geograph- ical mark of low- type so- cieties. mediately after the Tartar conquest, found that the Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural rivers were all boundaries between do- mains of the various millionaries or thousands, into which the Tartar horde was organized. 22 The population of this vast country was distributed according to the different degrees of fertility and the size of the pastoral groups. 23 Volney observed the same distinction in the distribution of the Bedouins of Syria. He found the barren cantons held by small, widely scat- tered tribes, as in the Desert of Suez ; but the cultivable can- tons, like the Hauran and the Pachalic of Aleppo, closely dotted by the encampments of the pastoral owners. 24 The large range of territory held by a nomadic tribe is all successively occupied in the course of a year, but each part only for a short period of time. A pastoral use of even a good district necessitates a move of five or ten miles every few weeks. The whole, large as it may be, is absolutely neces- sary for the annual support of the tribe. Hence any outside encroachment upon their territory calls for the united resist- ance of the tribe. This joint or social action is dictated by their common interest in pastures and herds. The social ad- ministration embodied in the apportionment of pastures among the families or clans grows out of the systematic use of their territory, which represents a closer relation between land and people than is found among purely hunting tribes. Overcrowd- ing by men or livestock, on the other hand, puts a strain upon the social bond. When Abraham and Lot, typical nomads, returned from Egypt to Canaan with their large flocks and herds, rivalry for the pastures occasioned conflicts among their shepherds, so the two sheiks decided to separate. Abra- ham took the hill pastures of Judea, and Lot the plains of Jordan near the settled district of Sodom. 25 The larger the amount of territory necessary for the sup- port of a given number of people, whether the proportion be due to permanent poverty of natural resources as in the Eskimo country, or to retarded economic development as among the Indians of primitive America or the present Su- danese, the looser is the connection between land and people, and the lower the type of social organization. For such groups the organic theory of society finds an apt description. SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 59 To quote Spencer, "The original clusters, animal and social, are not only small, but they lack density. Creatures of low type occupy large spaces considering the small quantity of animal substance they contain ; and low-type societies spread over areas that are wide relatively to the number of their component individuals." 2 In common language this means small tribes or even detached families sparsely scattered over wide areas, living in temporary huts or encampments of tepees and tents shifted from place to place, making no effort to modify the surface of the land beyond scratching the soil to raise a niggardly crop of grain or tubers, and no investment of labor that might attach to one spot the sparse and migrant population. [See density maps pages 8 and 9.] The superiority over this social type of the civilized state Land and lies in the highly organized utilization of its whole geographic state, basis by the mature community, and in the development of government that has followed the increasing density of popu- lation and multiplication of activities growing out of this manifold use of the land. Sedentary agriculture, which forms its initial economic basis, is followed by industrialism and com- merce. The migratory life presents only limited accumulation of capital, and restricts narrowly its forms. Permanent settle- ment encourages accumulation in every form, and under grow- ing pressure of population slowly reveals the possibilities of every foot of ground, of every geographic advantage. These are the fibers of the land which become woven into the whole fabric of the nation's life. These a"re the geographic elements constituting the soil in which empires are rooted; they rise in the sap of the nation. The geographic basis of a state embodies a whole complex Strength of physical conditions which may influence its historical de- * tne velopment. The most potent of these are its size and zonal * location ; its situation, whether continental or insular, inland or maritime, on the open ocean or an enclosed sea ; its bounda- ries, whether drawn by sea, mountain, desert or the faint de- marking line of a river; its forested mountains, grassy plains, and arable lowlands ; its climate and drainage system ; finally its equipment with plant and animal life, whether indigenous or imported, and its mineral resources. When a state has 60 SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND Weak land tenure of hunt- ing and pastoral tribes. Land and food supply. taken advantage of all its natural conditions, the land becomes a constituent part of the state, 27 modifying the people which inhabit it, modified by them in turn, till the connection be- tween the two becomes so strong by reciprocal interaction, that the people cannot be understood apart from their land. Any attempt to divide them theoretically reduces the social or political body to a cadaver, valuable for the study of structural anatomy after the method of Herbert Spencer, but throwing little light upon the vital processes. A people who makes only a transitory or superficial use of its land has upon it no permanent or secure hold. The power to hold is measured by the power to use; hence the weak tenure of hunting and pastoral tribes. Between their scattered encampments at any given time are wide interstices, inviting occupation by any settlers who know how to make better use of the soil. This explains the easy intrusion of the English colonists into the sparsely tenanted territory of the Indians, of the agricultural Chinese into the pasture lands of the Mongols beyond the Great Wall, of the American pioneers into the hunting grounds of the Hudson Bay Company in the disputed Oregon country. 28 The frail bonds which unite these lower societies to their soil are easily ruptured and the people themselves dislodged, while their land is appropriated by the intruder. But who could ever conceive of dislodging the Chinese or the close-packed millions of India? A modern state with a given population on a wide area is more vulnerable than another of like population more closely distributed; but the former has the advantage of a reserve territory for future growth. 28 This was the case of Kursach- sen and Brandenburg in the sixteenth century, and of the United States throughout its history. But beside the danger of inherent weakness before attack, a condition of relative underpopulation always threatens a retardation of develop- ment. Easy-going man needs the prod of a pressing popula- tion. [Compare maps pages 8 and 103 for examples.] Food is the urgent and recurrent need of individuals and of society. It dictates their activities in relation to their land at every stage of economic development, fixes the locality of the encampment or village, and determines the size of SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 61 the territory from which sustenance is drawn. The length of residence in one place depends upon whether the springs of its food supply are perennial or intermittent, while the abundance of their flow determines how large a population a given piece of land can support. Hunter and fisher folk, relying almost exclusively upon Advance what their land produces of itself, need a large area and fr m derive from it only an irregular food supply, which in winter natural to ,. . . , * *>' ... ., artificial diminishes to the verge or famine. The transition to the bagig of pastoral stage has meant the substitution of an artificial subsistence, for a natural basis of subsistence, and therewith a change which more than any other one thing has inaugurated the advance from savagery to civilization. 30 From the standpoint of economics, the forward stride has consisted in the applica- tion of capital in the form of flocks and herds to the task of feeding the wandering horde ; 31 from the standpoint of alimen- tation, in the guarantee of a more reliable and generally more nutritious food supply, which enables population to grow more steadily and rapidly; from the standpoint of geography, in the marked reduction in the per capita amount of land necessary to yield an adequate and stable food supply. Pastoral nomadism can support in a given district of average quality from ten to twenty times as many souls as can the chase ; but in this respect is surpassed from twenty to thirty- fold by the more productive agriculture. While the subsis- tence of a nomad requires 100 to 200 acres of land, for that of a skillful farmer from 1 to 2 acres suffice. 32 In contrast, the land of the Indians living in the Hudson Bay Territory in 1857 averaged 10 square miles per capita; that of the Indians in the United States in 1825, subsidized moreover by the government, 1*4 square miles. 33 With transition to the sedentary life of agriculture, society Land in makes a further gain over nomadism in the closer integra- relation to tion of its social units, due to permanent residence in larger a S ncu ture< and more complex groups ; in the continuous release of labor from the task of mere food-getting for higher activities, re- sulting especially in the rapid evolution of the home; and finally in the more elaborate organization in the use of the land, leading to economic differentiation of different locali- 62 SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND Migratory agriculture. Geographic checks to progress. ties and to a rapid increase in the population supported by a given area, so that the land becomes the dominant cohesive force in society. [See maps pages 8 and 9.] Agriculture is adopted at first on a small scale as an ad- junct to the chase or herding. It tends therefore to partake of the same extensive and nomadic character 34 as these other methods of gaining subsistence, and only gradually becomes sedentary and intensive. Such was the superficial, migratory tillage of most American Indians, shifting with the village in the wake of the retreating game or in search of fresh un- exhausted soil. Such is the agriculture of the primitive Korkus in the Mahadeo Hills in Central India. They clear a forested slope by burning, rake over the ashes in which they sow their grain, and reap a fairly good crop in the fertilized soil. The second year the clearing yields a reduced product and the third year is abandoned. When the hamlet of five or six families has exhausted all the land about it, it moves to a new spot to repeat the process. 35 The same superficial, extensive tillage, with abandonment of fields every few years, prevails in the Tartar districts of the Russian steppes, as it did among the cattle-raising Ger- mans at the beginning of their history. Tacitus says of them, Arva per annos mutant et superest ager, 36 commenting at the same time upon their abundance of land and their reluctance to till. Where nomadism is made imperative by aridity, the agriculture which accompanies it tends to be- come fixed, owing to the few localities blessed with an irrigating stream to moisten the soil. These spots, generally selected for the winter residence, have their soil enriched, moreover, by the long stay of the herd and thus avoid exhaustion. 37 Often, how- ever, in enclosed basins the salinity of the irrigating streams in their lower course ruins the fields after one or two crops, and necessitates a constant shifting of the cultivated patches; hence agriculture remains subsidiary to the yield of the pas- tures. This condition and effect is conspicuous along the termini of the streams draining the northern slope of the Kuen Lun into the Tarim basin. 38 The desultory, intermittent, extensive use of the land prac- tised by hunters and nomads tends, under the growing pres- SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 63 sure of population, to pass into the systematic, continuous, intensive use practised by the farmer, except where nature presents positive checks to the transition. The most obvious check consists in adverse conditions of climate and soil. Where agriculture meets insurmountable obstacles, like the intense cold of Arctic Siberia and Lapland, or the alkaline soils of Nevada and the Caspian Depression, or the inadequate rain- fall of Mongolia and Central Arabia, the land can produce no higher economic and social groups than pastoral hordes. Hence shepherd folk are found in their purest types in deserts and steppes, where conditions early crystallized the social form and checked development. [Rainfall map chap. XIV.] Adverse conditions of climate and soil are not the only Native factors in this retardation. The very unequal native equip- animal and ment of the several continents with plant and animal forms P lant ! likely to accelerate the advance to nomadism and agriculture also enters into the equation. In Australia, the lack of a single indigenous mammal fit for domestication and of all cereals blocked from the start the pastoral and agricultural development of the natives. Hence at the arrival of the Europeans, Australia presented the unique spectacle of a whole continent with its population still held in the vise of nature. The Americas had a limited variety of animals susceptible of domestication, but were more meagerly equipped than the Old World. Yet the Eskimo failed to tame and herd the reindeer, though their precarious food-supply furnished a motive for the transition. Moreover, an abundance of grass and reindeer moss (Cladonia rangiferina), and congenial climatic conditions favored it especially for the Alaskan Eskimo, who had, besides, the nearby example of the Siberian Chukches as reindeer herders. 39 The buffalo, whose domesti- cability has been proved, was never utilized in this way by the Indians, though the Spaniard Gomara writes of one tribe, living in the sixteenth century in the southwestern part of what is now United States territory, whose chief wealth consisted in herds of tame buffalo. 40 North America, at the time of the discovery, saw only the dog hanging about the lodges of the Indians; but in South America the llama and alpaca, confined to the higher levels of the Andes (10,000 to 64 SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 1 Land per capita under various cul- tural and geographic conditions. 15,000 feet elevation) were used in domestic herds only in the mountain-rimmed valleys of ancient Peru, where, owing to the restricted areas of these intermontane basins, stock-raising early became stationary, 41 as we find it in the Alps. More- over, the high ridges of the Andes supported a species of grass called ichu, growing up to the snowline from the equator to the southern extremity of Patagonia. Its geographical distri- bution coincided with that of the llama and alpaca, whose chief pasturage it furnished. 42 In contrast, the absence of any wild fodder plants in Japan, and the exclusion of all for- eign forms by the successful competition of the native bamboo grass have together eliminated pastoral life from the economic history of the island. The Old World, on the other hand, furnished an abundant supply of indigenous animals susceptible of domestication, and especially those fitted for nomadic life, such as the camel, horse, ass, sheep and goat. Hence it produced in the wide- spread grasslands and deserts of Europe, Asia, and Africa the most perfect types of pastoral development in its natural or nomadic form. Moreover, the early history of the civilized agricultural peoples of these three continents reveals their previous pastoral mode of life. North and South America offered over most of their area conditions of climate and soil highly favorable to agriculture, and a fair list of indigenous cereals, tubers, and pulses yield- ing goodly crops even to superficial tillage. Maize espe- cially was admirably suited for a race of semi-migratory hun- ters. It could be sown without plowing, ripened in a warm season even in ninety days, could be harvested without a sickle and at the pleasure of the cultivator, and needed no prepara- tion beyond roasting before it was ready for food. 43 The beans and pumpkins which the Indians raised also needed only a short season. Hence many Indian tribes, while showing no trace of pastoral development, combined with the chase a semi-nomadic agriculture ; and in a few districts where geographic conditions had applied peculiar pressure, they had accomplished the transition to sedentary agriculture. Every advance to a higher state of civilization has meant a progressive decrease in the amount of land necessary for the SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 65 support of the individual, and a progressive increase in the relations between man and his habitat. The stage of social development remaining the same, the per capita amount of land decreases also from poorer to better endowed geographical districts, and with every invention which brings into use some natural resource. The following classification 44 illustrates the relation of density of population to various geographic and socio-economic conditions. Hunter tribes on the outskirts of the habitable area, as in Arctic America and Siberia, require from 70 to 200 square miles per capita ; in arid lands, like the Kalahari Desert and Patagonia, 40 to 200 square miles per capita; in choice dis- tricts and combining with the chase some primitive agriculture, as did the Cherokee, Shawnee and Iroquois Indians, the Dyaks of Borneo and the Papuans of New Guinea, 1/2 to 2 square miles per capita. Pastoral nomads show a density of from 2 to 5 to the square > ^ mile ; practicing some agriculture, as in Kordofan and Sennar districts of eastern Sudan, 10 to 15 to the square mile. Agri- culture, undeveloped but combined with some trade and in- dustry as in Equatorial Africa, Borneo and most of the Cen- tral American states, supports 5 to 15 to the square mile; practised with European methods in young or colonial lands, as in Arkansas, Texas, Minnesota, Hawaii, Canada and Argentine, or in European lands with unfavorable climate, up to 25 to the square mile. Pure agricultural lands of central Europe support 100 to the square mile, and those of southern Europe, 200; when combining some industry, from 250 to 300. But these figures rise to 500 or more in lowland India and China. Industrial districts of modern Europe, such as England, Belgium, Saxony, Departments Nord and Rhone in France, show a density of 500 to 800 to the square mile. [See maps pages 8 and 9.] With every increase of the population inhabiting a given Density of area, and with the consequent multiplication and constriction population of the bonds uniting society with its land, comes a growing a necessity for a more highly organized government, both to re- duce friction within and to secure to the people the land on 66 SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND Territorial expansion of the state. Checks to population. which and by which they live. Therefore protection becomes a prime function of the state. It wards off outside at- tack which may aim at acquisition of its territory, or an invasion of its rights, or curtailment of its geographic sphere of activity. The modern industrial state, furthermore, with the purpose of strengthening the nation, assists or itself undertakes the construction of highways, canals, and rail- roads, and the maintenance of steamship lines. These encourage the development of natural resources and of commerce, and hence lay the foundation for an increased population, by multiplying the relations between land and people. A like object is attained by territorial expansion, which often follows in the wake of commercial expansion. This strengthens the nation positively by enlarging its geographic base, and negatively by forcing back the boundaries of its neighbors. The expansion of the Thirteen Colonies from the Atlantic slope to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes by the treaty concluding the Revolution was a strong guarantee of the survival of the young Republic against future aggressions either of England or Spain, though it exchanged the scientific or protecting boundary of the Ap- palachian Mountains for the unscientific and exposed boundary of a river. The expansion to the Rocky Mountains by the Louisiana purchase not only gave wider play to na- tional energies, stimulated natural increase of population, and attracted immigration, but it eliminated a dangerous neighbor in the French, and placed a wide buffer of unten- anted land between the United States and the petty aggres- sions of the Spanish in Mexico. Rome's expansion into the valley of the Po, as later into Trans-Alpine Gaul and Ger- many, had for its purpose the protection of the peninsula against barbarian inroads. Japan's recent aggression against the Russians in the Far East was actuated by the realization that she had to expand into Korea at the cost of Muscovite ascendency, or contract later at the cost of her own independ- ence. If a state lacks the energy and national purpose, like Italy, or the possibility, like Switzerland, for territorial SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 67 expansion, and accepts its boundaries as final, the natural in- crease of population upon a fixed area produces an increased density, unless certain social forces counteract it. Without these forces, the relation of men to the land would have tended to modify everywhere in the same way. Increase in numbers would have been attended by a corresponding decrease in the amount of land at the disposal of each individual. Those states which, like Norway and Switzerland, cannot expand and which have exploited their natural resources to the utmost, must resign themselves to the emigration of their redundant population. But those which have remained within their own boundaries and have adopted a policy of isolation, like China, feudal Japan during its two and a half centuries of seclusion, and numerous Polynesian islands, have been forced to war with nature itself by checking the operation of the law of natural increase. All the repulsive devices contributing to this end, whether infanticide, abortion, cannibalism, the sanc- tioned murder of the aged and infirm, honorable suicide, poly- andry or persistent war, are the social deformities consequent upon suppressed growth. Such artificial checks upon popula- tion are more conspicuous in natural regions with sharply de- fined boundaries, like islands and oases, as Malthus observed ; 45 but they are visible also among savage tribes whose boundaries are fixed not by natural features but by the mutual repulsion and rivalry characterizing the stage of development, and whose limit of population is reduced by their low economic status. There is a great difference between those states whose inhabi- Ertra-terri- tants subsist exclusively from the products of their own coun- toria | try and those which rely more or less upon other lands. Great industrial states, like England and Germany, which derive only a portion of their food and raw material from their own territory, supply their dense populations through inter- national trade. Interruption of such foreign commerce is disastrous to the population at home; hence the state by a navy protects the lines of communication with those far- away lands of wheat fields and cattle ranch. This is no purely modern development. Athens in the time of Pericles used her navy not only to secure her political domination in the 68 SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND Geography in the philosophy of history. Theory of progress from the standpoint of geo- graphy. Aegean, but also her connections with the colonial wheat lands about the Euxine. The modern state strives to render this circle of trade both large and permanent by means of commercial treaties, customs-unions, trading-posts and colonies. Thus while soci- ety at home is multiplying its relations with its own land, the state is enabling it to multiply also its relations with the whole producing world. While at home the nation is be- coming more closely knit together through the common bond of the fatherland, in the world at large humanity is evolving a brotherhood of man by the union of each with all through the common growing bond of the earth. Hence we cannot avoid the question : Are we in process of evolving a social idea vaster than that underlying nationality? Do the Socialists hint to us the geographic basis of this new development, when they describe themselves as an international political party ? It is natural that the old philosophy of history should have fixed its attention upon the geographic basis of historical events. Searching for the permanent and common in the out- wardly mutable, it found always at the bottom of changing events the same solid earth. Biology has had the same ex- perience. The history of the life forms of the world leads al- ways back to the land on which that life arose, spread, and struggled for existence. The philosophy of history was supe- rior to early sociology, in that its method was one of historical comparison, which inevitably guided it back to the land as the material for the first generalization. Thus it happens that the importance of the land factor in history was approached first from the philosophical side. Montesquieu and Herder had no intention of solving sociological and geographical problems, when they considered the relation of peoples and states to their soil ; they wished to understand the purpose and destiny of man as an inhabitant of the earth. The study of history is always, from one standpoint, a study of progress. Yet after all the century-long investigation of the history of every people working out its destiny in its given environment, struggling against the difficulties of its habitat, progressing when it overcame them and retrograding SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 69 when it failed, advancing when it made the most of its op- portunities and declining when it made less or succumbed to an invader armed with better economic or political methods to exploit the land, it is amazing how little the land, in which all activities finally root, has been taken into account in the discussion of progress. Nevertheless, for a theory of progress it offers a solid basis. From the standpoint of the land social and political organizations, in successive stages of development, embrace ever increasing areas, and make them support ever denser populations ; and in this concentration of population and intensification of economic development they assume ever higher forms. It does not suffice that a peo- ple, in order to progress, should extend and multiply only its local relations to its land. This would eventuate in arrested de- velopment, such as Japan showed at the time of Perry's visit. The ideal basis of progress is the expansion of the world re- lations of a people, the extension of its field of activity and sphere of influence far beyond the limits of its own territory, by which it exchanges commodities and ideas with various countries of the world. Universal history shows us that, as the geographical horizon of the known world has widened from gray antiquity to the present, societies and states have ex- panded their territorial and economic scope; that they have grown not only in the number of their square miles and in the geographical range of their international intercourse, but in national efficiency, power, and permanence, and especially in that intellectual force which feeds upon the nutritious food of wide comparisons. Every great movement which has widened the geographical outlook of a people, such as the Crusades in the Middle Ages, or the colonization of the Americas, has applied an intellectual and economic stimulus. The ex- panding field of advancing history has therefore been an essen- tial concomitant and at the same time a driving force in the progress of every people and of the world. Since progress in civilization involves an increasing ex- Man's ploitation of natural advantages and the development of closer increasing relations between a land and its people, it is an erroneous dependence idea that man tends to emancipate himself more and more u P n naturc - from the control of the natural conditions forming at once Increase in kind and amount the foundation and environment of his activities. On the con- tr.iry, he multiplies his dependencies upon nature; 46 but while increasing their sum total, he diminishes the force of each. There lies the gist of the matter. As his bonds become more numerous, they become also more elastic. Civilization has lengthened his leash and padded his collar, so that it does not gall ; but the leash is never slipped. The Delaware Indians depended upon the forests alone for fuel. A citizen of Penn- sylvania, occupying the former Delaware tract, has the choice of wood, hard or soft coal, coke, petroleum, natural gas, or manufactured gas. Does this mean emancipation? By no means. For while fuel was a necessity to the Indian only for warmth and cooking, and incidentally for the pleasureable ex- citement of burning an enemy at the stake, it enters into the manufacture of almost every article that the Pennsylvanian uses in his daily life. His dependence upon nature has be- come more far-reaching, though less conspicuous and es- pecially less arbitrary. These dependencies increase enormously both in variety and amount. Great Britain, with its twenty thousand mer- chant ships aggregating over ten million tons, and its im- mense import and export trade, finds its harbors vastly more important to-day for the national welfare than in Cromwell's time, when they were used by a scanty mercantile fleet. Since the generation of electricity by water-power and its applica- tion to industry, the plunging falls of the Scandinavian Moun- tains, of the Alps of Switzerland, France, and Italy, of the Southern Appalachians and the Cascade Range, are geograph- ical features representing new and unsuspected forms of na- tional capital, and therefore new bonds between land and peo- ple in these localities. Russia since 1844 has built 35,572 miles (57,374 kilometers) of railroad in her European terri- tory, and thereby derived a new benefit from her level plains, which so facilitate the construction and cheap operation of railroads, that they have become in this aspect alone a new feature in her national economy. On the other hand, the galling restrictions of Russia's meager and strategically con- fined coasts, which tie her hand in any wide maritime policy, work a greater hardship to-day than they did a hundred years SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 71 ago, since her growing population creates a more insistent demand for international trade. In contrast to Russia, Nor- way, with its paucity of arable soil and of other natural re- sources, finds its long indented coastline and the coast-bred seamanship of its people a progressively important national asset. Hence as ocean-carriers the Norwegians have devel- oped a merchant marine nearly half as large again as that of Russia and Finland combined 1,569,646 tons 47 as against 1,084,165 tons. This growing dependence of a civilized people upon its land is characterized by intelligence and self-help. Man forms a partnership with nature, contributing brains and labor, while she provides the capital or raw material in ever more abundant and varied forms. As a result of this cooperation, held by the terms of the contract, he secures a better living than the savage who, like a mendicant, accepts what nature is pleased to dole out, and lives under the tyranny of her caprices. NOTES TO CHAPTER IH 1. H. J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 196. London, 1904. 2. Gardner, Atlas of English History, Map 29. New York, 1905. 3. Hereford George, Historical Geography of Great Britain, pp. 58-60. London, 1904. 4. Lewis Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 62. New York, 1878. 5. Franklin H. Giddings, Elements of Sociology, p. 247. New York, 1902. 6. Schoolcraft, The Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. I, pp. 198-200, 224. Philadelphia, 1853. 7. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 231-232, 241. 8. Koosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 70-73, 88. New York, 1895. 9. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 392-393, 408, Vol. XIX, of History of North America, edited by Francis W. Thorpe, Philadelphia, 1905. Eleventh Census Report on the Indians, p. 51. Washington, 1894. 10. Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 249-250. New York, 1902-1906. 11. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 13- 15. London, 1904. 12. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 126. London, 1896-1898. 13. Roscher, National-Ockonomik des AcJcerbaues, p. 24. Stuttgart, 1888. 72 SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO LAND 14. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 131. London, 1896-1898. 15. Paul Ehrenreich, Die Einteilung und Verbreitung der Volker- stamme Brasiliens, Peterman's Geographische Mitthetiungen, Vol. XXXVII, p. 85. Gotha, 1891. 16. Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 26, Note 5. Stuttgart, 1888. 17. Ibid., p. 27. 18. Albert Niblack, The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia, pp. 298-299, 304, 337-339. Washington, 1888. 19. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. Ill, p. 173. London, 1896-1898. 20. Ibid., Vol. III. pp. 173-174. 21. Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet, Vol. I, p. 184. New York and London, 1903. 22. John de Piano Carpini, Journey in 1246, p. 130. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904. 23. Journey of William de Rubruquis in 1253, p. 188. Hakluyt So- ciety, London, 1903. 24. Volney, quoted in Malthus, Principles of Population, Chap. VII, p. 60. London, 1878. 25. Genesis, Chap. XIII, 1-12. 26. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, p. 457. New York. 27. Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, pp. 202-204. Leipzig, 1897. 28. E. C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 206-207. Boston, 1903. 29. Roscher, Grundlagen des National-Oekonomie, Book VI. Bevolker- ung, p. 694, Note 5. Stuttgart, 1886. 30. Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. I, p. 303-313. Oxford and New York, 1892. 31. Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, pp. 31, 52. Stutt- gart, 1888. 32. Ibid., p. 56, Note 5. 33. For these and other averages, Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 593-595. New York, 1872. 34. Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, pp. 79-80, p. 81, Note 7. Stuttgart, 1888. William I. Thomas, Source Book for Social Origins, pp. 96-112. Chicago, 1909. 35. Capt. J. Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India, pp. 101-107, 168. London, 1889. 36. Tacitus, Germania, III. 37. Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 32, Note 15 on p. 36. Stuttgart, 1888. 38. E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 202, 203, 212, 213, 236-237. Boston, 1907. 39. Sheldon Jackson, Introduction of Domesticated Reindeer into Alaska, pp. 20, 25-29, 127-129. Washington, 1894. 40. Quoted in Alexander von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature in Different Lands, pp. 62, 139. Philadelphia, 1849. 41. Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. I, pp. 311-321, 333-354, 364-366. New York, 1892. 42. Prescott, Conquest of Peru, Vol. I, p. 47. New York, 1848. 43. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, Vol. XIX, pp. 151- 161, of The History of North America, edited by Francis W. Thorpe, Philadelphia, 1905. 44. Eatzel, Anthropo-geographie, Vol. II, pp. 264-265. 45. Malthus, Principles of Population, Chapters V and VII. London, 1878. 46. Nathaniel Shaler, Nature and Man in America, pp. 147-151. W. Z. Eipley, Eaces of Europe, Chap. I, New York, 1899. 47. Justus Perthea, Taschen- Atlaa, pp. 44, 47. Gotba, 1910. CHAPTER IV Universal- ity of these move- ments. Stratifi- cation of races. THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES IN THEIR GEO- GRAPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE THE ethnic and political boundaries of Europe to-day are the residuum of countless racial, national, tribal and individual movements reaching back into an unrecorded past. The very names of Turkey, Bulgaria, England, Scotland and France are borrowed from intruding peoples. New England, New France, New Scotland or Nova Scotia and many more on the American continents register the Trans-Atlantic nativity of their first white settlers. The provinces of Galicia in Spain, Lombardy in Italy, Brittany in France, Essex and Sussex in England record in their names streams of humanity diverted from the great currents of the Volkerwanderung. The Ro- mance group of languages, from Portugal to Roumania, tes- tify to the sweep of expanding Rome, just as the wide dis- tribution of the Aryan linguistic family points to many roads and long migrations from some unplaced birthplace. Names like Cis-Alpine and Trans-Alpine Gaul in the Roman Empire, Trans-Caucasia, Trans-Caspia and Trans-Baikalia in the Rus- sian Empire, the Transvaal and Transkei in South Africa, indicate the direction whence the advancing people have come. Ethnology reveals an east and west stratification of lin- guistic groups in Europe, a north and south stratification of races, and another stratification by altitude, which reappears in all parts of the world, and shows certain invading dominant races occupying the lowlands and other displaced ones the highlands. This definite arrangement points to successive arrivals, a crowding forward, an intrusion of the strong into fertile, accessible valleys and plains, and a dislodgment of the weak into the rough but safe keeping of mountain range or barren peninsula, where they are brought to bay. Ethnic fragments, linguistic survivals, or merely place names, dropped THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 75 like discarded baggage along the march of a retreating army, bear witness everywhere to tragic recessionals. Every country whose history we examine proves the re- The cipient of successive streams of humanity. Even sea-girt name England has received various intruding peoples from the s onca 4. a e T Movement. Ivoman occupation to the recent influx or Jtvussian Jews. In prehistoric times it combined several elements in its population, as the discovery of the "long barrow" men and "round bar- row" men by archaeologists, and the identification of a surviv- ing Iberian or Mediterranean strain by ethnologists go to prove. 1 Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India tell the same story, whether in their recorded or unrecorded history. Tropical Africa lacks a history ; but all that has been pieced together by ethnologists and anthropologists, in an effort to reconstruct its past, shows incessant movement, growth, expansion and short-lived conquest, followed by shrinkage, expulsion or ab- sorption by another invader. 2 To this constant shifting of races and peoples the name of historical movement has been given, because it underlies most of written history, and consti- tutes the major part of unwritten history, especially that of savage and nomadic tribes. Two things are vital in the history of every people, its ethnic composition and the wars it wages in defense or extension of its boundaries. Both rest upon his- torical movements, intrusions, whether peaceful or hostile, into its own land, and encroachments upon neighboring terri- tory necessitated by growth. Back of all such movements is natural increase of population beyond local means of subsist- ence, and the development of the war spirit in the effort to secure more abundant subsistence either by raid or conquest of territory. Among primitive peoples this movement is simple and Evolution monotonous. It involves all members of the tribe, either in of &* pursuit of game, or following the herd over the tribal territory, Histonca * . , , . J Movement, or in migrations seeking more and better land. Among civilized peoples it assumes various forms, and especially is differentiated for different members of the social group. The civilized state develops specialized frontiersmen, armies, ex- plorers, maritime traders, colonists, and missionaries, who keep a part of the people constantly moving and directing 76 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Nature of primitive movements. external expansion, while the mass of the population coir. ( the force once expended in the migrant food-quest into in- ternal activity. Here we come upon a paradox. The nation as a whole, with the development of sedentary life, increases its population and therewith its need for external movements ; it widens its national area and its circle of contact with other lands, enlarges its geographical horizon, and improves its internal communication over a growing territory ; it evolves a greater mobility within and without, which attaches, how- ever, to certain classes of society, not to the entire social group. This mobility becomes the outward expression of a whole complex of economic wants, intellectual needs, and political ambitions. It is embodied in the conquests which build up empires, in the colonization which develops new lands, in the world-wide exchange of commodities and ideas which lifts the level of civilization, till this movement of peo- ples becomes a fundamental fact of history. This movement is and has been universal and varied. When most unobtrusive in its operation, it has produced its greatest effects. To seize upon a few conspicuous migrations, like the Volkerwanderung and the irruption of the Turks into Europe, made dramatic by their relation to the declining empires of Rome and Constantinople, and to ignore the vast sum of lesser but more normal movements which by slow increments produce greater and more lasting results, leads to wrong con- clusions both in ethnology and history. Here, as in geology, great effects do not necessarily presuppose vast forces, but rather the steady operation of small ones. It is often assumed that the world was peopled by a series of migrations ; whereas everything indicates that humanity spread over the earth little by little, much as the imported gypsy moth is gradu- ally occupying New England or the water hyacinth the rivers of Florida. Louis Agassiz observed in 1853 that "the bounda- ries within which the different natural combinations of animals are known to be circumscribed upon the surface of the earth, coincide with the natural range of distinct types of man." 3 The close parallelism between Australian race and flora, Es- kimo race and Arctic fauna, points to a similar manner of dispersion. Wallace, in describing how the Russian frontier THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 77 of settlement slowly creeps forward along the Volga, encroach- ing upon the Finnish and Tartar areas, and permeating them with Slav blood and civilization, adds that this is probably the normal method of expansion. 4 Thucydides describes the same process of encroachment, displacement, and migration in ancient Hellas. 5 Strabo quotes Posidonius as saying that the emigration of the Cimbrians and other kindred tribes from their native seats was gradual and by no means sudden. 8 The traditions of the Delaware Indians show their advance from their early home in central Canada southward to the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay to have been a slow zig- zag movement, interrupted by frequent long halts, leaving behind one laggard group here and sending out an offshoot there, who formed new tribes and thereby diversified the stock. 7 It was an aimless wandering, without destination and purpose other than to find a pleasanter habitat. The Vandals appear first as "a loose aggregation of restless tribes who must not be too definitely assigned to any precise district on the map," somewhere in central or eastern Prussia. 8 Far-reaching migrations aiming at a distant goal, like the Gothic and Hunnish conquests of Italy, demand both a geographical knowledge and an organization too high for primitive peoples, and therefore belong to a later period of development. 9 The long list of recorded migrations has been supple- Number mented by the researches of ethnologists, which have revealed and a multitude of prehistoric movements. These are disclosed in ran e - greater number and range with successive investigation. The prehistoric wanderings of the Polynesians assume far more significance to-day than a hundred years ago, when their scope was supposed to have its western limit at Fiji and the Ellice group. They have now been traced to almost every island of Melanesia ; vestiges of their influence have been detected in the languages of Australia, and the culture of the distant coasts of Alaska and British Columbia. The west- ern pioneers of America knew the Shoshone Indians as small bands of savages, constantly moving about in search of food in the barren region west of the Rocky Mountains, and occa- sionally venturing eastward to hunt buffalo on the plains. Re- cent investigation has identified as offshoots of this retarded 78 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Shoshonean stock the sedentary agriculturalists of the Moqui Pueblo, and the advanced populations of ancient Mexico and Central America. 10 Here was a great human current which through the centuries slowly drifted from the present frontier of Canada to the shores of Lake Nicaragua. Powell's map of the distribution of the linguistic stocks of American Indians is intelligible only in the light of constant mobility. Haebler's map of the South American stocks reveals the same restless past. This cartographical presentation of the facts, giving only the final results, suggests tribal excursions of the nature of migrations ; but ethnologists see them as the sum total of countless small movements which are more or less part of the jiormal activity of an unrooted savage people. [Map page 101 .] Otis Mason finds that the life of a social group involves a variety of movements characterized by different ranges or scopes. I. The daily round from bed to bed. II. The annual round from year to year, like that of the Tunguse Orochon of Siberia who in pursuit of various fish and game change their residence within their territory from month to month, or the pastoral nomads who move with the seasons from pasture to pasture. III. Less systematic outside movements covering the tribal sphere of influence, such as journeys or voyages to remote hunting or fishing grounds, forays or piratical descents upon neighboring lands eventuating usually in conquest, expansion into border regions for occasional oc- cupation or colonization. IV. Participation in streams of barter or commerce. V. And at a higher stage in the great currents of human intercourse, experience, and ideas, which finally compass the world. 11 In all this series the narrower movement prepares for the broader, of which it constitutes at once an impulse and a part. Importance The real character and importance of these movements have been appreciated by broad-minded historians. Thucydides movements . in history. elucidates the conditions leading up to the Peloponnesian War by a description of the semi-migratory population of Hellas, the exposure of the more fertile districts to incursions, and the influence of these movements in differentiating Dorian from Ionian Greece. 12 Johannes von Muller, in the introduction to his history of Switzerland, assigns to federations and rnigra- THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 79 tions a conspicuous role in historical development. Edward A. Ross sees in such movements a thorough-going selective process which weeds out the unfit, or rather spares only the highly fit. He lays down the principle that repeated migra- tions tend to the creation of energetic races of men. He adds, "This principle may account for the fact that those branches of a race achieve the most brilliant success which have wan- dered the farthest from their ancestral home. . . . The Arabs and Moors that skirted Africa and won a home in far-away Spain, developed the most brilliant of the Saracen civilizations. Hebrews, Dorians, Quirites, Rajputs, Hovas were far invaders No communities in classic times flourished like the cities of Asia created by the overflow from Greece. Nowhere under the Czar are there such vigorous, progressive communities as in Siberia. 13 Brinton distinguishes the associative and disper- sive elements in ethnography. The latter is favored by the physical adaptability of the human race to all climates and external conditions ; it is stimulated by the food-quest, the pressure of foes, and the resultant restlessness of an unstable primitive society. 14 The earth's surface is at once factor and basis in these movements. In an active way it directs them ; but they in turn clothe the passive earth with a mantle of humanity. This mantle is of varied weave and thickness, showing here the simple pattern of a primitive society, there the intricate design of advanced civilization ; here a closely woven or a gauzy texture, there disclosing a great rent where a rocky peak or the ice-wrapped poles protrude through the warm human covering. This is the magic web whereof man is at once woof and weaver, and the flying shuttle that never rests. Given a region, what is its living envelope, asks anthropo-geography. Whence and how did it get there? What is the material of warp and woof? Will new threads enter to vary the color and design? If so, from what source? Or will the local pattern repeat itself over and over with dull uniformity ? Geographi- It was the great intellectual service of Copernicus that he Cl t P <-, pretation conceived of a world in motion instead of a world at rest. So anthropo-geography must see its world in motion, whether it cal move- is considering English colonization, or the westward expansion ment. 80 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES of the Southern slave power in search of unexhausted land, or the counter expansion of the free-soil movement, or the early advance of the trappers westward to the Rockies after the retreating game, or the withdrawal thither of the declining Indian tribes before the protruding line of white settlement, and their ultimate confinement to ever shrinking reservations. In studying increase of population, it sees in Switzerland chalet and farm creeping higher up the Alp, as the lapping of a rising tide of humanity below; it sees movement in the projection of a new dike in Holland to reclaim from the sea the land for another thousand inhabitants, movement in Japan's doubling of its territory by conquest, in order to house and feed its redundant millions. The whole complex relation of unresting man to the earth is the subject matter of anthropo-geography. The science traces his movements on the earth's surface, measures their velocity, range, and recurrence, determines their nature by the way they utilize the land, notes their transformation at different stages of economic development and under dif- ferent environments. Just as an understanding of animal and plant geography requires a previous knowledge of the various means of dispersal, active and passive, possessed by these lower forms of life, so anthropo-geography must start with a study of the movements of mankind. Mobility First of all is to be noted an evolution in the mobility of imitive p eo pi es< j n the lower stages of culture mobility is great. It is favored by the persistent food-quest over wide areas incident) toiretarded-economic methods, and by the loose attach- ment of society to the soil. The small social groups peculiar to these stages and their innate tendency to fission help the movements to ramify. The consequent scattered distribution of the population offers wide interstices between encampments or villages, and into these vacant spaces other wandering tribes easily penetrate. The rapid decline of the Indian race in America before the advancing whites was due chiefly to the division of the savages into small groups, scattered sparsely over a wide territory. Hunter and pastoral peoples need far more land than they can occupy at any one time. Hence the temporarily vacant spots invite incursion. Moreover, the THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 81 slight impedimenta carried by primitive folk minimize the natural physical obstacles which they meet when on the march. The lightly equipped war parties of the Shawnee Indians used gorges and gaps for the passage of the Allegheny Mountains which were prohibitive to all white pioneers except the lonely trapper. Finally, this mobility gets into the primitive mind. The Wanderlust is strong. Long residence in one territory is irksome, attachment is weak. Therefore a small cause suffices to start the whole or part of the social body moving. A tem- porary failure of the food supply, cruelty or excessive exac- tion of tribute on the part of the chief, occasions an exodus. The history of every negro tribe in Africa gives instances of such secessions, which often leave whole districts empty and exposed to the next wandering occupant. Methods of pre- venting such withdrawals, and therewith the diminution of his treasury receipts and his righting force, belong to the policy of every negro chieftain. The checks to this native mobility of primitive peoples are Natural two: physical and mental. In addition to the usual barriers barriers to of mountains, deserts, and seas before the invention of boats, movemen t~ primeval forests have always offered serious obstacles to man armed only with stone or bronze axe, and they rebuffed even man of the iron age. War and hunting parties had to move along the natural clearings of the rivers, the tracks of animals, or the few trails beaten out in time by the natives themselves. Primitive agriculture has never battled successfully against the phalanx of the trees. Forests balked the expansion of the Inca civilization on the rainy slope of the Andes, and in Cen- tral Africa the negro invaded only their edges for his yam fields and plantain groves. The earliest settlements in ancient Britain were confined to the natural clearings of the chalk downs and oolitic uplands; and here population was chiefly concentrated even at the close of the Roman occupation. Only gradually, as the valley woodlands were cleared, did the richer soil of the alluvial basins attract men from the high, poor ground where tillage required no preliminary work. But after four centuries of Roman rule and Roman roads, the clearings along the river valleys were still mere strips of culture mid an encompassing wilderness of woods. When the Germanic in- THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Effect of geographi- cal horizon. Civiliza- tion and mobility. vaders came, they too appropriated the treeless downs and were blocked by the forests. 15 On the other hand, grasslands and savannahs have developed the most mobile people whom we know, steppe hunters like the Sioux Indians and Patagonians. Thus while the forest dweller, confined to the highway of the stream, devised only canoe and dugout boat in various forms for purposes of transportation, steppe peoples of the Old World introduced the use of draft and pack animals, and in- vented the sledge and cart. Primitive peoples carry a drag upon their migrations in their restricted geographical outlook; ignorance robs them of definite goals. The evolution of the historical movement is accelerated by every expansion of the geographical horizon. It progresses most rapidly where the knowledge of outlying or remote lands travels fastest, as along rivers and thalassic coasts. Rome's location as toll-gate keeper of the Tiber gave her knowledge of the upstream country and directed her con- quest of its valley; and the movement thus started gathered momentum as it advanced. Caesar's occupation of Gaul meant to his generation simply the command of the roads leading from the Mediterranean to the northern sources of tin and amber, and the establishment of frontier outposts to protect the land boundaries of Italy ; this represented a bold policy of inland expansion for that day. The modern historian sees in that step the momentous advance of history beyond the narrow limits of the Mediterranean basin, and its gradual inclusion of all the Atlantic countries of Europe, through whose maritime enterprise the historical horizon was stretched to include America. In the same way, mediaeval trade with the Orient, which had familiarized Europe with distant India and Cathay, developed its full historico-geographical importance when it started the maritime discoveries of the fifteenth century. The expansion of the geographical horizon in 1512 to embrace the earth inaugurated a widespread his- torical movement, which has resulted in the Europeanization of the world. Civilized man is at once more and less mobile than his primi- tive brother. Every advance in civilization multiplies and tightens the bonds uniting him with his soil; makes him a THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 83 sedentary instead of a migratory being. On the other hand every advance in civilization is attended by the rapid clear- ing of the forests, by the construction of bridges and inter- lacing roads, the invention of more effective vehicles for trans- portation whereby intercourse increases, and the improvement of navigation to the same end. Civilized man progressively modifies the land which he occupies, removes or reduces ob- stacles to intercourse, and thereby approximates it to the open plain. Thus far he facilitates movements. But while doing this he also places upon the land a dense population, closely attached to the soil, strong to resist incursion, and for economic reasons inhospitable to any marked accession of population from without. Herein lies the great difference between migration in empty or sparsely inhabited regions, such as predominated when the world was young, and in the densely populated countries of our era. As the earth grew old and humanity multiplied, peoples themselves became the greatest barriers to any massive migrations, till in certain countries of Europe and Asia the historical movement has been reduced to a continual pressure, resulting in compression of population here, repression there. Hence, though political boundaries may shift, ethnic boundaries scarcely budge. The greatest wars of modern Europe have hardly left a trace upon the distribution of its peoples. Only in the Balkan Peninsula, as the frontiers of the Turkish Empire have been forced back from the Danube, the alien Turks have withdrawn to the shrinking territory of the Sultan and especially to Asia Minor. Where a population too great to be dislodged occupies the Diffusion land, conquest results in the eventual absorption of the victors * and their civilization by the native folk, as happened to the culture - Lombards in Italy, the Vandals in Africa and the Normans in England. Where the invaders are markedly superior in culture though numerically weak, conquest results in the gradual per- meation of the conquered with the religion, economic methods, language, and customs of the new-comers. 18 The latter pro- cess, too, is always attended by some intermixture of blood, where no race repulsion exists, but this is small in comparison to the diffusion of civilization. This was the method by which 84 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Greek traders and colonists Hellenized the countries about the eastern Mediterranean, and spread their culture far back from the shores which their settlements had appropriated. In this way Saracen armies soon after the death of Mohammed Arabized the whole eastern and southern sides of the Mediter- ranean from Syria to Spain, and Arab merchants set the stump of their language and religion on the coasts of East Africa as far as Mozambique. The handful of Spanish adventurers who came upon the relatively dense populations of Mexico and Peru left among them a civilization essentially Eurujn an, but only a thin strain of Castilian blood. Thus the immigra- tion of small bands of people sufficed to influence the cultuiv of that big territory known as Latin America. Ethnic That vast sum of migrations, great and small, which we intermix- group under the general term of historical movement has in- volved an endless mingling of races and cultures. As Professor Petrie has remarked, the prevalent notion that in prehistoric times races were pure and unmixed is without foundation. An examination of the various forms of the historical movement reveals the extent and complexity of this mingling process. In the first place, no migration is ever simple; it involves a number of secondary movements, each of which in turn occasions a new combination of tribal or racial elements. The transference of a whole people from its native or adopted seat to a new habitat, as in the Vdlkem'anderungcn, empties the original district, which then becomes a catchment basin for various streams of people about its rim; and in the new territory it dislodges a few or all of the occupants, and thereby starts up a fresh movement as the original one conies to rest. Nor is this all. A torrent that issues from its source in the mountains is not the river which reaches the sea. On its long journey from highland to lowland it receives now the milky waters of a glacier-fed stream, now a muddy tributary from agricultural lands, now the clear waters from a limestone plateau, while all the time its racing current bears a burden of soil torn from its own banks. Now it rests in a lake, where it lays down its weight of silt, then goes on, perhaps across an arid stretch where its water is sucked up by the thirsty air THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 85 or diverted to irrigate fields of grain. So with those rivers of men which we call migrations. The ethnic stream may start comparatively pure, but it becomes mixed on the way. From time to time it leaves behind laggard elements which in turn make a new racial blend where they stop. Such were the six thousand Aduatici whom Caesar found in Belgian Gaul. These were a detachment of the migrating Cimbri, left there in charge of surplus cattle and baggage while the main body went on to Italy. 17 A migration rarely involves a single people even at the Complex start. It becomes contagious either by example or by the curr ents subjection of several neighboring tribes to the same impelling **. force, by reason of which all start at or near the same time. We find the Cimbri and Teutons combined with Celts from the island of Batavia 18 in the first Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire. Jutes, Saxons and Angles started in close succession for Britain, and the Saxon group included Frisians. 19 An unavoidable concomitant of great migrations, especially those of nomads, is their tendency to sweep into the vortex of their movement any people whom they brush on the way. Both individuals and tribes are thus caught up by the current The general convergence of the central German tribes towards the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire during the Mar- comannic War drew in its train the Lombards from the lower Elbe down to the middle Danube and Theiss. 20 The force of the Lombards invading Italy in 568 included twenty thousand Saxons from Swabia, Gepidae from the middle Danube, Bul- garians, Slavs from the Russian Ukraine, together with vari- ous tribes from the Alpine district of Noricum and the fluvial plains of Pannonia. Two centuries later the names of these non-Lombard tribes still survived in certain villages of Italy which had formed their centers. 21 The army which Attila the Hun brought into Gaul was a motley crowd, comprising peoples of probable Slav origin from the Russian steppes, Teutonic Ostrogoths and Gepidae, and numerous German tribes, besides the Huns themselves. When this horde with- drew after the death of Attila, Gepidae and Ostrogoths settled along the middle Danube, and the Slavonic contingent along the Alpine courses of the Drave and Save Rivers. 22 The 86 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Cultural modification during migration. Vandal migration which in 409 invaded Spain included the Turanian Alans and the German Suevi. The Alans found a temporary home in Portugal, which they later abandoned to join the Vandal invasion of North Africa, while the Suevi set- tled permanently in the northwestern mountains of Spain. The Vandals occupied in Spain two widely separated districts, one in the mountain region of Galicia next to the Suevi, and the other in the fertile valley of Andalusia in the south, while the northeastern part of the peninsula was occupied by in- truding Visigoths. 23 Add to these the original Iberian and Celtic stocks of the peninsula and the Roman strain previously introduced, and the various elements which have entered into the Spanish people become apparent. 24 The absorption of foreign elements is not confined to large groups whose names come down in history, nor is the ensuing modification one of blood alone. Every land migra- tion or expansion of a people passes by or through the territories of other peoples; by these it is inevitably influenced in point of civilization, and from them individuals are absorbed into the wandering throng by marriage or adop- tion, or a score of ways. This assimilation of blood and local culture is facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of historical movements are slow, a leisurely drift. Even the great Volkerwandcrung, which history has shown us generally in the moment of swift, final descent upon the imperial city, in reality consisted of a succession of advances with long halts between. The Vandals, whose original seats were prob- ably in central or eastern Prussia, drifted southward with the general movement of the German barbarians toward the borders of the Empire late in the second century, and, after the Marcomannic War (175 A. D.), settled in Dacia north of the lower Danube under the Roman sway- In 271 they were located on the middle Danube, and sixty years afterwards in Moravia. Later they settled for seventy years in Pannonia within the Empire, where they assimilated Roman civilization and adopted the Arlan form of Christianity from their Gothic neighbors. 25 In Spain, as we have seen, they occupied Galicia and Andalusia for a time before passing over into Africa in 429. Here was a migration lasting two centuries and a half, THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 87 reaching from the Baltic to the southern shores of the Mediter- ranean, starting on the bleak sterile plains of the north amid barbarous neighbors, ending in the sunny grain fields and rich cities of Roman Africa. The picture which we get of the victorious Vandals parceling out the estates of Roman nobles, and, from the standpoint of their more liberal faith, profiting by the dissensions of the two Catholic sects of Africa, shows us a people greatly modified by their long sweep through the civilized outskirts of the Empire. So ft was with the Lombards and Goths who invaded Italy. Among primitive tribes, who move in smaller groups and must conform closely to the dictates of their environment, the modifying effects of people and land through which they pass are conspicuous. Ratzel describes the gradual with- drawal of a Hottentot people from western Cape Colony far into the arid interior before the advance of Kaffirs and Europeans by saying: "The stock and name of the Namaquas wandered northward, acquiring new elements, and in course of time filling the old mold with new contents." 2 This is the typical result of such primitive movements. The migration of the Delaware Indians from an early home somewhere northwest of the Great Lakes to their his- torical habitat between the Hudson and Potomac Rivers was a slow progress, which somewhere brought them into contact with maize-growing tribes, and gave them their start in agri- culture. 27 The transit lands through which these great race journeys pass exercise a modifying effect chiefly through thetr culture and their peoples, less through their physical features and climate. For that the stay of the visitants is generally too brief. Even early maritime migrants did not keep their strains Effect of pure. The untried navigator sailing from island to headland, earl y hugging the coast and putting ashore for water, came into n . migration, contact with the natives. Cross currents of migration can be traced in Polynesian waters, where certain islands are nodal points which have given and received of races and culture through centuries of movement. The original white popula- tion of Urugua} T differed widely from that of the other Span- ish republics of South America. Its nucleus was a large 88 The transit land. War as a form of the his- torical movement. immigration of Canary Islanders. These were descendants of Spaniards and the native Guanches of the Canaries, mingled also with Norman, Flemish and Moorish blood. 28 The Norse on their way to Iceland may have picked up a Celtic element in the islands north of Scotland ; but from the Faroe group onward they found only empty Iceland and Greenland. This was an exceptional experience. Early navigation, owing to its limitations, purposely restricted itself to the known. Men voyaged where men had voyaged before and were to be found. Journeys into the untenanted parts of the world were rare. However, the probable eastward expansion of the Eskimo along the Arctic rim of North America belongs in this class, so that this northern folk has suffered no modification from contact with others, except where Alaska approaches Asia. The land traversed by a migrating horde is not to be pic- tured as a dead road beneath their feet, but rather as a wide region of transit and transition, potent to influence them by its geography and people, and to modify them in the course of their passage. The route which they follow is a succession of habitats, in which they linger and domicile themselves for a while, though not long enough to lose wholly the habits of Itfe and thought acquired in their previous dwelling place. Although nature in many places, by means of valleys, low plains, mountain passes or oasis lines, points out the way of these race movements, it is safer to think and speak of this way as a transit land, not as a path or road. Even where the district of migration has been the sea, as among the Caribs of the Antilles Islands, the Moros of the Philippines, and the Polynesians of the Pacific, man sends his roots like a water plant down into the restless element beneath, and reflects its influence in all his thought and activities. Every aggressive historical movement, whether bold migra- tion or forcible extension of the home territory, involves displacement or passive movement of other peoples (except in those rare occupations of vacant lands), who in turn are forced to encroach upon the lands of others. These conditions involve war, which is an important form of the historical movement, contributing to new social contacts and fusion of racial stocks. THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 89 Raids and piratical descents are often the preliminary of great historical movements. They first expand the geograph- ical horizon, and end in permanent settlements, which involve finally considerable transfers of population, summoned to strengthen the position of the interloper. Such was the history of the Germanic invasions of Britain, the Scandi- navian settlements on the shores of Iceland, Britain, and France, and the incursions of Saharan tribes into the Sudanese states. Among pastoral nomads war is the rule; the tribe, a mobilized nation, is always on a war footing with its neigh- bors. The scant supply of wells and pasturage, inadequate in the dry season, involves rivalry and conflict for their possession as agricultural lands do not. Failure of water or grass is followed by the decline of the herds, and then by marauding expeditions into the river valleys to supply the temporary want of food. When population increases beyond the limits of subsistence in the needy steppes, such raids become the rule and end in the conquest of the more favored lands, with resulting amalgamation of race and culture. 29 The wars of savage and pastoral peoples affect the whole Primitive tribe. All the able-bodied men are combatants, and all the war * women and children constitute the spoils of war in case of defeat. This fact is important, since the purpose of primitive conflicts is to enslave and pillage, rather than to acquire land. The result is that a whole district may be laid waste, but when the devastators withdraw, it is gradually repopulated by bordering tribes, who make new ethnic combinations. After the destruction of the Eries by the Iroquois in 1655, Ohio was left practically uninhabited for a hundred and fifty years. Then the Iroquoian Wyandots extended their settlements into northwestern Ohio from their base in southern Michigan, while the Miami Confederacy along the southern shore of Lake Michigan pushed their borders into the western part. The Muskingum Valley in the eastern portion was occupied about 1750 by Delawares from eastern Pennsylvania, the Scioto by Shawnees, and the northeast corner of the territory by detach- ments of Iroquois, chiefly Senecas. 30 The long wars between the Algonquin Indians of the north and the Appalachian tribes of the south kept the district of Kentucky a No Man's Land, 90 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Slavery as form of historical movement in convenient vacancy for occupation by the white settlers, when they began the westward movement. 31 [Map page 156.] This desolation is produced partly by killing, but chiefly by enslavement of prisoners and the flight of the conquered. Both constitute compulsory migrations of far-reaching effect in the fusion of races and the blending of civilizations. The thousands of Greek slaves who were brought to ancient Rome contributed to its refinement and polish. All the nations of the known world, from Briton to Syrian and Jew, were repre- sented in the slave markets of the imperial capital, and con- tributed their elements to the final composition of the Roman people. When we read of ninety-seven thousand Hebrews whom Titus sold into bondage after the fall of Jerusalem, of forty thousand Greeks sold by Lucullus after one victory, and the auction sub corona of whole tribes in Gaul by Caesar, the scale of this forcible transfer becomes apparent, and its power as an agent of race amalgamation. Senator Sam Houston of Texas, speaking of the Comanche Indians, in the United States Senate, December 31, 1854, said: "There are not less than two thousand prisoners (whites) in the hands of the Comanches, four hundred in one band in my own state . . . They take no prisoners but women and boys." 3 It was cus- tomary among the Indians to use captured women as concu- bines and to adopt into the tribe such boys as survived the cruel treatment to which they were subjected. Since the Comanches in 1847 were variously estimated to number from nine to twelve thousand, 33 so large a proportion of captives would modify the native stock. In Africa slavery has been intimately associated with agri- culture as a source of wealth, and therefore has lent motive to intertribal wars. Captives were enslaved and then gradu- ally absorbed into the tribe of their masters. Thus war and slavery contributed greatly to that widespread blending of races which characterizes negro Africa. Slaves became a medium of exchange and an article of commerce with other continents. The negro slave trade had its chief importance in the eyes of ethnologists and historians because, in dis- tributing the black races in white continents, it has given a "negro question" to the United States, superseded the native THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 91 Indian stock of the Antilles by negroes, and left a broad negro strain in the blood of Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. This particular historical movement, which during the two cen- turies of its greatest activity involved larger numbers than the Tartar invasion of Russia or the Turkish invasion of Europe, for a long period gave to black Africa the only historical importance which it possessed for the rest of the world. 34 In higher stages of political development, war aiming Fusion by at the subjugation of large territories finds another means deporta to fuse the subject peoples and assimilate them to a common standard of civilization. The purpose is unification and the co lonies. obliteration of local differences. These are also the uncon- scious ends of evolution by historical movement. With this object, conquerors the world over have used a system of tribal and racial exchanges. It was the policy of the Incas of an- cient Peru to remove conquered tribes to distant parts of the realm, and supply their places with colonists from other districts who had long been subjected and were more or less assimilated. 35 In 722 B. C. the Assyrian king, Sargon, over- ran Samaria, carried away the Ten Tribes of Israel beyond the Tigris and scattered them among the cities of Media, where they probably merged with the local population. To the country left vacant by their wholesale deportation he trans- planted people from Babylon and other Mesopotamian cities. 39 The descendants of these, mingled with the poorer class of Jews still left there, formed the despised Samaritans of the time of Christ. The Kingdom of Judah later was despoiled by Nebuchadnezzar of much of its population, which was carried off to Babylon. This plan of partial deportation and colonization charac- terized the Roman method of Romanization. Removal of the conquered from their native environment facilitated the pro- cess, while it weakened the spirit and power of revolt. The Romans* met bitter opposition from the mountain tribes when trying to open up the northern passes of the Apennines. Con- sequently they removed the Ligurian tribe of the Apuanians, forty-seven thousand in number, far south to Samnium. When in 15 B. C. the region of the Rhaetian Alps was joined 92 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES to the Empire, forty thousand of the inhabitants were trans- planted from the mountains to the plain. The same method was used with the Scordisci and Dacians of the Danube. More often the mortality of war so thinned the population, that the settlement of Roman military colonies among them sufficed to keep down revolt and to Romanize the surviving fragment. The large area of Romance speech found in Roumania and eastern Hungary, despite the controversy about its origin, 37 seems to have had its chief source in the extensive Roman colonies planted by the Emperor Trajan in conquered Dacia. 38 In Iberian Spain, which bitterly resisted Romanization, the process was facilitated by the presence of large garrisons of soldiers. Between 196 and 169 B. C. the troops amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand, and many of them remained in the country as colonists. 39 Compare the settlement of * Scotch troops in French Canada by land grants after 1763, resulting in the survival to-day of sandy hair, blue eyes, and highland names among the French-speaking habitants of Mur- ray Bay and other districts. The Turks in the fifteenth cen- tury brought large bodies of Moslem converts from Asia Minor to garrison Macedonia and Thessaly, thereby robbing the Anatolian Plateau of half its original population. Into the vacuum thus formed a current of nomads from inner Asia has poured ever since. 40 Withdrawal Every active historical movement which enters an already and flight. populated country gives rise there to passive movements, either compression of the native folk followed by amalgama- tion, or displacement and withdrawal. The latter in some degree attends every territorial encroachment. Only where there is an abundance of free land can a people retire as a whole before the onslaught, and maintain their national or racial solidarity. Thus the Slavs seem largely to have withdrawn be- fore the Germans in the Baltic plains of Europe. The Indians of North and South America retired westward before the ad- vance of the whites from the Atlantic coast. The Cherokee nation, who once had a broad belt of country extending from the Tennessee Valley through South Carolina to the ocean, 41 first retracted their frontier to the Appalachian Mountains; in 1816 they were confined to an ever shrinking territory on THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 93 the middle Tennessee and the southern end of the highlands ; in 1818 they began to retire beyond the Mississippi, and in 1828 beyond the western boundary of Arkansas. 42 The story of the Shawnees and Delawares is a replica of this. 43 In the same way Hottentots and Kaffirs in South Africa are with- drawing northward and westward into the desert before the protruding frontier of white settlement, as the Boers before the English treked farther into the veldt. [See map page 105.] Where the people attacked or displaced is small or a broken remnant, it often takes refuge among a neighboring or kindred tribe. The small Siouan tribes of the Carolinas, reduced to fragments by repeated Iroquois raids, combined with their Siouan kinsmen the Catawbas, who consequently in 1743 in- cluded twenty dialects among their little band. 44 The Iro- quoian Tuscaroras of North Carolina, defeated and weakened by the whites in 1711, fled north to the Iroquois of New York, where they formed the Sixth Nation of the Confederation. The Yamese Indians, who shifted back and forth between the borders of Florida and South Carolina, defeated first by the whites and then by the Creeks, found a refuge for the rem- nant of their tribe among the Seminoles, in whom they merged and disappeared as a distinct tribe 45 the fate of most of these fragmentary peoples. [See map page 54.] When the fugitive body is large, it is forced to split up Dispersal in order to escape. Hence every fugitive movement tends to in flight, assume the character of a dispersal, all the more as organiza- tion and leadership vanish in the catastrophe. The fis- sile character of primitive societies especially contributes to this end, so that almost every story of Indian and native African warfare tells of shattered remnants fleeing in sev- eral directions. Among civilized peoples, the dispersal is that of individuals and has far-reaching historical effects. After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews were scattered over the earth, the debris of a nation. The religious wars of France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caused Huguenots to flee to Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Eng- land, and South Carolina ; they even tried to establish a colony on the coast of Brazil. Everywhere they contributed a val- uable element to the economic and social life of the community THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Natural regions of retreat. which they joined. The great schism in the Russian Church became an agent of emigration and colonization. It helped to spread the Russian nationality over remote frontier regions of the empire which previously had been almost exclusively Asiatic; and distributed groups of dissenters in the neighbor- ing provinces of Turkey, Roumania, Austria, Poland and Prussia. 46 The hope of safety from pursuit drives fugitive peoples into isolated and barren places that are scarcely accessible or habitable, and thereby extends the inhabited area of the earth long before mere pressure of population would have stretched it to such limits. We find these refugee folk living in pile villages built over the water, in deserts, in swamps, mangrove thickets, very high mountains, marshy deltas, and remote or barren islands, all which can be classified as regions of re- treat. Fugitives try to place between themselves and their pursuers a barrier of sea or desert or mountains, and in doing this have themselves surmounted some of the greatest obstacles to the spread of the human race. Districts of refuge located centrally to several natural re- gions of migration receive immigrants from many sides, and are therefore often characterized by a bizarre grouping of populations. The cluster of marshy islands at the head of the Adriatic received fugitives from a long semi-circle of north Italian cities during the barbarian invasions. Each refugee colony occupied a separate island, and finally all coalesced to form the city of Venice. Central mountain districts like the Alps and Caucasus contain "the sweepings of the plains." The Caucasus particularly, on the border between Europe and Asia, contains every physical type and repre- sentative of every linguistic family of Eurasia, except pure Aryan. Nowhere else in the world probably is there such a heterogeneous lot of peoples, languages and religions. Ripley calls the Caucasus "a grave of peoples, of languages, of customs and physical types." 47 Its base, north and south, and the longitudinal groove through its center from east to west have been swept by various racial currents, which have cast up their flotsam into its valleys. The pueblos of our arid Southwest, essentially an area of asylum, are inhabited THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 95 by Indians of four distinct stocks, and only one of them, the Moquis, show clearly kinship to another tribe outside this ter- ritory, 48 so that they are survivals. The twenty-eight dif- ferent Indian stocks huddled together in small and diverse lin- guistic groups between the Pacific Ocean and the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range 49 leave the impression that these protected valleys, similar to the Caucasus in their ethnic diversity, were an asylum for remnants of de- pleted stocks who had fled to the western highlands before the great Indian migrations of the interior. 50 Making their way painfully and at great cost of life through a region of mountain and desert, they came out in diminished bands to survive in the protection of the great barrier. Of the twenty- one Indian linguistic stocks which have become extinct since the arrival of the white man, fifteen belong to this trans- montane strip of the Pacific slope 51 evidence of the frag- mentary character of these stocks and their consequently small power of resistance. [See map page 54.] Advance to a completely sedentary life, as we see it among Emigra- modern civilized nations, prohibits the migration of whole ^on and peoples, or even of large groups when maintaining their politi- c . cal organization. On the other hand, however, sedentary life and advanced civilization bring rapid increase of population, improved methods of communication, and an enlarged geo- graphical horizon. These conditions encourage and facilitate emigration and colonization, forms of historical movement which have characterized the great commercial peoples of an- tiquity and the overcrowded nations of modern times. These forms do not involve a whole people, but only individuals and small groups, though in time the total result may represent a considerable proportion of the original population. The United States in 1890 contained 980,938 immigrants from Canada and Newfoundland, 52 or just one-fifth the total popu- lation of the Dominion in that same year. Germany since 1820 has contributed at least five million citizens to non- European lands. Ireland since 1841 has seen nearly four mil- lions of its inhabitants drawn off to other countries, 53 an amount only little less than its present population. It is estimated that since 1851 emigration has carried off from coloniza- 96 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES County Clare and Kerry seventy-two per cent, of the average population ; and yet those counties are still crowded. 54 Among those who abandon their homes in search of easier conditions of living, certain ages and certain social and industrial classes predominate. A typical emigrant group to America repre- sents largely the lower walks of life, includes an abnormal proportion of men and adults, and about three-fourths of it are unskilled laborers and agriculturists. 55 Colonization, the most potent instrument of organized ex- pansion, has in recent centuries changed the relative signifi- cance of the great colonial nations of Europe. It raised Eng- land from a small insular country to the center of a world power. It gave sudden though temporary preeminence to Spain and Portugal, a new lease of life to little Holland, and ominous importance to Russia. Germany, who entered the colonial field only in 1880, found little desirable land left ; and yet it was especially Gennany who needed an outlet for her redundant population. With all these states, as \\iih ancient Phoenicia, Greece and Yemen, the initial purpose was commerce or in some form the exploitation of the new territory. Colonies were originally trading stations estab- lished as safe termini for trade routes. 50 Colonial government, as administered by the mother country, originally had an eye single for the profits of trade: witness the experience of the Thirteen Colonies with Great Britain. Colonial wars have largely meant the rivalry of competing nations seeking the same markets, as the history of the Portuguese and Dutch in the East Indies, and the English and French in America prove. The first Punic War had a like commercial origin rivalry for the trade of Magna Grcecia between Rome and Carthage, the dominant colonial powers of the western Mediterranean. Such wars result in expansion for the victor. Commerce. Commerce, which so largely underlies colonization, is itself a form of historical movement. It both causes and stimulates great movements of peoples, yet it differs from these funda- mentally in its relation to the land. Commerce traverses the land to reach its destination, but takes account of natural features only as these affect transportation and travel. It has to do with systems of routes and goals, which it aims to THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 97 reach as quickly as possible. It reduces its cortege to essen- tials ; eliminates women and children. Therefore it surmounts natural barriers which block the advance of other forms of the historical movement. Merchant caravans are constantly crossing the desert, but not so peoples. Traders with loaded yaks or ponies push across the Karakorum Mountains by passes where a migrating horde would starve and freeze. The northern limit of the Mediterranean race in Spain lies sharply defined along the crest of the Pyrenees, whose long unbroken wall forms one of the most pronounced boundaries in Europe ; 57 yet traders and smugglers have pushed their way through from time immemorial. Long after Etruscan merchants had crossed northward over the Alps, Roman expansion and colonization made a detour around the mountains westward into Gaul, with the result that the Germans received Roman civilization not straight from the south, but secondhand through their Gallic neighbors west of the Rhine. Commerce, though differing from other historical move- Commerce ments, may give to these direction and destination. The a S 1 "? 6 trader is frequently the herald of soldier and settler. He . . . movements, becomes their guide, takes them along the trail which he has blazed, and gives them his own definiteness of aim. The earliest Roman conquest of the Alpine tribes was made for the purpose of opening the passes for traders and abolishing the heavy transit duties imposed by the mountaineers. 58 Fur- traders inaugurated French expansion to the far west of Can- ada, and the Russian advance into Siberia. The ancient amber route across Russia from the Baltic to the Euxine probably guided the Goths in their migration from their northern seats to the fertile lands in southern Russia, where they first appear in history as the Ostrogoths. 59 The caravan trade across the Sahara from the Niger to the Mediterranean coast has itself embodied an historical movement, by bring- ing out enough negro slaves appreciably to modify the ethnic composition of the population in many parts of North Africa. 60 It was this trade which also suggested to Prince Henry of Portugal in 1415, when campaigning in Morocco, the plan of reaching the Guinea Coast by sea and diverting its gold dust and slaves to the port of Lisbon, a movement 98 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES which resulted in the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa. 61 Every staple place and trading station is a center of geo- graphical information ; it therefore gives an impulse to ex- pansion by widening the geographical horizon. The Lewis and Clark Expedition found the Mandan villages at the northern bend of the Missouri River the center of a trade which ex- tended west to the Pacific, through the agency of the Crow and Paunch Indians of the upper Yellowstone, and far north to the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Rivers. Here in conversa- tion with British and French fur-traders of the Northwest Company's posts, they secured information about the western country they were to explore. 02 Similarly the trade of the early Jesuit missions at La Pointe near the west end of Lake Superior annually drew the Indians from a wide circle sweep- ing from Green Bay and the Fox River in the south, across the Mississippi around to the Lake of the Woods and far north of Lake Superior. 63 Here Marquette first heard of the great river destined to carry French dominion to the Gulf of Mexico. Movements Trade often finds in religion an associate and coadjutor due to in directing and stimulating the historical movement, religion. China regards modern Christian missions as effective Euro- pean agencies for the spread of commercial and political power. Jesuit and fur-trader plunged together into the wilds of colonial Canada; Spanish priest and gold-seeker, into Mex- ico and Peru. American missionary pressed close upon the heels of fur-trader into the Oregon country. Jason Lee, having established a Methodist mission on the Willamette in 1834, himself experienced sudden conversion from religionist to colonizer. He undertook a temporary mission back to the settled States, where he preached a stirring propaganda for the settlement and appropriation of the disputed Oregon country, before the British should fasten their grip upon it. The United States owes Hawaii to the expansionist spirit of American missionaries. Thirty years after their arrival in the islands, they held all the important offices under the native government, and had secured valuable tracts of lands, laying the foundation of the landed aristocracy of planters estab- THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 99 lished there to-day. Their sons and grandsons took the lead in the Revolution of 1893, and in the movement for annex- ation to the United States. Thus sometimes do the meek inherit the earth. The famous pilgrimages of the world, in which the commer- Religious cial element has been more or less conspicuous, 64 have con- pilgrim- tributed greatly to the circulation of peoples and ideas, es- ages ' pecially as they involve multitudes and draw from a large circle of lands. Their economic, intellectual and political effects rank them as one phase of the historical movement. Herodotus tells of seven hundred thousand Egyptians flock- ing to the city of Bubastis from all parts of Egypt for the festival of Diana. Gr ' The worship of Ashtoreth in Bambyce in Syria drew votaries from all the Semitic peoples except the Jews. As early as 386 A. D. Christian pilgrims flocked to Jerusalem from Armenia, Persia, India, Ethiopia, and even from Gaul and Britain. Jerusalem gave rise to those armed pilgrimages, the Crusades, with all their far-reaching results. The pilgrimages to Rome, which in the Jubilee of 1300 brought two hundred thousand worshipers to the sacred city, did much to consolidate papal supremacy over Latin Christen- dom. 06 As the roads to Rome took the pious wayfarers through Milan, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Bologna, and other great cities of Italy, they were so many channels for the dis- tribution of Italian art and culture over the more untutored lands of western Europe. Though Mecca is visited annually by only seventy or eighty thousand pilgrims, it puts into motion a far greater number over the whole Mohammedan world, from westernmost Africa to Chinese Turkestan. 67 Yearly a great pilgrimage, numbering in 1905 eighty thousand souls, moves across Africa eastward through the Sudan on its way to the Red Sea and Mecca. Many traders join the caravans of the devout both for pro- tection and profit, and the devout themselves travel with herds of cattle to trade in on the way. The merchants are prone to drop out and settle in any attractive country, and few get beyond the populous markets of Wadai. The British and French governments in the Sudan aid and protect these pil- grimages ; they recognize them as a political force, because 100 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Historical movement and race distribu- tion. Migrations in relation to zones and heat they spread the story of the security and order of Euro- pean rule. GS The markets of western Tibet, recently opened to Indian merchants by the British expedition to Lhassa, pro- mote intercourse between the two countries especially be- cause of the sacred lakes and mountains in their vicinity, whicli are goals of pilgrimage alike to Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist. They offer an opportunity to acquire merit and profit at the same time, an irresistible combination to the needy, pious Hindu. Therefore across the rugged passes of the Himalayas he drives his yaks laden with English merchan- dise, an unconscious instrument for the spread of English influence, English civilization and the extension of the Eng- lish market, as the Colonial Office well understands. 69 The forms which have been assumed by the historical move- ment are varied, but all have contributed to the spread of man over the habitable globe. The yellow, white and red races have become adapted to every zone; the black race, whether in Africa, Australia or Melanesia, is confined chiefly to the Tropics. A like conservatism as to habitat tends to characterize all sub-races, peoples, and tribes of the human family. The fact which strikes one in studying the migrations of these smaller groups is their adherence each to a certain zone or heat belt defined by certain isothermal lines (see map chap. XVII.), their reluctance to protrude beyond its limits, and the restricted range and small numerical strength of such protrusions as occur. This seems to be the conservatism of the mature race type, which has lost some of its plasticity and shuns or succumbs to the ordeal of adaptation to contrasted climatic conditions, except when civilization enables it par- tially to neutralize their effects. In South America, Caribs and Arawaks showed a strictly tropical distribution from Hayti to the southern watershed of the Amazon. The Tupis, moving down the Parana-La Plata system, made a short excursion beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, though not beyond the hot belt, then turned equator-ward again along the coast. 70 In North America we find some exceptions to the rule. For instance, though the main area of the Athapascan stock is found in the frigid belt of Canada and Alaska, north of the annual isotherm of C. THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 101 Arrows show direction of race movements Chacos Pat. Tupis Caribs r*^-=^ Civilized. . . Arawak .... Tapujos. . . PRIMITIVE INDIAN STOCKS or SOUTH AMERICA (From Helmolt's History of the World. By permission of Dodd, Mead & Co.) 102 (32 F.) small residual fragments of these people are scat- tered also along the Pacific coast of Oregon and California, marking the old line of march of a large group which drifted southward into Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the northern part of Mexico. The Shoshone stock, which originally oc- cupied the Great Basin and western intermontane plateau up to the borders of Canada, sent out offshoots which developed into the ancient civilized tribes of tropical Mexico and Central America. Both these emigrations to more southern zones were part of the great southward trend characterizing all move- ments on the Pacific side of the continent, probably from an original ethnic port of entry near Bering Strait ; and part also of the general southward drift in search of more genial climate, which landed the van of northern Siouan, Algonquin and Iroquoian stocks in the present area of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, while the base of their territory stretched out to its greatest width in south- ern Canada and contiguous parts of the United States. [See map page 54.] (1 Indo-Aryan Monpoloid Dravidian Aryo-Dravidian E3 Turco-Dravidian Mongolo-Dravidian H Turco-Iranian ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF INDIA FROM THE INDIAN CENSUS OF 1901. THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 103 If we turn to the eastern hemisphere, we find the Malays Range of and Malayo-Polynesians, differentiated offshoots of the Mon- m vements golian stock, restricted to the Tropics, except where Poly- in Asia. 70 10 120 ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF ASIA. Vertical Shading in the North is Slav. nesians have spread to outlying New Zealand. The Chinese draw their political boundary nearly along the Tropic of Can- 104 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES cer, but they have freely lapped over this frontier into Indo- C'hina as far as Singapore. 72 Combined with this expansion was the early infiltration of the Chinese into the Philippines, Borneo, and the western Sunda Isles, all distinctly tropical. The fact that the Chinese show a physical capacity for ac- climatization found in no other race explains in part their presence into the Tropics. In contrast, the Aryan folk of India, whether in their pure type as found in the Punjab and Rajputana Desert, or mingled with the earlier Dravidian race, belong to the hot belt but scarcely reach the Tropic of Can- cer, 73 though their language has far overshot this line both in the Deccan and the Ganges Delta. One spore of Aryan stock, in about 450 B. C., moved by sea from the Bay of Cambay to Ceylon; mingling there with the Tamil natives, they became the progenitors of the Singhalese, forming a hybrid tropical offshoot. Europe, except for its small sub-arctic area, has received immigrants, according to the testimony of history and eth- nology, only from the temperate parts of Asia and Africa, with the one exception of the Saracens of Arabia, whose original home lay wholly within the hot climate belt of 20 C. (68 F.). Saracen expansion, in covering Persia, Syria, and Egypt, still kept to this hot belt ; only in the Barbary Coast of Africa and in Spain did it protrude into the temperate belt. Though this last territory was extra-tropical, it was essentially semi-arid and sub-tropical in temperature, like the dry trade-wind belt whence the Saracens had sprung. Range of The Semitic folk of Arabia and the desert Hamites of north- movements ern Africa, bred by their hot, dry environment to a nomadic life, have been drawn southward over the Sahara across the Tropic into the grasslands of the Sudan, permeating a wide zone of negro folk with the political control, religion, civiliza- tion and blood of the Mediterranean north. Hare similar though better conditions of life, a climate hotter though less arid, attracted Hamitic invasion, while the relatively dense native population in a lower stage of economic development presented to the commercial Semites the attraction of lucra- tive trade. South of the equator the native Bantu Kaffirs, es- sentially a tropical people, spread beyond their zonal border 105 20 10 10 20 30 > 90 (Pulbe EKjgjgjI Bantu Negroes f ^ Hova Malay fUm Sudan Negroes f|||Hottentot tUM Pygmies K^^!i English and Dutch ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF AFRICA AND ARABIA. 106 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Coloniza- tion and latitude. to the south coast of Africa at 33 S. L., and displaced the yellow Hottentots 74 before the arrival of the Dutch in 1602; while in the early nineteenth century we hear of the Makololo, a division of this same Kaffir stock, leaving their native seats near the southern sources of the Vaal River at 28 S. L. and moving some nine hundred miles northward to the Barotse territory on the upper Zambesi at 15 S. L. 75 This again was a movement of a pastoral people across a tropic to other grasslands, to climatic conditions scarcely different from those which they had left. The modern colonial movements which have been genuine race expansions have shown a tendency not only to adhere to their zone, but to follow parallels of latitude or isotherms. The stratification of European peoples in the Americas, ex- cepting Spanish and Portuguese, coincides with heat zones. Internal colonization in the United States reveals the same principle. 76 Russian settlements in Asia stretch across Siberia chiefly between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth parallels ; these same lines include the ancient Slav territory in Germany between the Vistula and Weser. The great efflux of home-srokors, as opposed to the smaller contingent of mere conquerors and ex- ploiters, which has poured forth from Europe since the fif- teenth century, has found its destinations largely in the tem- perate parts of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Even the Spanish overlords in Mexico and Peru domiciled themselves chiefly in the highlands, where alti- tude in part counteracts tropical latitude. European immi- gration into South America to-day greatly predominates in the temperate portions, in Argentine, Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Brazil and southern Chile. While Argentine's popu- lation includes over one million white foreigners, who com- prise twenty per cent, of the total, 77 Venezuela has no genuine white immigration. Its population, which comprises only one per cent, of pure whites, consists chiefly of negroes, mulattoes, and Sambos, hybrids of negro and Indian race. In British Guiana, negroes and East Indian coolies, both importations from other tropical lands, comprise eighty-one per cent, of the population. 78 The movement of Europeans into the tropical regions of THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 107 Asia, Australasia, Africa and America, like the American ad- vance into the Philippines, represents commercial and political, not genuine ethnic expansion. Except where it resorts to hy- bridization, it seeks not new homesteads, but the profits of tropical trade and the markets for European manufactures found in retarded populations. These it secures either by a small but permanently domiciled ruling class, as formerly in Spanish and Portuguese America, or by a body of European officials, clerks, agents and soldiers, sent out for a term of years. Such are the seventy-six thousand Britishers who manage the affairs of commerce and state in British India, and the smaller number of Dutch who perform the same func- tions in the Dutch East India islands. The basis of this sys- tem is exploitation. It represents neither a high economic, ethical, nor social ideal, and therefore lacks the stamp of geographic finality. A migrating or expanding people, when free to choose, is Movement prone to seek a new home with like geographic conditions to to ^ e the old. Hence the stamp once given by an environment tends ~J to perpetuate itself. All people, especially those in the lower stages of culture, are conservative in their fundamental activ ities. Agriculture is intolerable to pastoral nomads, hunting has little attraction for a genuine fisher folk. Therefore such peoples in expansion seek an environment in which the national aptitudes, slowly evolved in their native seats, find a ready field. Thus arise natural provinces of distribution, whose location, climate, physical features, and size reflect the social and economic adaptation of the inhabitants to a certain type of environment. A shepherd folk, when breaking off from its parent stock like Abraham's family from their Meso- potamian kinsmen, seeks a land rich in open pastures and large enough to support its wasteful nomadic economy. A seafaring people absorb an ever longer strip of seaboard, like the Eskimo of Arctic America, or throw out their settlements from inlet to inlet or island to island, as did Malays and Poly- nesians in the Pacific, ancient Greeks and Phoenicians in the subtropical Mediterranean, and the Norse in the northern seas. The Dutch, bred to the national profession of diking and draining, appear in their element in the water-logged coast 108 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Movement to better geographic conditions. of Sumatra and Guiana, 79 where they cultivate lands reclaimed from the sea; or as colonists in the Vistula lowlands, whither Prussia imported them to do their ancestral task, just as the English employed their Dutch prisoners after the wars with Holland in the seventeenth century to dike and drain the fens of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Moreover, the com- mercial talent of the Dutch, trained by their advantageous situation on the North Sea about the Rhine mouths, guided their early traders to similar locations elsewhere, like the Hud- son and Delaware Rivers, or planted them on islands either furnishing or commanding extensive trade, such as Ceylon, Mauritius, the East Indies, or the Dutch holdings in the An- tilles. Much farther down in the cultural scale we find the fisher tribes of Central Africa extending their villages from point to point along the equatorial streams, and the river Indians of South America gradually spreading from headwaters to estuary, and thence to the related environment of the coast. The Tupis, essentially a water race, have left traces of their occupation only where river or coast enabled them to live by their inherited aptitudes. 80 The distribution of the ancient mounds in North America shows their builders to have sought with few exceptions protected sites near alluvial lowlands, commanding rich soil for cultivation and the fish supply from the nearby river. Mountaineer folk often move from one up- land district to another, as did the Lombards of Alpine Pan- nonia in their conquest of Lombardy and Apennine Italy, where all their four duchies were restricted to the highlands of the peninsula. 81 The conquests of the ancient Incas and the spread of their race covered one Andean valley after another for a stretch of one thousand five hundred miles, wherever cli- matic and physical conditions were favorable to their irrigated tillage and highland herds of llamas. They found it easier to climb pass after pass and mount to ever higher altitudes, rather than descend to the suffocating coasts where neither man nor beast could long survive, though they pushed the po- litical boundary finally to the seaboard. [Map page 101.] The search for better land, milder climate, and easier con- ditions of living starts many a movement of peoples which, THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 109 in view of their purpose, necessarily leads them into an en- vironment sharply contrasted to their original habitat. Such has been the radial outflow of the Mongoloid tribes down from the rugged highlands of central Asia to the fertile river lowlands of the peripheral lands ; the descent of the Iran pas- tors upon the agricultural folk of the Indus, Ganges and Mesopotamian valleys, and the swoop of desert-born conquer- ors upon the unresisting tillers of well-watered fields in all times, from .the ancient Hyksos of the Nile to the modern Fulbe of the Niger Valley. The attraction of a milder climate has caused in the north- Southward ern hemisphere a constantly recurring migration from north andwes t- to south. In primitive North America, along the whole broad . ^ Atlantic slope, the predominant direction of Indian migra- northern tions was from north to south, accompanied by a drift hemi- from west to east. 82 On the Pacific side of the continent also sphere- the trend was southward. This is generally conceded regard- less of theory as to whether the Indians first found entrance to the continent at its northeast or northwest corner. It was a movement toward milder climates. 83 Study of the Volkenvanderungen in Europe reveals two currents or drifts in varied combination, one from north to south and the other from east to west, but both of them aimed at regions of better climate ; for the milder temperature and more abundant rainfall of western Europe made a country as alluring to the Goths, Huns, Alans, Slavs, Bulgars and Tartars of Asiatic deserts and Russian steppes, as were the sunny Medi- terranean peninsulas to the dwellers of the bleak Baltic coasts. This is one geographic fact back of the conspicuous westward movement formulated into an historical principle : "Westward the star of empire takes its course." The establishment of European colonies on the western side of the Atlantic, their extension thence to the Pacific and ever westward, till Euro- pean culture was transplanted to the Philippines by Spain and more recently by the United States, constitute the most remarkable sustained movement made by any one race. But westward movements are not the only ones. On the Eastward Pacific slope of Asia the star has moved eastward. From movements. Iiighland Mongolia issued the throng which originally popu- 110 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Return movements. Regions of at- traction and repulsion. lated the lowlands of China; and ever since, one nomad con- queror after the other has descended thence to rule the fruit- ful plains of Chili and the teeming populations of the Yangtze Valley. 84 Russia, blocked in its hoped for expansion to the west by the strong powers of central Europe, stretched its dominion eastward to the Pacific and for a short time over to Alaska. The chief expansion of the German people and the German Empire in historical times has also been from west to east ; but this eastward advance is probably only retracing the steps taken by many primitive Teutonic tribes as they drifted Rhineward from an earlier habitat along the Vistula. Since the world is small, it frequently happens that a peo- ple after an interval of generations, armed with a higher civilization, will reenter a region which it once left when too crude and untutored to develop the possibilities of the land, but which its better equipment later enables it to exploit. Thus we find a backward expansion of the Chinese westward to the foot of the Pamir, and an internal colonization of the empire to the Hi feeder of Lake Balkash. The expansion of the Japanese into Korea and Saghalin is undoubtedly such a return current, after an interval long enough to work a com- plete transformation in the primitive Mongolians who found their way to that island home. Sometimes the return repre- sents the ebbing of the tide, rather than the back water of a stream in flood. Such was the retreat of the Moors from Spain to the Berber districts of North Africa, whither they carried echoes of the brilliant Saracen civilization in the Iberian Peninsula. Such has been the gradual withdrawal of the Turks from Europe back to their native Asia, and slow expulsion of the Tartar tribes from Russia to the barren Asiatic limits of their former territory. [See map page 225.] Voluntary historical movements, seeking congenial or choice regions of the earth, have left its less favored spots undis- turbed. Paucity of resources and isolation have generally insured to a region a peaceful history; natural wealth has always brought the conqueror. In ancient Greece the fruit- ful plains of Thessaly, Boeotia, Elis and Laconia had a fatal attraction for every migrating horde; Attica's rugged surface, poor soil, and side-tracked location off the main line THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 111 of travel between Hellas and the Peloponnesus saved it from many a rough visitant, 85 and hence left the Athenians, ac- cording to Tlmcydides, an indigenous race. The fertility of the Rhine Valley has always attracted invasion, the barren Black Forest range has repelled and obstructed it. The security of such unproductive highlands lies more in their failure to attract than in their power to resist con- quest. When to abundant natural resources, a single spot adds a reputation for wealth, magnificence, an exceptional position for the control of territory or commerce, it becomes a geographical magnet. Such was Delphi for the Gauls of the Balkan Peninsula in the third century, Rome for the Germanic and Hunnish tribes of the Volkerwanderung, Constantinople for the Normans, Turks and Russians, Venice for land-locked Austria, the Mississippi highway and the outlet at New Or- leans for our Trans-Allegheny pioneers. Sometimes the goal is fabulous or mythical, but potent Psychical to lure, like the land of El Dorado, abounding in gold and influences iewels, which for two centuries spurred on Spanish explora- movementS; tion m America. Other than purely material motives may initiate or maintain such a movement, an ideal or a dream of good, like the fountain of eternal youth which brought Ponce de Leon to Florida, the search for the Islands of the Blessed, or the spirit of religious propaganda which stimulated the spread of the Spanish in Mexico and the French in Canada, or the hope of religious toleration which has drawn Quaker, Puri- tan, Huguenot, and Jew to America. It was an idea of purely spiritual import which directed the century-long movement of the Crusades toward Jerusalem, half Latinized the Levant, and widened the intellectual horizon of Europe. A national or racial sentiment which enhaloes a certain spot may be preg- nant with historical results, because at any moment it may start some band of enthusiasts on a path of migration or con- quest. The Zionist agitation for the return of oppressed Jews to Palestine, and the establishment of the Liberian Republic for the negroes in Africa rest upon such a sentiment. The reverence of the Christian world for Rome as a goal of pil- grimages materially enhanced the influence of Italy as a school of culture during the Middle Ages. The spiritual and ethnic 112 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Results of historical movement. Differen- tiation and area. association of the Mohammedan world with Mecca is always fraught with possible political results. The dominant tribe ; of the Sudan, followers of Islam, who proudly trace bac fictitious line of ancestry to the Arabs of Yemen, are readily incited to support a new prophet sprung from the race of Mecca. 88 The pilgrimages which the Buddhists of the Asiatic highlands make to the sacred city of Lhassa ensure China's control over the restless nomads through the instrumentality of the Grand Lama of Tibet. Historical movements are varied as to motive, direction, numerical strength, and character, but their final results are two, differentiation and assimilation. Both are important phases of the process of evolution, but the latter gains force with the progress of history and the increase of the world's population. A people or race which, in its process of numerical growth, spreads over a large territory subjects itself to a widening range of geographic conditions, and therefore of differ- entiation. The broad expansion of the Teutonic race in Eu- rope, America, Australia and South Africa has brought it into every variety of habitat. If the territory has a monotonous relief like Russia, nevertheless, its mere extent involves diver- sity of climate and location. The diversity of climate incident to large area involves in turn different animal and plant life, different crops, different economic activities. Even in low- lands the relief, geologic structure, and soil are prone to vary over wide districts. The monotonous surface of Holland shows such contrasts. So do the North German lowlands ; here the sandy barren flats of the "geest" alternate with stretches of fertile silt deposited by the rivers or the sea, 87 and support different types of communities, which have been admirably de- scribed by Gustav Frenssen in his great novel of Jon Uhl. The flat surface of southern Illinois shows in small compass the teeming fertility of the famous "American bottom," the poor clay soil of "Egypt" with its backward population, and the rich prairie land just to the north with its prosperous and progressive farmer class. When the relief includes mountains, the character not only of the land but of the climate changes, and therewith the type THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 113 of community. Hence neighboring districts may produce strongly contrasted types of society. Madison County of Kentucky, lying on the eastern margin of the Bluegrass re- gion, contains the rich landed estates, negro laboring class and aristocratic society characteristic of the "planter" communi- ties of the old South ; and only twenty miles southeast of Rich- mond, the center of this wealth and refinement, it includes also the rough barren hill country of the Cumberland Plateau, where are found one-room cabins, moonshine stills, feuds, and a backward population sprung from the same pure English stock as the Bluegrass people. Here is differentiation due to the immediate influences of Contrasted 4. mu u e environ- environment. Ihe phenomenon reappears in every part of t the world, in every race and every age. The contrast between the ancient Greeks of the mountains, coasts and alluvial val- leys shows the power of environment to direct economic activ- ities and to modify culture and social organization. So does the differences between the coast, steppe, and forest Indians of Guiana, 88 the Kirghis of the Pamir pastures and the Irtysh River valley, the agricultural Berbers of the Atlas Mountains and the Berber nomads of the Sahara, the Swiss of the high, lonely Engadine and those of the crowded Aar valley. Contrasted environments effect a natural selection in an- other way and thereby greatly stimulate differentiation, when- ever an intruding people contest the ownership of the territory with the inhabitants. The struggle for land means a struggle also for the best land, which therefore falls to the share of the strongest peoples. Weaklings must content themselves with poor soils, inaccessible regions of mountain, swamp or desert. There they deteriorate, or at best strike a slower pace of in- crease or progress. The difference between the people of the highlands and plains of Great Britain or of France is there- fore in part a distinction of race due to this geographical se- lection, 89 in part a distinction of economic development and culture due to geographic influences. Therefore the piedmont belts of the world, except in arid lands, are cultural, ethnic and often political lines of cleavage, showing marked differen- tiation on either side. Isotherms are other such cleavage lines, marking the limits beyond which an aggressive people did not 114 THE MOV01KNTS OF PEOPLES desire to expand because of an uncongenial climate. The dis- tinction between Anglo-Saxon and Latin America is one of zone as well as race. Everywhere in North America the Eng- lish stock has dominated or displaced French and Spanish competitors down to the Mexican frontier. As the great process of European colonization has perme- ated the earth and multiplied its population, not only the best land but the amount of this has commenced to differentiate the history of various European nations, and that in a way whose end cannot yet be definitely predicted. The best lands have fallen to the first-comers strong enough to hold them. People who early develop powers of expansion, like the English, or who, like the French and Russians, formulate and execute vast territorial policies, secure for their future growth a wide base which will for all time distinguish them from late-comers into the colonial field, like Germany and Italy. These countries see the fecundity of their people re- dounding to the benefit of alien colonial lands, which have been acquired by enterprising rivals in the choice sections of the temperate zone. German and Italian colonies in torrid, unhealthy, or barren tropical lands, fail to attract emigrants from the mother country, and therefore to enhance national growth. Two-type When colonizers or conquerors appropriate the land of a populations. l owe r race, we find a territory occupied at least for a time by two types of population, constituting an ethnic, social and often economic differentiation. The separation may be made geographical also. The Indians in the United States have been confined to reservations, like the Hottentots to the twenty or more "locations" in Cape Colony. This is the simplest arrangement. Whether the second or lower type survives depends upon their economic and social utility, into which again geographic conditions enter. The Indians of Canada are a distinct economic factor in that country as trappers for the Hudson Bay Company, and they will so remain till the hunting grounds of the far north are exhausted. The native agriculturists in the Tropics are indispensable to the unac- dimated whites. The negroes of the South, introduced for an economic purpose, find their natural habitat in the Black Belt. THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 115 Here we have an ethnic division of labor for geographical reasons. Castes or social classes, often distinguished by shades of color as in Brahman India, survive as differentiations in- dicating old lines of race cleavage. There is abundant evi- dence that the upper classes in Germany, France, Austria, and the British Isles are distinctly lighter of hair and eyes than the peasantry. 90 The high-class Japanese are taller and fairer than the masses. Nearly all the African tribes of the Sudan and bordering Sahara include two distinct classes, one of lighter and one of darker shade. Many Fulbe tribes distinguish these classes by the names of "Blacks" and "Whites." 9 The two-type people are the result of historical movements. Differentiation results not only from contrasted geographic conditions, but also from segregation. A moA'ing or expand- an( j ing throng in search of more and better lands drops off one isolation, group to occupy a fertile valley or plain, while the main body goes on its way, till it reaches a satisfactory destination or destinations. The tendency to split and divide, characteristic of primitive peoples, is thus stimulated by migration and ex- pansion. Each offshoot, detached from the main body, tends to diverge from the stock type. If it reaches a naturally isolated region, where its contact without is practically cut off, it grows from its own loins, emphasizes its group characteristic by close in-breeding, and tends to show a development related to biological divergence under conditions of isolation. Since roan is essentially a gregarious animal, the size of every such migrating band will always prevent the evolution of any sharply defined variety, according to the standard of biology. Nevertheless, the divergent types of men and societies devel- oped in segregated regions are an echo of the formation of new species under conditions of isolation which is now generally ac- knowledged by biological science. Isolation was recognized by Darwin as an occasional factor in the origin of species and especially of divergence; in combination with migration it was made the basis of a theory of evolution by Moritz Wagner in 1873 ; 92 and in recent years has come to be regarded as an essential in the explanation of divergence of types, as op- posed to differentiation. 93 116 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Differen- tiation and di- gression. The traditions of the Delaware Indians and Sioux in the north of the United States territory, and of the Creeks in the south, commence with each stock group as a united body, which, as it migrates, splits into tribes and sends out off- shoots developing different dialects. Here was tribal dif- ferentiation after entry into the general stock area, the pro- cess going on during migration as well as after the tribes had become established in their respective habitats. Culture, how- ever, made little progress till after they became sedentary and took up agriculture to supplement the chase. 94 Tribes some- times wander far beyond the limits of their stock, like the Iroquoian Cherokees of East Tennessee and North Carolina or the Athapascan Navajos and Apaches of arid New Mexico and Arizona, who had placed twenty or thirty degrees of lati- tude between themselves and their brethren in the basins of the Yukon and Mackenzie rivers. Such inevitably come into contrasted climatic conditions, which further modify the im- migrants. [See map page 54.] Wide digressions differentiate them still further from the parent stock by landing them amid different ethnic and social groups, by contact with whom they are inevitably modified. The Namaqua Hottentots, living on the southern margin of the Hottentot country near the frontier of the European set- tlements in Cape Colony, acquired some elements of civiliza- tion, together with a strain of Boer and English blood, and in some cases even the Dutch vernacular. They were therefore differentiated from their nomadic and warlike kinsmen in the grasslands north of the Orange River, which formed the cen- ter of the Hottentot area. 85 A view of the ancient Germans during the first five or six centuries after Christ reveals dif- ferentiation by various contacts in process along all the ragged borders of the Germanic area. The offshoots who pushed westward across the Rhine into Belgian Gaul were rapidly Celticized, abandoning their semi-nomadic life for sedentary agriculture, assimilating the superior civilization which they found there, and steadily merging with the native population. They became Belgae, though still conscious of their Teutonic origin. 96 The Batavians, an offshoot of the ancient Chatti living near the Thuringian Forest, appropri- 117 ated the river island between the Rhine and the Waal. There in the seclusion of their swamps, they became a distinct na- tional unit, retaining their backward German culture and primitive type of German speech, which the Chatti themselves lost by contact with the High Germans. 97 Far away on the southeastern margin of the Teutonic area the same process of assimilation to a foreign civilization went on a little later when the Visigoths, after a century of residence on the lower Danube in contact with the Eastern Empire, adopted the Arian form of Christianity which had arisen in the Greek peninsula. 88 The border regions of the world show the typical results of the historical movement differentiation from the core or central group through assimilation to a new group which meets and blends with it along the frontier. Entrance into a naturally isolated district, from which Geograph- subsequent incursions are debarred, gives conditions for 1C divergence and the creation of a new type. On the other h hand, where few physical barriers are present to form these geneity natural pockets, the process of assimilation goes on over a and homo- wide field. Europe is peculiar among the family of continents for its "much divided" geography, commented upon by Strabo. Hence its islands, peninsulas and mountain-rimmed basins have produced a variegated assemblage of peoples, languages and culture. Only where it runs off into the monotonous immensity of Russia do we find a people who in their physical traits, language, and civilization reflect the uniformity of their environment." Africa's smooth outline, its plateau surface rimmed with mountains which enclose but fail to divide, and its monoto- nous configuration have produced a racial and cultural uni- formity as striking as Europe's heterogeneity. Constant movements and commixture, migration and conquest, have been the history of the black races, varied by victorious in- cursions of the Hamitic and Semitic whites from the north, which, however, have resulted in the amalgamation of the two races after conquest. lfl Constant fusion has leveled also the social and political relations of the people to one type; it has eliminated primordial groups, except where the dwarf hunters have taken refuge in the equatorial forests and the 118 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Differen- tiation versus flssimilfl- tion. Elimina- tion by historical movement. Bushmen in the southwestern deserts, just as it has thwarted the development of higher social groups by failure to segre- gate and protect. It has sown the Bantu speech broadcast over the immense area of Central Africa, and is disseminat- ing the Hausa language through the agency of a highly mixed commercial folk over a wide tract of the western Sudan. The long east-and-west stretch of the Sudan grasslands pre- sents an unobstructed zone between the thousand-mile belt of desert to the north and the dense equatorial forests to the south, between hunger and thirst on one side, heat and fever and impenetrable forests on the other. Hence the Sudan in all history has been the crowded Broadway of Africa. Here pass commercial caravans, hybrid merchant tribes like the Hausa, throngs of pilgrims, streams of peoples, herds of cattle moving to busy markets, rude incursive shoppers or looters from the desert, coming to buy or rob or rule in this highway belt. [See map page 105.] Historical development advances by means of differentia- tion and assimilation. A change of environment stimulates variation. Primitive culture is loath to change; its inertia is deep-seated. Only a sharp prod will start it moving or accelerate its speed ; such a prod is found in new geographic conditions or new social contacts. Divergence in a segre- gated spot may be overdone. Progress crawls among a people too long isolated, though incipient civilization thrives for a time in seclusion. But in general, accessibility, ex- posure to some measure of ethnic amalgamation and social contact is essential to sustained progress. 10 As the world has become more closely populated and means of communica- tion have improved, geographical segregation is increasingly rare. The earth has lost its "corners." All parts are being drawn into the circle of intercourse. Therefore differentia- tion, the first effect of the historical movement, abates; the second effect, assimilation, takes the lead. The ceaseless human movements making for new combina- tions have stimulated development. They have lifted the level of culture, and worked towards homogeneity of race and civilization on a higher plane. Since the period of the great discoveries inaugurated by Columbus enabled the his- THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 119 torical movement to compass the world, whole continents, like North America and Australia, have been reclaimed to civiliza- tion by colonization. The process of assimilation is often ruthless in its method. Hence it has been attended by a marked reduction in the number of different ethnic stocks, tribes, languages, dialects, social and cultural types through wide-spread elimination of the weak, backward or unfit. 10 These have been wiped out, either by extermination or the slower proce.ss of absorption. The Indian linguistic stocks in the United States have been reduced from fifty-three to thirty-two ; and of those thirty-two, many survive as a single tribe or the shrinking remnant of one. 103 In Africa the slave trade has caused the annihilation of many small tribes. 104 The history of the Hottentots, who have been passive before the active advance of the English, Dutch and Kaffirs about them, shows a race undergoing a widespread process of hybridiza- tion 105 and extermination. 106 Strong peoples, like the English, French, Russians and Chinese, occupy ever larger areas. Where an adverse climate precludes genuine colonization, as it did for the Spanish in Central and South America, and for the English and Dutch in the Indies, they make their civilization, if not their race, permeate the acquired territory, and gradually impose on it their language and economic methods. The Poles, who once boasted a large and distinguished nationality, are being Germanized and Russified to their final national extinction. The Finns, whose Scandinavian offshoot has been almost absorbed in Sweden, 107 are being forcibly dissolved in the Muscovite dominion by powerful reagents, by Russian school- masters, a Russian priesthood, Russian military service. No new types of races have been developed either by No new amalgamation or by transfer to new climatic and economic ethnic conditions in historic times. Contrasted geographic condi- tions long ago lost their power to work radical physical changes in the race type, because man even with the begin- nings of civilization learned to protect himself against ex- tremes of climate. He therefore preserved his race type, which consequently in the course of ages lost much of its plas- ticity and therewith its capacity to evolve new varieties. 10 120 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES Where ethnic amalgamations on a large scale have occurred as a result of the historical movement, as in Mexico, the Sudan and Central Africa, the local race, being numerically stronger than the intruders and better adapted to the environment, has succeeded in maintaining its type, though slightly modi- fied, side by side with the intruders. The great historical movements of modern times, however, have been the expan- sion of European peoples over the retarded regions of the world. These peoples, coming into contact with inferior races, and armed generally with a race pride which was an- tagonistic to hybrid marriages, preserved their blood from extensive intermixture. Hybridism, where it existed, was an ephemeral feature restricted to pioneer days, when white women were scarce, or to regions of extreme heat or cold, where white women and children could with difficulty survive. Even in Spanish America, where ethnic blendings were most extensive, something of the old Spanish pride of race has reasserted itself. Checks to Improved communication maintains or increases the ranks differentia- o f ^he intruders from the home supply. The negroes in North America, imported as they were en masse, then steadily recruited by two centuries of the slave trade, while their race integrity was somewhat protected by social ostracism, have not been seriously modified physically by several genera- tions of residence in a temperate land. Their changes have been chiefly cultural. The Englishman has altered only superficially in the various British colonial lands. Constant intercourse and the progress of inventions have enabled him to maintain in diverse regions approximate uniformity of physical well-being, similar social and political ideals. The changed environment modifies him in details of thought, man- ner, and speech, but not in fundamentals. Moreover, civilized man spreading everywhere and turning all parts of the earth's surface to his uses, has succeeded to some extent in reducing its physical differences. The earth as modified by human action is a conspicuous fact of historical development. 109 Irrigation, drainage, fertilization of soils, terrace agriculture, denudation of forests and forestration of prairies have all combined to diminish the contrasts be- 121 tween diverse environments, while the acclimatization of plants, animals and men works even more plainly to the same end of uniformity. The unity of the human race, varied only by superficial differences, reflects the unity of the spherical earth, whose diversities of geographical feature nowhere depart greatly from the mean except in point of climate. Differentiation due to geography, therefore, early reached its limits. For assimilation no limit can be forseen. In view of this constant differentiation on the one hand, Geogra- and assimilation on the other, the historical movement has made it difficult to trace race types to their origin ; and yet this is a task in which geography must have a hand. Bor- rowed civilizations and purloined languages are often so many disguises which conceal the truth of ethnic relation- ships. A long migration to a radically different habitat, into an outskirt or detached location protected from the swamping effects of cross-breeding, results eventually in a divergence great enough to obliterate almost every cue to the ancient kinship. The long-headed Teutonic race of northern Europe is regarded now by ethnologists as an offshoot of the long-headed brunette Mediterranean race of African origin, which became bleached out under the pale suns of Scandina- vian skies. The present distribution of the various Teu- tonic stocks is a geographical fact ; their supposed cradle in the Mediterranean basin is a geographical hypothesis. The connecting links must also be geographical. They must prove the former presence of the migrating folk in the in- tervening territory. A dolichocephalic substratum of popu- lation, with a negroid type of skull, has in fact been traced by archaeologists all over Europe through the early and late Stone Ages. The remains of these aboriginal inhabitants are marked in France, even in sparsely tenanted districts like the Auvergne Plateau, which is now occupied by the broad-headed Alpine race; and they are found to underlie, in point of time, other brachycephalic areas, like the Po Val- ley, Bavaria and Russia. " The origin of a people can be investigated and stated only in terms of geography. The problem of origin can be solved only by tracing a people from its present habitat, through AAv^A, 122 THE MOVEM FATS OF PEOPLES the country over which it has migrated, back to its original seat. Here are three geographical entities which can be laid down upon a map, though seldom with sliarj-ly defined boundaries. They represent three successive geographic lo- cations, all embodying geographic conditions potent to in- fluence the people and their movement. Hence the geograph- ical element emerges in every investigation as to origins, whether in ethnology, history, philology, mythology or re- ligion. The transit land, the course between start and finish, is of supreme importance. Especially is this true for religion, which is transformed by travel. Christianity did not con- quer the world in the form in which it issued from the cramped and isolated environment of Palestine, but only after it had been remodelled in Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and cosmopolized in the wide contact of the Mediterranean basin. The Roman speech and civilization, which spread through the Romance speaking peoples of Europe, were variously diluted and alloyed before being transplanted by French, Spaniard and Portuguese to American shores, there to be further transformed. Large In view of the countless springs and tributaries that com- ers of bine ^ swe ii th e curr ent of every historical movement, anthropo-geography looks for the origin of a people not in a narrowly defined area, but in a broad, ill-defined center of dispersion, from which many streams simultaneously and successively flow out as from a low- rimmed basin, nnd which has been filled from many remoter sources. Autochthones, aborigines are therefore merely scientific tropes, indicating the limit beyond which the movement of people cannot be traced in the gray light of an uncertain dawn. The vaguer and more complex these movements on account of their his- torical remoteness, the wider their probable range. The ques- tion as to the geographical origin of the Aryan linguistic family of peoples brings us to speculative sources, more or less scientifically based, reaching from Scandinavia and Lithuania to the Hindu Kush Mountains and northern Africa. n The sum total of all these conjectural cradles, amounting to a large geographical area, would more nearly approximate the truth as to Aryan origins. For the study 123 of the historical movement makes it clear that a large, highly differentiated ethnic or linguistic family presupposes a big center and a long period of dispersion, protracted wander- ings, and a diversified area both for their migrations and successive settlements. The slighter the inner differences in an ethnic stock, Small whether in culture, language or physical traits, the smaller centers * was their center of distribution and the more rapid their dispersal. The small initial habitat restricts the chances of variation through isolation and contrasted geographic conditions, as does also the short duration of their subse- quent separation. The amazing uniformity of the Eskimo type from Bering Strait to eastern Greenland can only thus be explained, even after making allowance for the monotony of their geographic conditions and remoteness from outside influences. The distribution of the Bantu dialects over so wide a region in Central Africa and with such slight divergences presupposes narrow limits both of space and time for their origin, and a short period since their dis- persal. 112 Small centers of dispersion are generally natural dis- tricts with fixed boundaries, favored by their geographical location or natural resources or by both for the development of a relatively dense population. When this increases beyond the local limits of subsistence, there follows an emigration in point of number and duration out of all proportion to the small area whence it issues. Ancient Phoenicia, Crete, Samos, mediaeval Norway, Venice, Yemen, modern Malta, Gilbert Islands, England and Japan furnish examples. Such small favored areas, when they embody also strong political power, may get the start in the occupation of colonial lands. This gives them a permanent advantage, if their colonies are chosen with a view to settlement in congenial climates, as were those of the English, rather than the more ephemeral advan- tage of trade, as were those of the Dutch and Portuguese in the Tropics. It seems also essential to these centers of dispersion, that, to be effective, they must command the wide choice of outlet and destination afforded by the mighty com- mon of the sea. Only the Inca Empire in South America gives 124 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES us an example of the extensive political expansion of a small mountain state. Tests of The question arises whether any single rule can as yet be origin. formulated for identifying the original seats of existing peoples. By some ethnologists and historians such homes have been sought where the people are distributed in the largest area, as the Athapascan and Algonquin Indians are assigned to a northern source, because their, territories at- tained their greatest continuous extent in Canada, but were intermittent or attenuated farther south. The fact that colonial peoples often multiply inordinately in new lands, and there occupy a territory vastly greater than that of the mother country, points to the danger in such a generaliza- tion. Of the ten millions of Jews in the world, only a handful remain in the ancient center of dispersion in Pal- estine, while about eight millions are found in Poland and the contiguous territories of western Russia, Roumania, Austria-Hungary and eastern Germany. Moreover, history and the German element in the "Yiddish" speech of the Rus- sian Jews point to a secondary center of dispersion in the Rhine cities and Franconia, whither the Jews were drawn by the trade route up the Rhone Valley in the third cen- tury. 113 A more scientific procedure is to look for the early home of a race in the locality around which its people or family of peoples centers in modern times. Therefore we place the cradle of the negro race in Africa, rather than Melanesia. Density often supplies a test, because colonial lands are generally more sparsely inhabited than the mother country. But even this conclusion fails always to apply, as in the case of Samos, which has a population vastly more dense than any section of the Grecian mainland. The largest compact area including at once the greatest density of popu- lation and the greatest purity of race would more nearly indicate the center of dispersion : because purity of race is incompatible with long migrations, as we have seen, though in the native seat it may be affected by intrusive elemi When this purity of race is combined with archaic forms of language and culture, as among the Lithuanians of Aryan THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 125 speech among the Baltic swamps, it may indicate that the locality formed a segregated corner of the early center of dispersion. It seems essential to such an original seat that, whether large or small, it should be marked by some degree of isolation, as the condition for the development of specific racial characteristics. The complexity of this question of ethnic origins is typical of anthropo-geographic problems, typical also in the warn- ing which it gives against any rigidly systematic method of solution. The whole science of anthropo-geography is as yet too young for hard-and-fast rules, and its subject matter too complex for formulas. NOTES TO CHAPTER IV 1. H. J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seaa ) pp. 1?-187. Lon- don, 1904. W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 306-310, 319-326. New York, 1899. 2. Compare observations of Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. I, pp. 312-313. London, 1873. 3. Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. Ivii. Philadelphia, 1868. 4. D. M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 151-155. New York, 1904. 5. Thucydides, Book I, chap. II. 6. Strabo, Book II, chap. Ill, 7. 7. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 408-414, Vol. XIX of History of North America, edited by T. N. Thorpe. Phila- delphia, 1905. 8. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, p. 214. Oxford, 1892. 9. Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, p. 587. New York, 1872. 10. D. G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 116-119. Philadelphia, 1901. 11. O. T. Mason, Primitive Travel and Transportation, pp. 249-230. Smithsonian Report, Washington, 1896. i 12. Thucydides, Book I, chap. II. 13. Edward A. Ross, Foundations of Sociology, pp. 359-363, 386-389. New York, 1905. 14. D. G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 73-75. Philadelphia, 1901. 15. John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 9-11, 45-46, 52-54, 57, 62. London, 1904. 16. James Bryce, The Migration of the Races of Men Considered Historically, Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol. VIII, pp. 400-421, and Smithsonian Seport for 1893, pp. 567-588. 17. Caesar, De Bella Gallico, Book II, chap. 29. 18. Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, Vol. I, p. 5. New York, 1883. 19. John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, p. 46. London, 1904. 126 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 20. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. V, pp. 99-101. Oxford, 1895. 21. Ibid., Vol. V, pp. 156-157. 22. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, pp. 107, 195. Oxford, 1892. 23. Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 219-223, 230. 24. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 276-277. New York, 1899. 25. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, pp. 214-219. Oxford, 1892. 26. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 296. London, 1896-1898. 27. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 408-412, Vo\, XIX of History of North America. Philadelphia, 1905. 28. Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, p. 858. New York, 1902. 29. Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, pp. 44-48. Stutt- gart, 1888. 30. Cyrus Thomas, The Indians of North America in Historical Times, p. 261. Vol. II of History of North America, Philadelphia, 1903. 31. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 134-135, 250. New York, 1895. Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 16. Boston, 1899. 32. Eleventh Census, Eeport on the Indians, p. 54. Washington, 1894. 33. Ibid., p. 531. 34. Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. Ill, p. 411. New York, 1902-1906. 35. Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. II, pp. 57-58. Oxford, 1899. 36. // Kings, Chap. XVII, 6-24. 37. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 432-434. New York, 1899. 38. Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. V, pp. 353-354. New York, 1902-1906. 39. Ibid., Vol. VI, p. 15. 40. D. G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 247. London, 1902. 41. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. I, p. 248. New York, 1895. 42. C. C. Royce, The Cherokee Nation of Indians, pp. 130-131. Maps VIII and IX. Fifth Annual Eeport of Bureau of Ethnology, Washing- ton, 1887. 43. Albert Gallatin, Report on the Indians in 1836, reprinted in Eleventh Census, Eeport on the Indians, p. 33. Washington, 1894. 44. Cyrus Thomas, Indians of North America in Historical Times, pp. 94, 96. Vol. II of History of North America, Philadelphia, 1903. 45. Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 100-101. 46. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. Ill, pp. 333-334. New York, 1902. 47. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 437-438. New York, 1899. 48. D. G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 115-116. Philadelphia, 1901. 49. H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. Ill, pp. 559, 635-638. San Francisco, 1886. 50. Cyrus Thomas, Indians of North America in Historical Times, pp. 381-382, Vol. II of History of North America. Philadelphia, 1903. 51. Eleventh Census, Eeport on the Indians, p. 35. Washington, 1894. 52. Eleventh Census, Eeport on Population, Vol. I, p. cxxxviii. Washington, 1894. 53. Justus Perthes, Taschen Atlas, p. 38. Gotha, 1905. THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 127 54 Hkhmond Mayo-Smith, Emigration and Immigration, p. 24. New York. 55. Ibid., pp. 79-80, 113-115. 56. Capt. A. T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 27- 28. Boston, 1902. 57. W. Z. Eipley, Races of Europe, pp. 247, 272-274. New York, 1899. 58. Cffisar, Bella Gallico, Book III, chap. I. 59. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 34-43. Ox- ford, 1892. 60. Eatzel, History of Mankind, Vol. Ill, pp. 242, 245, 250, 257. Lon- don, 1896-1898. 61. John Fiske, Discovery of America, Vol. I, pp. 316-317. Boston, 1893. 62. Elliott Coues, History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Vol. I. pp. 193-198, 203-212, 240. New York, 1893. 63. Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, pp. 39-40, Note 2. Boston, 1904. 64. George G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 56-57. London, 1204. 65. Herodotus, Book II, 60. 66. Encyclopedia Britanica, Article Pilgrimages. 67. E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, p. 88. Boston, 1907. 68. Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 3-7. London, 1907. (59. C. A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, pp. 3-4, 144-145. 280-284. London, 1906^ 70. Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191. Map p. 190. New York and London, 1902-1906. 71. J. W. Powell, Map of Linguistic Stocks of American Indians, Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Vol. VII. 72. Archibald Little, The Far East, Ethnological Map, p. 8. Ox- ford, 1905. 73. Census of India, 1901, Genera! Report by H. H. Risley and E. A. Gait, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 500-504; and Ethnographic Appendices by H. H. Risley, Vol. I, map, p. 60. Calcutta, 1903. P. Vidal de la Blache, Le Peuple de I'Inde, d'apres la serie des recensements, pp. 431-434, Annales de Geographic , Vol. XV. Paris, 1906. 74. Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. Ill, pp. 422, 424, 434- 436. New York, 1902-1906. 75. D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 97-102. New York, 1858. 76. James Bryce, Migrations of the Races of Men Considered Histor- ically, Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol. VIII, pp. 400-421, May, 1892. 77. Justus Perthes, Taschen Atlas, p. 78. Gotha, 1905. 78. Ibid., p. 80. 79. Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, p. 878. New York, 1902. 80. Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191. New York, 1902-1906. 81. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. VI, pp. 23-27, 38-42, 63-68, 83-87. Oxford, 1896. 82. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, Chap. XXI, Vol. XIX of History of North America, Philadelphia, 1905. 83. Ibid., pp. 83, 87, Map of Migrations, p. 3. 84. Archibald Little, The Far East, pp. 34-38. Oxford, 1905. 128 THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES 85. Strabo, Book VIII, chap. I, 2. 86. Heinrich Earth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. II, p. 648. New York, 1857. 87. Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 104-105. London, 1903. 88. E. F. im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 167-171, 202- 207. London, 1883. 89. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 237. New York, 1899. 90. Ibid., p. 469. 91. H. Earth, Human Society in Northern Central Africa, Journal of the Soyal Geog. Society, Vol. XXX, p. 116. London, 1860. 92. Moritz Wagner, Die Entstehung der Arten durch raumliche Bonder- ung. Basel, 1889. 93. H. W. Conn, The Method of Evolution, pp. 282-295. New York, 1900. 94. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 418, 424, Vol. XIX of History of North America. Philadelphia, 1905. 95. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 280-283. London, 1896- 1898. 96. Csesar, Bella Gallico, Book II, chap. IV. 97. H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, pp. 32-33. New York 1902-1906. 98. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 75, 81, 82. Oxford, 1895. 99. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 34, 341-342. New York, J899 100. H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. Ill, pp. 400, 417. New York, 1902-1906. 101. A. C. Haddon, The Study of Man, p. xir. New York and Lon- don, 1898. 102. James Bryce, Migrations of the Races of Men Considered Histor- ically, Scottish Geographical Magazine, Vol. VIII, pp. 400-421. May, 1892. 103. Eleventh Census, Eeport on the Indians, pp. 34-35. Washington, 1894. 104. H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. Ill, p. 42. New York, 1902-1906. 105. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 279-283. London. 1896-98. 106. Jerome Dowd, The Negro Races, Vol. I, pp. 47-48, 61 62. New York, 1907. 107. Sweden, Its People and Its Industries, p. 93. Edited by G. Suncl- barg, Stockholm, 1904. 108. Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 589-593. New York, 1872. 109. G. P. Marsh, The Earth as Modified by Human Action. New York, 1877. 110. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 261-267. New York, 1899. 111. Ibid., pp. 475-485. 112. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 402-405. London, IV'Jo- 1898. 113. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. ''.71 372. Map. v 374. V?v York, 1899. I \ >v^. ft 1^ * . '. J - rjf.1 -. \ CHAPTER V GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION THE location of a country or people is always the supreme Importance geographical fact in its history. It outweighs every other ?' geograph- single geographic force. All that has been said of Russia's ^ vast area, of her steppes and tundra wastes, of her impotent seaboard on land-locked basins or ice-bound coasts, of her poverty of mountains and wealth of rivers, fades into the background before her location on the border of Asia. From her defeat by the Tartar hordes in 1224 to her attack upon the Mongolian rulers of the Bosporus in 1877, and her recent struggle with Japan, most of her wars have been waged against Asiatics. Location made her the bulwark of Cen- tral Europe against Asiatic invasion and the apostle of West- ern civilization to the heart of Asia. If this position on the outskirts of Europe, remote from its great centers of develop- ment, has made Russia only partially accessible to European culture and, furthermore, has subjected her to the retarding ethnic and social influences emanating from her Asiatic neigh- bors, 1 and if the rough tasks imposed by her frontier situa- tion have hampered her progress, these are all the limitations of her geographical location, limitations which not even the advantage of her vast area has been able to outweigh. Area itself, important as it is, must yield to location. Lo- cation may mean only a single spot, and yet from this spot powerful influences may radiate. No one thinks of size when mention is made of Rome or Athens, of Jerusalem or Mecca, of Gibraltar or Port Arthur. Iceland and Greenland guided early Norse ships to the continent of America, as the Cana- ries and Antilles did those of Spain ; but the location of the smaller islands in sub-tropical latitudes and in the course of the northeast trade-winds made them determine the first permanent path across the western seas. The historical significance of many small peoples, and the * 130 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION historical insignificance of many big ones even to the nil point, is merely the expression of the preponderant impor- tance of location over area. The Phoenicians, from their nar- row strip of coast at the foot of Mount Lebanon, were dis- seminators of culture over the whole Mediterranean. Hol- land owed her commercial and maritime supremacy, from the thirteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, to her exceptional position at the mouth of the great Rhine highway and at the southern angle of the North Sea near the entrance to the unexploited regions of the Baltic. The Iroquois tribes, located where the Mohawk Valley opened a way through the Appalachian barrier between the Hudson River and Lake Ontario, occupied both in the French wars and in the Revo- lution a strategic position which gave them a power and im- portance out of all proportion to their numbers. Location often assumes a fictitious political value, due to a combination of political interests. The Turkish power owes its survival on the soil of Europe to-day wholly to its position on the Bosporus. Holland owes the integrity of her king- dom, and Roumania that of hers, to their respective locations at the mouths of the Rhine and the Danube, because the in- terest of western Europe demands that these two important arteries of commerce should be held by powers too weak ever to tie them up. The same principle has guaranteed the neu- trality of Switzerland, whose position puts it in control of the passes of the Central Alps from Savoy to the Tyrol ; and, more recently, that of the young state of Panama, through which the Isthmian Canal is to pass. Content Geographical location necessarily includes the idea of the size and form of a country. Even the most general state- ment of the zonal and interoceanic situation of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Russian Empire, indicates the area and contour of their territories. This is still more conspicuously the case with naturally defined regions, such as island and peninsula countries. But location includes a com- plex of yet larger and more potent relations which go with mere attachment to this or that continent, or to one or another side of a continent. Every part of the world gives to its lands and its people some of its own qualities ; and so GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 131 again every part of this part. Arabia, India and Farther India, spurs of the Asiatic land-mass, have had and will always have a radically different ethnic and political history from Greece, Italy and Spain, the corresponding peninsulas of Europe, because the histories of these two groups are bound up in their respective continents. The idea of a Eu- ropean state has a different content from that of an Asiatic, or North American or African state ; it includes a different race or combination of races, different social and economic development, different political ideals. Location, therefore, means climate and plant life at one end of the scale, civiliza- tion and political status at the other. This larger conception of location brings a correspond- Intercon- ingly larger conception of environment, which affords the tinental solution of many otherwise hopeless problems of anthropo- l cat ion. geography. It is embodied in the law that the influences of a land upon its people spring not only from the physical features of the land itself, but also from a wide circle of lands into which it has been grouped by virtue of its location. Almost every geographical interpretation of the ancient and modern history of Greece has been inadequate, because it has failed sufficiently to emphasize the most essential factor in this history, namely, Greece's location at the threshold of the Orient. This location has given to Greek history a strong Asiatic color. It comes out in the accessibility of Greece to ancient Oriental civilization and commerce, and is conspicuous in every period from the Argonautic Expedition to the achievement of independence in 1882 and the recent efforts for-'the liberation of Crete. This outpost location before the Mediterranean portals of the vast and arid plains of southwestern Asia, exposed to every tide of migration or conquest sent out by those hungry lands, had in it always an element of weakness. In comparison with the shadow of Asia, which constantly overhung the Greek people and from 1401 to 1832 enveloped them, only secondary importance can be attributed to advantageous local conditions as factors in Greek history. It is a similar intercontinental location in the isthmian region between the Mediterranean on the west and the ancient 132 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Natural versus vicinal lo- cation. maritime routes of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf on the east, which gave to Pho?nicia the office of middleman between the Orient and Occident, 2 and predestined its conquest, now by the various Asiatic powers of Mesopotamia, now by the Pharaohs of Egypt, now by European Greeks and Romans, now by a succession of Asiatic peoples, till to-day we find it incorporated in the Asiatic-European Empire of Turkey. Proximity to Africa has closely allied Spain to the southern continent in flora, fauna, and ethnic stock. The long-headed, brunette Mediterranean race occupies the Iberian Peninsula and the Berber territory of northwest Africa. 3 This community of race is also reflected in the political union of the two districts for long periods, first under the Carthaginians, then the Romans, who secured Hispania by a victory on African soil, and finally by the Saracens. This same African note in Spanish history recurs to-day in Spain's interest in Morocco and the influence in Moroccan affairs yielded her by France and Germany at the Algeciras convention in 1905, and in her ownership of Ceuta and five smaller presidios on the Moroccan coast. Compare Portugal's former ownership of Tangier. In contradistinction to continental and intercontinental location, anthropo-geography recognizes two other narrower meanings of the term. The innate mobility of the human race, due primarily to the eternal food-quest and increase of num- bers, leads a people to spread out over a territory till they reach the barriers which nature has set up, or meet the frontiers of other tribes and nations. Their habitat or their specific geographic location is thus defined by natural fea- tures of mountain, desert and sea, or by the neighbors whom they are unable to displace, or more often by both. A people has, therefore, a twofold location, an immediate one, based upon their actual territory, and a mediate or vicinal one, growing out of its relations to the countries nearest them. The first is a question of the land under their feet; the other, of the neighbors about them. The first or natural location embodies the complex of local geographic conditions which furnish the basis for their tribal or national existence. This basis may be a peninsula, island, archipelago, an oasis, GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 133 an arid steppe, a mountain system, or a fertile lowland. The stronger the vicinal location, the more dependent is the peo- ple upon the neighboring states, but the more potent the in- fluence which it can, under certain circumstances, exert upon them. Witness Germany in relation to Holland, France, Austria and Poland. The stronger the natural location, on the other hand, the more independent is the people and the more strongly marked is the national character. This is exemplified in the people of mountain lands like Switzerland, Abyssinia and Nepal ; of peninsulas like Korea, Spain and Scandinavia ; and of islands like England and Japan. To- day we stand amazed at that strong primordial brand of the Japanese character which nothing can blur or erase. Clearly defined natural locations, in which barriers of Naturally mountains and sea draw the boundaries and guarantee some defined degree of isolation, tend to hold their people in a calm em- l cat i n - brace, to guard them against outside interference and infu- sion of foreign blood, and thus to make them develop the national genius in such direction as the local geographic conditions permit. In the unceasing movements which have made up most of the historic and prehistoric life of the human race, in their migrations and counter-migrations, their in- cursions, retreats, and expansions over the face of the earth, vast unfenced areas, like the open lowlands of Russia and the grasslands of Africa, present the picture of a great thorough- fare swept by pressing throngs. Other regions, more se- cluded, appear as quiet nooks, made for a temporary halt or a permanent rest. Here some part of the passing human flow is caught as in a vessel and held till it crystallizes into a nation. These are the conspicuous areas of race charac- terization. The development of the various ethnic and polit- ical offspring of the Roman Empire in the naturally defined areas of Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and France illustrates the process of national differentiation which goes on in such secluded locations. A marked influence upon this development is generally ascribed to the protection afforded by such segregated dis- tricts. But protection alone is only a negative force in the life of a people ; it leaves them free to develop in their own 134 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION way, but does not say what that way shall be. On the other hand, the fact that such a district embraces a certain number of geographic features, and encompasses them by obstruc- tive boundaries, is of immense historical importance; because this restriction leads to the concentration of the national powers, to the more thorough utilization of natural advan- tages, both racial and geographical, and thereby to the growth of an historical individuality. Nothing robs the his- torical process of so much of its greatness or weakens so much its effects as its dispersion over a wide, boundless area. This was the disintegrating force which sapped the strength of the French colonies in America. The endless valleys of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi and the alluring fur trade tempted them to an expansion that was their political and economic undoing. Russia's history illustrates the curse of a distant horizon. On the other hand, out of a restricted geographical base, with its power to concentrate and inten- sify the national forces, grew Rome and Greece, England and Japan, ancient Peru and the Thirteen Colonies of America. Vicinal If even the most detached and isolated of these natural 1<>- location. cations be examined, its people will, nevertheless, reveal a transitional character, intermediate between those of its neighbors, because from these it has borrowed both ethnic stock and culture. Great Britain is an island, but its vicinal location groups it with the North Sea family of people. Even in historic times it has derived ancient Belgian stock, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Scandinavian from the long semi- circle of nearby continental hinds, which have likewise con- tributed so much to the civilization of the island. Similarly. Japan traces the sources of its population to the north of Asia by way of the island of Sakhalin, to the west through Korea, and to the Malay district of the south, whence the Kuro Siwa has swept stragglers to the shores of Kiu-siu. Like England, Japan also has drawn its civilization from its neighbors, and then, under the isolating influence of its local environment, has individualized both race and culture. Here we have the interplay of the forces of natural and vicinal location. A people situated between two other peoples form an GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 135 ethnic and cultural link between the two. The transitional type is as familiar in anthropo-geography as in biology. The only exception is found in the young intrusion of a migrating or conquering people, like that of the Hungarians and Turks in southeastern Europe, and of the Berger Tua- regs and Fulbes among the negroes of western Sudan ; or of a colonizing people, like that of the Russians in Mon- golian Siberia and of Europeans among the aborigines of South Africa. Even in these instances race amalgamation tends to take place along the frontiers, as was the case in Latin America and as occurs to-day in Alaska and northern Canada, where the "squaw man" is no rarity. The assimila- tion of culture, at least in a superficial sense, may be yet more rapid, especially where hard climatic conditions force the interloper to imitate the life of the native. The industrial and commercial Hollander, when transplanted to the dry grasslands of South Africa, became pastoral like the native Kaffirs. The French voyageur of Canada could scarcely be distinguished from the Indian trapper; occupation, food, dress, and spouse were the same. Only a lighter tint of skin distinguished the half-breed children of the Frenchman. The settlers of the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths, at least for a generation or two, showed little outward difference in mode of life from that of the savage community among which they dwelt. 4 The more alike the components of such a vicinal group of Vicinal people, the easier, freer and more effective will be the medi- &up* * ating function of the central one. Germany has demonstrated ,. this in her long history as intermediary between the nations race ajl( j of southeastern and western Europe. The people of Po- culture, land, occupying a portion of the Baltic slope of northern Europe, fended by no natural barriers from their eastern and western neighbors, long constituted a transition form be- tween the two. Though affiliated with Russia in point of language, the Poles are Occidental in their religion ; and their head-form resembles that of northern Germany rather than that of Russia. 5 The country belongs to western Europe in the density of its population (74 to the square kilometer or 190 to the square mile), which is quadruple that of re- 136 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Thalassic vicinal location. maining European Russia, and also in its industrial and social development. The partition of Poland among the three neighboring powers was the final expression of its in- termediate location and character. 8 One part was joined politically to the Slav-German western border of Russia, and another to the German-Slav border of Germany, while the portion that fell to the Austrian Empire simply extended the northern Slav area of that country found in Bohemia, Moravia, and the Slovak border of Hungary. [Map page 223.] If the intermediate people greatly differs in race or civilization from both neighbors, it exercises and receives slight influence. The Mongols of Central Asia, between China on one side and Persia and India on the other, have been poor vehicles for the exchange of culture between these two great districts. The Hungarians, located between the Roumanians and Germans on the east and west, Slovaks and Croatians on the north and south, have helped little to recon- cile race differences in the great empire of the Danube. The unifying effect of vicinal location is greatly enhanced if the neighboring people are grouped about an enclosed sea which affords an easy highway for communication. The in- tegrating force of such a basin will often overcome the disin- tegrating force of race antagonisms. The Roman Empire in the Mediterranean was able to evolve an effective centralized government and to spread one culture over the neighboring shores, despite great variety of nationality and language and every degree of cultural development. A certain similar- ity of natural conditions, climatic and otherwise, from the Iberian Peninsula to the borders of the Syrian desert, also aided in the process of amalgamation. Where similarity of race already forms a basis for con- geniality, such circumthalassic groups display the highest degree of interactive influence. These contribute to a further blending of population and unification of culture, by which the whole circle of the enclosing lands tends to approach one standard of civilization. This was the history of the Baltic coast from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, when the German Hansa distributed the material products of Europe's highest civilization from Russian Novgorod to Norway. The GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 137 North Sea group, first under the leadership of Holland, later under England's guidance, became a single community of advancing culture, which was a later reflection of the early community of race stretching from the Faroe and Shet- land Islands to the Rhine and the Elbe. This same process has been going on for ages about the marginal basins of eastern Asia, the Yellow and Japan Seas. Community of race and culture stamps China, Korea and Japan. A general advance in civilization under the leadership of Japan, the England of the East, now inaugurates the elevation of the r^ whole group. An even closer connection exists between adjoining peo- Comple- ples who are united by ties of blood and are further made men ^ ar 7 economically dependent upon one another, because of a con- trast in the physical conditions and, therefore, in the products of their respective territories. Numerous coast and inland tribes, pastoral and agricultural tribes are united because they are mutually necessary. In British Columbia and Alaska the fishing Indians of the seaboard long held a definite commercial relation to the hunting tribes of the interior, selling them the products and wares of the coast, while monopolizing their market for the inland furs. Such was the position of the Ugalentz tribe of Tlingits near the mouth of the Copper River in relation to the up-stream Athapascans ; of the Kinik tribe at the head of Cook's Inlet in relation to the inland Atnas, 7 of the Chilcats of Chilkoot Inlet to the mountain Tinnehs. Similarly, the hunting folk of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa attach themselves to influential tribesmen of the adjacent Bechuana grasslands, in order to exchange the skins of the desert animals for spears, knives, and tobacco. 8 Fertile agricultural lands adjoining pastoral regions of deserts and steppes have in all times drawn to their border markets the mounted plainsmen, bringing the products of their herds to exchange for grain ; and in all times the abun- dance of their green fields has tempted their ill-fed neighbors to conquest, so that the economic bond becomes a pre- liminary to a political bond and an ethnic amalgamation growing out of this strong vicinal location. The forest lands of Great Russia supplement the grain-bearing Black Lands 138 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Types of location. Continuous and scattered location. of Little Russia; the two are united through geographico- economic conditions, which would not permit an independent existence to the smaller, weaker section of the south, ever open to hostile invasion from Asia. 9 Leaving now the ethnic and economic ties which may strengthen the cohesive power of such vicinal grouping, and considering only its purely geographic aspects, we distinguish the following types: I. Central location. Examples: The Magyars in the Danube Valley; the Iroquois Indians on the Mohawk River and the Finger Lakes; Russia from the 10th to the 18th century; Poland from 1000 to its final partition in 1795; Bolivia, Switzerland, and Afghanistan. II. Peripheral location: Ancient Phoenicia; Greek colonies in Asia Minor and southern Italy ; the Roman Empire at the accession of Augustus; the Thirteen Colonies in 1750; island and peninsula lands. III. Scattered location : English and French settlements in America prior to 1700; Indians in the United States and the Kaffirs in South Africa; Portuguese holdings in the Orient, and French in India. IV. Location in a related series: Oasis states grouped along desert routes ; islands along great marine routes. All peoples in their geographical distribution tend to fol- low a social and political law of gravitation, in accordance with which members of the same tribe or race gather around a common center or occupy a continuous stretch of territory, as compactly as their own economic status, and the physical conditions of climate and soil will permit. This is characteris- tic of all mature and historically significant peoples who have risen to sedentary life, maintained their hold on a given ter- ritory, and, with increase of population, have widened their boundaries. The nucleus of such a people may be situated somewhere in the interior of a continent, and with growing strength it may expand in every direction ; or it may originate on some advantageous inlet of the sea and spread thence up and down the coast, till the people have possessed themselves of a long-drawn hem of land and used this peripheral location to intercept the trade between their back country and the sea. GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 139 These are the two types of continuous location. In contrast to them, a discontinuous or scattered location characterizes the sparse distribution of primitive hunting and pastoral tribes ; or the shattered fragments of a conquered people, whose territory has been honeycombed by the land appro- priation of the victors ; or a declining, moribund peo- ple, who, owing to bad government, poor economic methods, and excessive competition in the struggle for existence, have shrunk to mere patches. As a favorable symptom, scat- tered location regularly marks the healthy growth of an ex- panding people, who throw out here and there detached centers of settlement far beyond the compact frontier, and fix these as the goal for the advance of their boundary. It is also a familiar feature of maritime commercial expan- sion, which is guided by no territorial ambition but merely aims to secure widely distributed trading stations at favor- able coast points, in order to make the circle of commerce as ample and resourceful as possible. But this latter form of scattered location is not permanently sound. Back of it lies the short-sighted policy of the middleman nation, which makes wholly inadequate estimate of the value of land, and is con- tent with an ephemeral prosperity. A broad territorial base and security of possession are the Central guarantees of national survival. The geographic conditions versus peri- which favor one often operate against the other. Peripheral P h ^ ral lo ~ location means a narrow base but a protected frontier along the sea; central location means opportunity for widening the territory, but it also means danger. A state embedded in the heart of a continent has, if strong, every prospect of radial expansion and the exercise of wide-spread in- fluence ; but if weak, its very existence is imperilled, because it is exposed to encroachments on every side. A central loca- tion minus the bulwark of natural boundaries enabled the kingdom of Poland to be devoured piecemeal by its voracious neighbors. The kingdom of Burgundy, always a state of fluctuating boundaries and shifting allegiances, fell at last a victim to its central location, and saw its name obliterated from the map. Hungary, which, in the year 1000, occupied a restricted inland location on the middle Danube, by the 140 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 14th century broke through the barriers of its close-hug- ging neighbors, and stretched its boundaries from the Adria- tic to the Euxine ; two hundred years later its territory con- tracted to a fragment before the encroachments of the Turks, but afterwards recovered in part its old dimensions. Ger- many has, in common with the little Sudanese state of Wadai, an influential and dangerous position. A central location in the Sudan has made Wadai accessible to the rich caravan trade from Tripoli and Barca on the north, from the great market town of Kano in Sokoto on the west, and from the Nile Valley and Red Sea on the east. But the little state has had to fight for its life against the aggressions of its western rival Bornu and its eastern neighbor Darfur. And now more formidable enemies menace it in the French, who have occupied the territory between it and Bornu, and the English, who have already caught Darfur in the dragnet of the Egyptian Sudan. 10 Danger Germany, crowded in among three powerful neighbors of central like France, Russia, and Austria, has had no choice about location. maintaining a strong standing army and impregnable fron- tier defenses. The location of the Central European states between the Baltic and the Balkans has exposed them to all the limitations and dangers arising from a narrow circle of land neighbors. Moreover, the diversified character of the area, its complex mountain systems, and diverging river courses have acted as disintegrating forces which have pre- vented the political concentration necessary to repel inter- ference from without. The Muscovite power, which had its beginning in a modest central location about the sources of the Dwina, Dnieper and Volga, was aided by the physical unity of its unobstructed plains, which facilitated political combination. Hence, on every side it burst through its en- compassing neighbors and stretched its boundaries to the un- tenanted frontier of the sea. Central location was the un- doing of the Transvaal Republic. Its efforts to expand to the Indian Ocean were blocked by its powerful British rival at every point at Delagoa Bay in 1875 by treaty with Por- tugal, at Santa Lucia Bay in 1884, and through Swaziland in 1894. The Orange Free State was maimed in the same 141 way when, in 1868, she tried to stretch out an arm through Basutoland to the sea. 11 Here even weak neighbors were ef- fective to curtail the seaward growth of these inland states, because they were made the tools of one strong, rapacious neighbor. A central position teaches always the lesson of vigilance and preparedness for hostilities, as the Boer equip- ment in 1899, the military organization of Germany, and the bristling fortresses on the Swiss Alpine passes prove. How intimate and necessary are the relations between cen- Mutual re- tral and peripheral location is shown by the fact that all ktions be ~ states strive to combine the two. In countries like Norway, center and France, Spain, Japan, Korea and Chile, peripheral loca- periphery, tion predominates, and therefore confers upon them at once the security and commercial accessibility which result from contact with the sea. Other countries, like Russia, Germany and Austro-Hungary, chiefly central in location, have the strategic and even the commercial value of their coasts re- duced by the long, tortuous course which connects them with the open ocean. Therefore, we find Russia planning to make a great port at Ekaterina Harbor on the northernmost point of her Lapland coast, where an out-runner from the Gulf Stream ensures an ice-free port on the open sea. 12 An ad- mirable combination of central and peripheral location is seen in the United States. Here the value of periphery is greatly enhanced by the interoceanic location of the country ; and the danger of entanglements arising from a marked cen- tral location is reduced by the simplicity of the political neighborhood. But our country has paid for this security by an historical aloofness and poverty of influence. Civilized countries which are wholly central in their location are very few, only nine in all. Six of these are mountain or plateau states, like Switzerland and Abyssinia, which have used the fortress character of their land to resist conquest, and have preferred independence to the commercial advantages to be gained only by affiliation with their peripheral neighbors. Central and peripheral location presuppose and supple- Inland and ment one another. One people inhabits the interior of an c< island or continent whose rim is occupied by another. The first suffers from exclusion from the sea and therefore strives 142 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION to get a strip of coast. The coast people feel the drawback of their narrow foothold upon the land, want a broader base in order to exploit fully the advantages of their maritime loca- tion, fear the pressure of their hinterland when the great forces there imprisoned shall begin to move; so they tend to expand inland to strengthen themselves and weaken the neighbor in their rear. The English colonies of America, prior to 1763, held a long cordon of coast, hemmed in between the Appalachian Mountains and the sea. Despite threats of French encroachments from the interior, they expanded from this narrow peripheral base into the heart of the con- tinent, and after the Revolution reached the Mississippi River and the northern boundary of the Spanish Floridas. They now held a central location in relation to the long Spanish periphery of the Gulf of Mexico. True to the instincts of that location, they began to throw the weight of their vast hinterland against the weak coastal barrier. This gave way, either to forcible appropriation of territory or diplomacy or war, till the United States had incorporated in her own ter- ritory the peripheral lands of the Gulf from Florida Strait to the Rio Grande. [See map page 156.] Russian ^ n Asia this same process has been perennial and on a far expansion greater scale. The big arid core of that continent, contain- in Asia. m g m any million square miles, has been charged with an expansive force. From the appearance of the Aryans in the Indus Valley and the Scythians on the borders of Macedonia, it has sent out hordes to overwhelm the peripheral lands from the Yellow Sea to the Black, and from the Indian Ocean to the White Sea. 1S To-day Russia is making history there on the pattern set by geographic conditions. From her most southerly province in Trans-Caspia, conquered a short twenty-five years ago, she is heading towards the Indian Ocean. The Anglo-Russian convention of August 31st, 1907, yielding to Russia all northern Persia as her sphere of in- fluence, enables her to advance half way to the Persian Gulf, though British statesmen regard it as a check upon her am- bition, because England has secured right to the littoral. But Russia by this great stride toward her goal is working with causes, satisfied to let the effects follow at their leisure. GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 143 She has gained the best portion of Persia, comprising the six largest cities and the most important lines of communication radiating from the capital. l4 This country will make a solid base for her further advance to the Persian Gulf; and, when developed by Russian enterprise in railroad building and commerce, it will make a heavy weight bearing down upon the coast. The Muscovite area which is pressing upon Eng- land's Persian littoral reaches from Ispahan and Yezd to the far-away shores of the Arctic Ocean. In the essentially complementary character of interior and Periphery periphery are rooted all these coastward and landward move- as goa f ments of expansion. Where an equilibrium seems to have been reached, the peoples who have accepted either the one or the other one-sided location have generally for the time being ceased to grow. Such a location has therefore a passive char- acter. But the surprising elasticity of many nations may start up an unexpected activity which will upset this equili- brium. Where the central location is that of small mountain states, which are handicapped by limited resources and popu- lation, like Nepal and Afghanistan, or overshadowed by far more powerful neighbors, like Switzerland, the passive char- acter is plain enough. In the case of larger states, like Servia, Abyssinia, and Bolivia, which offer the material and geographical base for larger populations than they now sup- port, it is often difficult to say whether progression or re- trogression is to be their fate. As a rule, however, the expul- sion of a people from a peripheral point of advantage and their confinement in the interior gives the sign of national decay, as did Poland's loss of her Baltic seaboard. Russia's loss of her Manchurian port and the resignation of her am- bition on the Chinese coasts is at least a serious check. On the other hand, if an inland country enclosed by neighbors suc- ceeds in somewhere getting a maritime outlet, the sign is hopeful. The century-old political slogan of Hungary, "To the sea, Magyars !" lias borne fruit in the Adriatic harbor of Fiume, which is to-day the pride of the nation and in no small degree a basis for its hope of autonomy. The history of Montenegro took on a new phase when from its mountain seclusion it recently secured the short strip of seaboard which 144 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Reaction between center and periphery. it had won and lost so often. Such peripheral holdings are the lungs through which states breathe. History and the study of race distribution reveal a mass of facts which represent the contrast and reaction between in- terior and periphery. The marginal lands of Asia, from northern Japan, where climatic conditions first make histori- cal development possible, around the whole fringe of islands, peninsulas and border lowlands to the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, present a picture of culture and progress as com- pared with the high, mountain-rimmed core of the continent, condemned by its remoteness and inaccessibility to eternal retardation. Europe shows the same contrast, though in less pronounced form. Its ragged periphery, all the way from the Balkan Gibraltar at Constantinople to the far northern projections of Scandinavia and Finland, shows the value of a seaward outlook both in culture and climate. Germany beyond the Elbe and Austria beyond the Danube begin to feel the shadow of the continental mass behind them ; and from their eastern borders on through Russia the benumb- ing influence of a central location grows, till beyond the Volga the climatic, economic, social and political conditions of Asia prevail. Africa is all core : contour and relief have combined to reduce its periphery to a narrow coastal hem, offering at best a few vantage points for exploitation to the great maritime merchant peoples of the world. Egypt, embedded in an endless stretch of desert like a jewel in its matrix, was powerless to shake off the influence of its continental environ- ment. Its location was predominantly central; its culture bore the stamp of isolation and finally of arrested develop- ment. Australia, the classic ground of retardation, where only shades of savagery can be distinguished, offered the natives of its northern coast some faint stimuli in the visits of Malay seamen from the nearby Sunda Islands; but its central tribes, shielded by geographic segregation from ex- ternal influences, have retained the most primitive customs and beliefs. 15 Expanding Europe has long been wrestling with Africa, but it can not get a grip, owing to the form of its antagonist; it finds no limb by which the giant can be tripped and thrown. GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 145 Asia presents a wide border of marginal lands, some of them like Arabia and India being almost continental in their pro- portions. Since Europe began her career of maritime and colonial expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she has seized upon these peripheral projections as if they were the handles on a pilot wheel, and by them she has steered the course of Asia ever since. These semi-detached outlyers of the continent have enabled her to stretch a girdle of Eu- ropean influences around the central core. Such influences, through the avenues of commerce, railway concessions, mis- sionary propaganda, or political dominion, have permeated the accessible periphery and are slowly spreading thence into the interior. China and Persia have felt these influences not less than India and Tongking ; Japan, which has most effec- tually preserved its political autonomy, has profited by them most. This historical contrast between center and periphery of continents reappears in smaller land masses, such as penin- sulas and islands. The principle holds good regardless of size. The whole fringe of Arabia, from Antioch to Aden and from Mocha to Mascat, has been the scene of incoming and outgoing activities, has developed live bases of trade, maritime growth, and culture, while the inert, somnolent in- terior has drowsed away its long eventless existence. The rugged, inaccessible heart of little Sardinia repeats the story of central Arabia in its aloofness, its impregnability, back- wardness, and in the purity of its race. Its accessible coast, forming a convenient way-station on the maritime crossroads of the western Mediterranean, has received a succession of conquerors and an intermittent influx of every ethnic strain known in the great basin. The story of discovery and colonization, from the days of Periphery in ancient Greek enterprise in the Mediterranean to the recent colonization. German expansion along the Gulf of Guinea, shows the ap- propriation first of the rims of islands and continents, and later that of the interior. A difference of race and culture between inland and peripheral inhabitants meets us almost everywhere in retarded colonial lands. In the Philip- pines, the wild people of Luzon, Mindoro and the Visa- 146 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION yas are confined almost entirely to the interior, while civil- ized or Christianized Malays occupy the whole seaboard, except where the rugged Sierra Madre Mountains, fronting the Pacific in Luzon, harbor a sparse population of primi- tive Negritos. lfl For centuries Arabs held the coast of K.-i- ' Africa, where their narrow zone of settlement bordered on that of native blacks, with whom they traded. Even ancient Greece showed a wide difference in type of character and cul- ture between the inland and maritime states. The Greek landsman was courageous and steadfast, but crude, illiterate, unenterprising, showing sterility of imagination and intellect; while his brother of the seaboard was active, daring, mer- curial, imaginative, open to all the influences of a refining civilization. 17 To-day the distribution of the Greeks along the rim of the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor, in contrast to the Turks and Slavs of the interior, is distinctly a per- ipheral phenomenon. 18 The rapid inland advance from the coast of oversea colonists is part of that restless activity which is fostered by contact with the sea and supported by the command of abundant resources conferred by maritime superiority. The Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, as later the English colonization of America, seized the rim of the land, and promptly pushed up the rivers in sea-going boats far into the interior. But periphery may give to central region some- thing more than conquerors and colonists. From its active markets and cosmopolitan exchanges there steadily filter into the interior culture and commodities, carried by peaceful merchant and missionary, who, however, are often only the harbingers of the conqueror. The accessibility of the per- iphery tends to raise it in culture, wealth, density of popula- tion, and often in political importance, far in advance of the center. Dominant The maritime periphery of a country receives a variety of historical oversea influences, blends and assimilates these to its own culture, Hellenizes, Americanizes or Japanizes them, as the case may be, and then passes them on into the interior. Here no one foreign influence prevails. On the land boundaries the case is different. Each inland frontier has to reckon with GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 147 Civilized Peoples {__ Wild Peoples Negrito PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. Distribution of Civilized and Wild Peoples 148 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION The Medi- terranean side of Europe. a different neighbor and its undiluted influence. A pre- dominant central location means a succession of such neigh- bors, on all sides friction which may polish or rub sore. The distinction between a many-sided and a one-sided historical development depends upon the contact of a people with its neighbors. Consider the multiplicity of influences which have flowed in upon Austria from all sides. But not all such influences are similar in kind or in degree. The most power- ful neighbor will chiefly determine on which boundary of a country its dominant historical processes are to work them- selves out in a given epoch. Therefore, it is of supreme im- portance to the character of a people's history on which side this most powerful neighbor is located Russia had for several centuries such a neighbor in the Tartar hordes along its southeastern frontier, and therefore its history received an Asiatic stamp ; so, too, did that of Austria and Hungary in the long resistance to Turkish invasion. All three states suffered in consequence a retardation of development on their western sides. After the turmoil on the Asiatic frontier had subsided, the great centers of European culture and com- merce in Italy, Germany and the Baltic lands began to assert their powers of attraction. The young Roman Republic drew up its forces to face the threatening power of Carthage in the south, and thereby was forced into rapid maritime develop- ment ; the Roman Empire faced north to meet the inroads of the barbarians, and thereby was drawn into inland expansion. All these instances show that a vital historical turning-point is reached in the development of every country, when the scene of its great historical happenings shifts from one side to an- other. In addition to the aggressive neighbor, there is often a more sustained force that may draw the activities of a peo- ple toward one or another boundary of their territory. This may be the abundance of land and unexploited resources lying on a colonial frontier and attracting the unemployed energies of the people, such as existed till recently in the United States, 19 and such as is now transferring the most active scenes of Russian history to far-away Siberia. But a stronger attraction is that of a higher civilization and domin- GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 149 ant economic interests. So long as the known world was con- fined to the temperate regions of Europe, Asia and Africa, together with the tropical districts of the Indian Ocean, the necessities of trade between Orient and Occident and the historical prestige of the lands bordering on the Mediter- ranean placed in this basin the center of gravity of the cul- tural, commercial and political life of Europe. The continent was dominated by its Asiatic corner ; its every country took on an historical significance proportionate to its proximity and accessibility to this center. The Papacy was a Mediterranean power. The Crusades were Mediterranean wars. Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Venice, and Genoa held in turn the focal positions in this Asiatic-European sea ; they were on the sunny side of the continent, while Portugal and England lay in shadow. Only that portion of Britain facing France felt the cultural influences of the southern lands. The estuaries of the Mersey and Clyde were marshy solitudes, echoing to the cry of the bittern and the ripple of Celtic fishing-boat. After the year 1492 inaugurated the Atlantic period of Change of history, the western front of Europe superseded the Medi- historical terranean side in the historical leadership of the continent. " ont - The Breton coast of France waked up, the southern seaboard dozed. The old centers in the Aegean and Adriatic became drowsy corners. The busy traffic of the Mediterranean was transferred to the open ocean, where, from Trafalger to Nor- way, the western states of Europe held the choice location on the world's new highway. Liverpool, Plymouth, Glasgow, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Cherbourg, Lisbon and Cadiz were shifted from shadowy margin to illuminated cen- ter, and became the foci of the new activity. Theirs was a new continental location, maintaining relations of trade and colonization with two hemispheres. Their neighbors were now found on the Atlantic shores of the Americas and the peripheral lands of Asia. These cities became the exponents of the intensity with which their respective states exploited the natural advantages of this location. The experience of Germany was typical of the change of front. From the tenth to the middle of the sixteenth cen- tury, this heir of the old Roman Empire was drawn toward 150 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Italy by every tie of culture, commerce, and political ideal. This concentration of interest in its southern neighbor made it ignore a fact so important as the maritime development of the Hanse Towns, wherein lay the real promise of its future, the hope of its commercial and colonial expansion. The shifting of its historical center of gravity to the At- lantic seaboard therefore came late, further retarded by lack of national unity and national purposes. But the present wide circle of Germany's transoceanic commerce incident upon its recent industrial development, the phenomenal increase of its merchant marine, the growth of Hamburg and Bremen, the construction of ship canals to that short North Sea coast, and the enormous utilization of Dutch ports for German commerce, all point to the attraction of distant economic interests, even when meagerly supported by colonial posses- sions. Location, therefore, while it is the most important sin- gle geographic factor, is at the same time the one most subject to the vicissitudes attending the anthropo-geograph- ical evolution of the earth. Its value changes with the trans- fer of the seats of the higher civilizations from sub-tropical to temperate lands ; from the margin of enclosed sea to the hem of the open ocean; from small, naturally defined terri- tories to large, elastic areas; from mere periphery to a com- bination of periphery and interior, commanding at once the freedom of the sea and the resources of a wide hinterland. Contrasted Even in Europe, however, where the Atlantic leaning of all historical the states is so marked as to suggest a certain dependence, the strength of this one-sided attraction is weakened by the complexity and closeness of the vicinal grouping of the several nations. Germany's reliance upon the neighboring grain fields of Russia and Hungary and the leather of the, southern steppes counteracts somewhat the far-off magnet of America's wheat and cattle. England experienced a radical change of geographic front with the sailing of the Cabots; but the enormous tonnage entering and passing from the North Sea and Channel ports for her European trade 20 show the attraction of the nearby Continent. Oftentimes we find two sides of a country each playing simultaneously GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 151 a different, yet an equally important historical part, and thus distributing the historical activities, while diversifying the historical development of the people. The young United States were profoundly influenced as to national ideals and their eventual territorial career by the free, eager life and the untrammeled enterprise of its wilderness frontier beyond the Alleghenies, while through the Atlantic seaboard it was kept in steadying contact with England and the inherited ideals of the race. Russia is subjected to different influences on its various fronts ; it is progressive, industrial, socialistic on its European side in Poland ; expansive and radical in a different way in colonial Siberia ; aggressive in the south, bending its energies toward political expansion along the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf seaboards. In all such countries there is a constant shifting and readjustment of extra-territorial in- fluences. It is otherwise in states of very simple vicinal grouping, One-sided coupled with only a single country or at best two. Spain, historical from the time Hamilcar Barca made it a colony of ancient relatlons - Carthage, down to the decline of its Saracen conquerors, was historically linked with Africa. Freeman calls at- tention to "the general law by which, in almost all periods of history, either the masters of Spain have borne rule in Africa or the masters of Africa have borne rule in Spain." The history of such simply located countries tends to have a correspondingly one-sided character. Portu- gal's development has been under the exclusive influence of Spain, except for the oversea stimuli brought to it by the Atlantic. England's long southern face close to the French coast had for centuries the effect of interweaving its history with that of its southern neighbor. The conspicuous fact in the foreign history of Japan has been its intimate connec- tion with Korea above all the other states. 21 Egypt, which projects as an alluvial peninsula into an ocean of desert from southwestern Asia, has seen its history, from the time of the Shepherd Kings to that of Napoleon, repeatedly linked with Palestine and Syria. Every Asiatic or European con- quest of these two countries has eventually been extended to the valley of the Nile ; and Egypt's one great period of ex- 152 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Scattered location due to geographic conditions. pansion saw this eastern coast of the Mediterranean as far as the Euphrates united to the dominion of the Pharaohs. Here is a one-sided geographical location in an exaggerated form, emphasized by the physical and political barrenness of the adjacent regions of Africa and the strategic importance of the isthmian district between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. The forms of vicinal location thus far considered pre- suppose a compact or continuous distribution, such as char- acterizes the more fertile and populous areas of the earth. Desert regions, whether due to Arctic cold or extreme aridity, distribute their sparse population in small groups at a few favored points, and thus from physical causes give rise to the anthropo-geographical phenomenon of scattered location. Districts of intense cold, which sustain life only in contact with marine supplies of food, necessitate an intermittent dis- tribution along the seaboard, with long, unoccupied stretches between. This is the location we are familiar with among the Eskimo of Greenland and Alaska, among the Norse and Lapps in the rugged Norwegian province of Finmarken, where over two-thirds of the population live by fishing. In the interior districts of this province about Karasjok and Kantokeino, the reindeer Lapps show a corresponding scattered grouping here and there on the inhospitable slopes of the mountains. 22 In that one-half of Switzerland lying above the altitude where agriculture is possible, population is sprinkled at wide intervals over the sterile surface of the highlands. A somewhat similar scattered location is found in arid deserts, where population is restricted to the oases dropped here and there at wide intervals amid the waste of sand. But unlike those fragments of human life on the frozen outskirts of the habitable world, the oasis states usually constitute links in a chain of connection across the desert between the fertile lands on either side, and therefore form part of a series, in which the members maintain firm and necessary economic relations. Every caravan route across the Sahara is dotted by a series of larger or smaller tribal settlements. Tripoli, Sokna, Murzuk, Bilma and Bornu form one such chain ; Algiers, El Golea, Twat, the salt mines of Taudeni, GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 153 Norwegian-Russian boundary ^. Settlements DISTRIBUTION OF SETTLEMENT IN THE NORWEGIAN PROVINCE OF FINMABKEN. Arawan and Timbuctoo, another. Bagdad, Hayil, Boreyda and Mecca trace the road of pilgrim and merchant starting from the Moslem land of the Euphrates to the shrine of Mo- hammed. 23 Not unlike this serial grouping of oasis states along cara- Island way van routes through the desert are the island way stations maritime that rise out of the waste of the sea and are connected by the rou t es< great maritime routes of trade. Such are the Portuguese Madeiras, Bissagos, and San Thome on the line between Lis- bon and Portuguese Loanda in West Africa ; and their other series of the Madeiras, Cape Verde, and Fernando, which facilitated communication with Pernambuco when Brazil was 154 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Scattered location of primi- tive tribes. a Portuguese colony. The classic example of this serial grouping is found in the line of islands, physical or political, which trace England's artery of communication with India Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Perim, Aden, Sokotra, and Ceylon, besides her dominant position at Suez. Quite different from this scattered distribution, due to physical conditions, in an otherwise uninhabited waste is that wide dispersal of a people in small detached groups which is the rule in lower stages of culture, and which bespeaks necessity of relatively large territorial reserves for the uneconomic method of land utilization characteristic of hunt- ing, fishing, pastoral nomadism, and primitive agriculture. A distribution which claims large areas, without, however, maintaining exclusive possession or complete occupation, in- dicates among advanced peoples an unfinished process, 24 es- pecially unfinished expansion, such as marked the early French and English colonies in America and the recent Rus- sian occupation of Siberia. Among primitive peoples it is the normal condition, belongs to the stage of civilization, not to any one land or any one race, though it has been called the American form of distribution. Not only are villages and encampments widely dispersed, but also the tribal territories. The Tupis were found by the Portuguese explorers along the coast of eastern Brazil and in the interior from the mouth of the La Plata to the lower Amazon, while two distant tribes of the Tupis were dropped down amid a prevailing Arawak population far away among the foothills of the Andes in two separate localities on the western Amazon. 25 [See map page 101.] The Athapascans, from their great compact northern area between Hudson Bay, the Saskatchewan River, and the Eskimo shores of the Arctic Ocean sent southward a detached offshoot comprising the Navajos, Apaches and Lipans, who were found along the Rio Grande from its source almost to its mouth ; and several smaller fragments westward who were scattered along the Pacific seaboard from Puget Sound to northern California. 20 The Cherokees of the southern Appalachians and the Tu> caroras of eastern North Carolina were detached groups of the Iroquois, who had their chief seat about the lower Great GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 155 Lakes and the St. Lawrence. Virginia and North Carolina harbored also several tribes of Sioux, 27 who were also repre- sented in southern Mississippi by the small Biloxi nation, though the chief Sioux area lay between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan rivers. Similarly the Caddoes of Louisiana and eastern Texas had one remote offshoot on the Platte River and another, the Arikaras, on the upper Missouri near its great bend. [See map page 54.] But the territory of the Caddoes, in turn, was sprinkled with Choctaws, who belonged properly east of the Mississippi, but who in 1803 were found scattered in fixed villages or wandering groups near the Bayou Teche, on the Red River, the Washita, and the Arkansas. 28 Their villages were frequently interspersed with others of the Biloxi Sioux. This fragmentary distribution appears in Africa among people in parallel stages of civilization. Dr. Junker found it as a universal phenomenon in Central Africa along the watershed between the White Nile and the Welle-Congo. Here the territory of the dominant Zandeh harbored a motley collection of shattered tribes, remnants of peoples, and in- truding or refugee colonies from neighboring districts. 29 The few weak bonds between people and soil characterizing retarded races are insufficient to secure permanent residence in the face of a diminished game supply, as in the case of the Choctaws above cited, or of political disturbance or op- pression, or merely the desire for greater independence, as in that of so many African tribes. A scattered location results in all stages of civilization Ethnic when an expanding or intruding people begins to appropri- islands of ate the territory of a different race. Any long continued in- ex P ansion - filtration, whether peaceful or aggressive, results in race islands or archipelagoes distributed through a sea of abori- gines. Semitic immigration from southern Arabia has in n '- this way striped and polka-dotted the surface of Hamitic Abyssinia. 30 Groups of pure German stock are to-day scat- tered through the Baltic and Polish provinces of Russia. 31 [See map page 223.] In ancient times the advance guard of Teutonic migration crossed the Rhenish border of Gaul, selected choice sites here and there, after the manner of 156 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 87 83 75 67 DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1800. GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 157 Ariovistus, and appeared as enclaves in the encompassing Gallic population. While the Anahuac plateau of Mexico formed the center of the Aztec or Nahuatl group of Indians, outlying colonies of this stock occurred among the Maya people of the Tehuantepec region, and in Guatemala and Nicaragua. 32 Such detached fragments or rather spores of settle- ment characterize all young geographical boundaries, where ethnic and political frontiers are still in the making. The early French, English, Dutch, and Swedish settlements in America took the form of archipelagoes in a surrounding sea of Indian-owned forest land; and in 1800, beyond the frontier of continuous settlement in the United States long slender peninsulas and remote outlying islands of white oc- cupation indicated American advance at the cost of the native. Similarly the Portuguese, at the end of the sixteenth cen- tury, seized and fortified detached points along the coast of East Africa at Sofala, Malindi, Mombassa, Kilwa, Lamu, Zanzibar and Barava, which served as way stations for Portuguese ships bound for India, and were outposts of ex- pansion from their Mozambique territory. 33 The snow- muffled forests of northern Siberia have their solitudes broken at wide intervals by Russian villages, located only along the streams for fishing, gold-washing and trading with the native. These lonely clearings are outposts of the broad band of Muscovite settlement which stretches across southern Siberia from the Ural Mountains to the Angara River. 34 [See map page 103.] The most exaggerated example of scattered political loca- Political tion existing to-day is found in the bizarre arrangement of islands of European holdings on the west coast of Africa between the Senegal and Congo rivers. Here in each case a handful of governing whites is dropped down in the midst of a dark- skinned population in several districts along the coast. The six detached seaboard colonies of the French run back in the interior into a common French-owned hinterland formed by the Sahara and western Sudan, which since 1894 link the Guinea Coast colonies with French Algeria and Tunis ; but the various British holdings have no territorial cohesion at 158 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Ethnic islands of survival. any point, nor have the Spanish or Portuguese or German. The scattered location of these different European posses- sions is for the most part the expression of a young coloniz- ing activity, developed in the past fifty years, and signal- ized by the vigorous intrusion of the French and Germans into the field. To the anthropo-geographer the map of west- ern Africa presents the picture of a political situation wholly immature, even embryonic. The history of similar scattered outposts of political expansion in America, India and South Africa teaches us to look for extensive consolidation. Race islands occur also when a land is so inundated by a tide of invasion or continuous colonization that the original inhabitants survive only as detached remnants, where pro- tecting natural conditions, such as forests, jungles, moun- tains or swamps, provide an asylum, or where a sterile soil or rugged plateau has failed to attract the cupidity of the conqueror. The dismembered race, especially one in a lower status of civilization, can be recognized as such islands of survival by their divided distribution in less favored localities, into which they have fled, and in which seldom can they increase and recombine to recover their lost heritage. In Central Africa, between the watersheds of the Nile, Congo and Zambesi, there is scarcely a large native state that does not shelter in its forests scattered groups of dwarf hunter folk variously known as Watwa, Batwa, and Akka. 35 They serve the agricultural tribes as auxiliaries in war, and trade with them in meat and ivory, but also rob their banana groves and manioc patches. The local dispersion of these pygmies in small isolated groups among stronger peoples points to them as survivals of a once wide-spread aboriginal race, another branch of which, as Schweinfurth suggested, is probably found in the dwarfed Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa. 30 [See map page 105.] Similar in distribution and in mode of life are the abori- gines of the Philippines, the dwarf Negritos, who are still found inhabiting the forests in various localities. They are dispersed through eight provinces of Luzon and in several other islands, generally in the interior, whither they have been driven by the invading Malays. 37 [See map page 147.] But GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 159 the Negritos crop out again in the mountain interior of For- mosa and Borneo, in the eastern peninsula of Celebes, and in various islands of the Malay Archipelago as far east as Ceram and Flores, amid a prevailing Malay stock. Toward the west they come to the surface in the central highland of Malacca, in the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, and in several moun- tain and jungle districts of India. Here again is the typical geographic distribution of a moribund aboriginal race, whose shrivelled patches merely dot the surface of their once wide territory. 38 The aboriginal Kolarian tribes of India are found under the names of Bhils, Kols and Santals scattered about in the fastnesses of the Central Indian jungles, the Vind- hyan Range, and in the Rajputana Desert, within the area covered by Indo- Aryan occupation. 39 [See map page 103.] Such broad, intermittent dispersal is the anthropological Discontinu- prototype of the "discontinuous distribution" of biol- ous dis- ogists. By this they mean that certain types of plants and animals occur in widely separated regions, without the pres- ence of any living representatives in the intermediate area. But they point to the rock records to show that the type once occupied the whole territory, till extensive elimination oc- curred, owing to changes in climatic or geologic conditions or to sharpened competition in the struggle for existence, with the result that the type survived only in detached lo- calities offering a favorable environment. 40 In animal and plant life, the ice invasion of the Glacial Age explains most of these islands of survival; in human life, the invasion of stronger peoples. The Finnish race, which in the ninth cen- tury covered nearly a third of European Russia, has been shattered by the blows of Slav expansion into numerous frag- ments which lie scattered about within the old ethnic bound- ary from the Arctic Ocean to the Don-Volga watershed. 41 The encroachments of the whites upon the red men of America early resulted in their geographical dispersion. The map showing the distribution of population in 1830 reveals large detached areas of Indian occupancy embedded in the prevailing white territory. 42 The rapid compression of the tribal lands and the introduction of the reservation sys- tem resulted in the present arrangement of yet smaller and 160 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Contrasted location. Geograph- ical polarity. more widely scattered groups. Such islands of survival tend constantly to contract and diminish in number with the growing progress, density, and land hunger of the surround- ing race. The Kaffir islands and the Hottentot "locations" in South Africa, large as they now are, will repeat the his- tory of the American Indian lands, a history of gradual shrinkage and disappearance as territorial entities. Every land contains in close juxtaposition areas of sharply contrasted cultural, economic and political devel- opment, due to the influence of diverse natural locations emphasizing lines of ethnic cleavage made perhaps by some great historical struggle. In mountainous countries the con- quered people withdraw to the less accessible heights and leave the fertile valleys to the victorious intruders. The two races are thus held apart, and the difference in their respective modes of life forced upon them by contrasted geographic con- ditions tends still farther for a time to accentuate their di- versity. The contrasted location of the dislodged Alpine race, surviving in all the mountains and highlands of western Eur- ope over against the Teutonic victors settled in the plains, 43 has its parallel in many parts of Asia and Africa ; it is almost always coupled with a corresponding contrast in mode of life, which is at least in part geographically determined. In Al- geria, the Arab conquerors, who form the larger part of the population, are found in the plains where they live the life of nomads in their tents; the Berbers, who were the original inhabitants, driven back into the fastnesses of the Atlas ranges, form now an industrious, sedentary farmer class, living in stone houses, raising stock, and tilling their fields as if they were market gardeners. 44 In the Andean states of South America, the eastern slopes of the Cordilleras, which are densely forested owing to their position in the course of the trade-winds, harbor wild, nomadic tribes of hunting and fish- ing Indians who differ in stock and culture from the Inca In- dians settled in the drier Andean basins. 4j [See map page 101.] Every geographical region of strongly marked character possesses a certain polarity, by reason of which it attracts certain racial or economic elements of population, and GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 161 repels others. The predatory tribes of the desert are con- stantly reinforced by refugee outlaws from the settled agricul- tural communities along its borders. 46 The mountains which offer a welcome asylum for the persecuted Waldenses have no lure for the money-making Jew, who is therefore rarely found there. The negroes of the United States are more and more congregating in the Gulf States, making the "Black Belt" blacker. The fertile tidewater plains of ante-bellum Vir- ginia and Maryland had a rich, aristocratic white population of slave-holding planters ; the mountain backwoods of the Ap- palachian ranges, whose conditions of soil and relief were ill adapted for slave cultivation, had attracted a poorer demo- cratic farmer class, who tilled their small holdings by their own labor and consequently entertained little sympathy for the social and economic system of the tidewater country. This is the contrast between mountain and plain which is as old as humanity. It presented problems to the legislation of Solon, and caused West Virginia to split off from the mother State during the Civil War. 47 Each contrasted district has its own polarity ; but with this it attracts not one but many of the disruptive forces which are pent up in every people or state. Certain condi- tions of climate, soil, and tillable area in the Southern States of the Union made slave labor remunerative, while opposite conditions in the North combined eventually to exclude it thence. Slave labor in the South brought with it in turn a whole train of social and economic consequences, notably the repulsion of foreign white immigration and the development of shiftless or wasteful industrial methods, which further sharpened the contrast between the two sections. The same contrast occurs in Italian territory between Sicily and Lom- bardy. Here location at the two extremities of the peninsula has involved a striking difference in ethnic infusions in the two districts, different historical careers owing to different vicinal grouping, and dissimilar geographic conditions. These effects operating together and attracting other minor elements of divergence, have conspired to emphasize the already strong . contrast between northern and southern Italy. marks of In geographical location can be read the signs of growth growth. 162 Marks of inland expansion. or decay. There are racial and national areas whose form is indicative of development, expansion, while others show the symptoms of decline. The growing people seize all the geo- graphic advantages within their reach, whether lying inside their boundaries or beyond. In the latter case, they prompt- ly extend their frontiers to include the object of their desire, as the young United States did in the case of the Mississippi River and the Gulf coast. European peoples, like the Russians in Asia, all strive to reach the sea ; and when they have got there, they proceed to embrace as big a strip of coast as possible. Therefore the whole colonization movement of western and central Europe was in the earlier periods re- stricted to coasts, although not to such an excessive degree as that of the Phoenicians and Greeks. Their own maritime location had instructed them as to the value of seaboards, and at the same time made this form of expansion the simplest and easiest. On the other hand, that growing people which finds its coastward advance blocked, and is therefore restricted to landward expansion, seizes upon every natural feature that will aid its purpose. It utilizes every valley highway and navigable river, as the Russians did in the case of the Dnieper, Don, Volga, Kama and Northern Dwina in their radial ex- pansion from the Muscovite center at Moscow, and as later they used the icy streams of Siberia in their progress toward the Pacific ; or as the Americans in their trans-continental ad- vance used the Ohio, Tennessee, the Great Lakes, and the Missouri. They reach out toward every mountain pass leading to some choice ultramontane highway^ Bulges or projecting angles of their frontier indicate the path they plan to follow, and always include or aim at some natural feature which will facilitate their territorial growth. The acquisition of the province of Ticino in 1512 gave the Swiss Confederation a foothold upon Lake Maggiore, perhaps the most important waterway of northern Italy, and the possession of the Val Leventina, which now carries the St. Got t hard Rail- road down to the plains of the Po. Every bulge of Russia's Asiatic frontier, whether in the Trans-Caucasus toward the Mesopotamian basin and the Persian Gulf, or up the Murghab GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 163 and Tedjend rivers toward the gates of Herat, is directed at some mountain pass and an outlet seaward beyond. If this process of growth bring a people to the borders of a desert, there they halt perhaps for a time, but only, as it were, to take breath for a stride across the sand to the near- est oasis. The ancient Egyptians advanced by a chain of oases Siwa, Angila, Sella and Sokna, across the Libyan Desert to the Syrtis Minor. The Russians in the last twenty-five years have spread across the arid wastes of Turkestan by way of the fertile spots of Khiva, Bukhara and Merv to the irrigated slopes of the Hindu Kush and Tian Shan Mountains. The French extended the boundaries of Algiers southward into the desert to include the caravan routes focusing at the great oases of Twat and Tidekelt, years before their recent appro- priation of the western Sahara. As territorial expansion is the mark of growth, so the sign Marks of of decline is the relinquishment of land that is valuable or decline, necessary to a people's well-being. The gradual retreat of the Tartars and in part also of the Kirghis tribes from their best pasture lands along the Volga into the desert or steppes indicates their decrease of power, just as the withdrawal of the Indians from their hunting grounds in forest and prairie was the beginning of their decay. Bolivia maimed herself for all time when in 1884 she relinquished to Chile her one hundred and eighty miles of coast between the Rio Lao and the twenty-fourth parallel. Her repeated efforts later to recover at least one seaport on the Pacific indicate her own estimate of the loss by which she was limited to an inland location, and deprived of her maritime periphery. 48 The habits of a people and the consequent demands which they make upon their environment must be taken into account KgitteTe ^ in judging whether or not a restricted geographical location and mar- is indicative of a retrograde process. The narrow marginal ginal loca- distribution of the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshean Indians on tion - the islands and coastal strips of northwestern America means simply the selection of sites most congenial to those inveterate fisher tribes. The fact that the English in the vicinity of the Newfoundland Banks settled on a narrow rim of coast in order to exploit the fisheries, while the French peasants pene- GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION Prevalence of ethnic islands of decline. trated into the interior forests and farmlands of Canada, was no sign of territorial decline. English and French were both on the forward march, each in their own way. The scattered peripheral location of the Phoenician trading stations and later of the Greek colonies on the shores of the Mediterranean was the expression of the trading and maritime activity of those two peoples. Centuries later a similar distribution of Arab posts along the coast of East Africa, Mada- gascar and the western islands of the Sunda Archipelago in- dicated the great commercial expansion of the Mohammedan traders of Oman and Yemen. The lack came when this distri- bution, normal as a preliminary form, bore no fruit in the oc- cupation of wide territorial bases. [See map page 251.] In general, however, any piecemeal or marginal location of a people justifies the question as to whether it results from encroachment, dismemberment, and consequently national or racial decline. This inference as a rule strikes the truth. The abundance of such ethnic islands and reefs some scarcely distinguishable above the flood of the surround- ing population is due to the fact that when the area of dis- tribution of any life form, whether racial or merely animal, is for any cause reduced, it does not merely contract but breaks up into detached fragments. These isolated groups often give the impression of being emigrants from the original home who, in some earlier period of expansion, had occupied this outlying territory. At the dawn of western European his- tory, Gaul was the largest and most compact area of Celtic speech. For this reason it has been regarded as the land whence sprang the Celts of Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, the Alps and northern Italy. Freeman thinks that the Gauls of the Danube and Po valleys were detachments whicji had been left behind in the great Celtic migration toward the west ; 49 but does not consider the possibility of a once far more extensive Celtic area, which, as a matter of fact, once reached eastward to the Weser River and the Stidetes Mountains and was later dismembered. 50 The islands of Celtic speech which now mark the western flank of Great Britain and Ireland are shrunken fragments of a Celtic linguistic arc-a. which, as place-names indicate, once comprised the whole coun- GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 165 try. 51 Similarly, all over Russia Finnic place-names testify to the former occupation of the country by a people now sub- merged by the immigrant Slavs, except where they emerge in ethnic islands in the far north and about the elbow of the Volga. 52 [See map page 225.] Beyond the compact area of the Melanesian race occupying New Guinea and the islands eastward to the Fiji and Loyalty groups, are found scat- tered patches of negroid folk far to the westward, relegated to the interiors of islands and peninsulas. The dispersed and fragmentary distribution of this negroid stock has sug- gested that it formed the older and primitive race of a wide region extending from India to Fiji and possibly even beyond. 53 Ethnic or political islands of decline can be distinguished Contrast from islands of expansion by various marks. When sur- e ' vivals of an inferior people, they are generally character- ^i^ds of ized by inaccessible or unfavorable geographic location, growth When remnants of former large colonial possessions of mod- and de- em civilized nations, they are characterized by good or even excellent location, but lack a big compact territory nearby to which they stand in the relation of outpost. Such are the Portuguese fragments on the west coast of India at Goa, Damaon, and Diu Island, and the Portuguese half of the island of Timor with the islet of Kambing in the East Indies. Such also are the remnants of the French empire in India, founded by the genius of Frai^ois Dupleix, which are located on the seaboard at Chandarnagar, Carical, Pondi- cherry, Yanaon and Mahe. They tell the geographer a far different story from that of the small detached French hold- ing of Kwang-chan Bay and Nao-chan Island on the south- ern coast of China, which are outposts of the vigorous French colony of Tongking. The scattered islands of an intrusive people, bent upon conquest or colonization, are distinguished by a choice of sites favorable to growth and consolidation, and by the rapid extension of their boundaries until that consolidation is achieved ; while the people themselves give signs of the rapid differentiation incident to adaptation to a new environ- ment. 166 GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION NOTES TO CHAPTER V 1. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 98- 101. New York, 1893. 2. George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 5-8, 12, 13, 19-28, 37. New York, 1 3. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 272-273. New York, 1899. 4. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, Vol. II, chap. I. 1846. 5. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 336, 334. Map. p. 53. New York, 1899. 6. J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 137. London, 1903. 7. Eleventh Census, Report for Alaska, pp. 66, 67, 70. Washington, 1893. 8. Livingstone, Travels in South Africa, p. 56. New York, 1858. 9. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol 1, pp. 36, 108. New Yoil.. 1893. 10. Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 127-130, 170. London, 1907. 11. James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 147, 150, 170-173. New York, 1897. 12. Alexander P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp. 135, 140-147, 165, 170. Translated from the Russian. London, 1899. 13. For full and able discussion, see II. J. Mackinder, The Geographical Pivot of History, in the Geographical Journal, April, 1904. London. 14. The Anglo-Russian Agreement, with map, in The Independent, October, 10, 1907. 15. Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. xii. London, 1904. 16. Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, p. 526; Vol. II, pp. 34-35, 50-52 and map. Washington, 1903. 17. Grote, History of Greece, Vol. 11, pp. 225-226. New York, 1859. 18. W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 402-410, map. New York, 1899. 19. Frederick J. Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, in the Annual Eeport of the American Historical Association for 1893, pp. 199-227. Washington, 1894. 20. Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 150-152. New York, 1902. 21. W. E. Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Vol. I, pp. 75, 83. New York, 1903. Henry Dyer, Dai Nippon, pp. 59, 69. New York, 1904. 22. Norway, Official Publication, pp. 4, 83, 99, and map. Christiauia, 1900. 23. D. G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 221-224, map. London, 1902. 24. Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, p. 224. Leipzig, 1897. 25. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189 191. New York, 1902-1906. 26. Eleventh Census, Eeport on the Indians, pp. 36-37. Washington, 1894. 27. John Fiske, Old Virginia and her Neighbors, Vol. II, p. 299. Boston, 1897. GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION 167 28. Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, pp. 30-31. Washington, 1894. 29. Dr. William Junker, Travels in Africa, 1882-1886, pp. 30, 31, 34, 37, 44, 50-54, 64, 94-95, 140, 145-148. London, 1892. 30. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. Ill, pp. 193-195. London, 1896- 1898. 31. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 124-129. New York, 1893. 32. D. G. Brinton, The American Race, p. 266. Philadelphia, 1901. 33. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. Ill, pp. 484, 485. New York, 1902-06. 34. Nordeuskiold, The Voyage of the Vega, p. 291. New York, 1882. 35. H. M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. II, pp. 100-103, 218. In Darkest Africa, Vol. I, pp. 208, 261, 374-375; Vol. II, pp. 40-44. 36. Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. II, chap. XI, 3rd edition, London. 37. Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 411, 436, 532, 533. Washington, 1903. 38. Quatrefages, The Pygmies, pp. 24-51. New York, 1895. 39. Sir T. H. Holdich, India, pp. 202-203, map. London, 1905. 40. Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XII. New York, 1895. 41. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 66-70, maps facing pp. 64 and 80. New York, 1893. 42. Eleventh Census of the United States, Seport on Population, Part I, map p. 23. Washington, 1894. 43. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Chapters 7, 8, 11. New York, 1899. 44. H. R. Mill, International Geography, p. 910. New York, 1902. 45. Ibid., pp. 832, 836. 46. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. Ill, pp. 175, 257. London, 1896- 1898. 47. E. C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, pp. 280-287. Boston, 1903. 48. C. E. Akers, History of South America, 1854-1894, pp. 501-502, 556-562. New York, 1904. 49. E. A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 14. London, 1882. 50. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, pp. 125-132, map. New York, 1902-1906. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 274, 297, 308, 472-473. New York, 1899. 51. H. J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 183-191. Lon- don, 1904. 52. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 26, 353, 361-365. Map. New York, 1899. 53. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, 214-218. London, 1896-1898. CHAPTER VI The size of the earth. Relation of area to life. EVERY consideration of geographical area must take as its starting point the 199,000,000 square miles (510,000,000 square kilometers) of the earth's surface. Though some 8,000,000 square miles (21,000,000 square kilometers) about the poles remain unexplored, and only the twenty-eight per cent, of the total constituting the land area is the actual habitat of man, still the earth as a whole is his planet. Its surface fixes the limits of his possible dwelling place, the range of his voyages and migrations, the distribution of ani- mals and plants on which he must depend. These conditions he has shared with all forms of life from the amoeba to the civilized nation. The earth's superficial area is the primal and immutable condition of earth-born, earth-bound man; it is the common soil whence is sprung our common humanity. Nations belong to countries and races to continents, but humanity belongs to the whole world. Naught but the united forces of the whole earth could have produced this single species of a single genus which we call Man. The relation of life to the earth's area is a fundamental question of bio-geography. The amount of that area avail- able for terrestrial life, the proportion of land and water, the reduction or enlargement of the available surface by the operation of great cosmic forces, all enter into this problem, which changes from one geologic period to another. The present limited plant life of the Arctic regions is the impoverished successor of a vegetation abundant enough at the eighty-third parallel to produce coal. That was in the Genial Period, when the northern hemisphere with its broad land-masses presented a far larger area for the support of life than to-day. Then the Glacial Period spread an ice- sheet from the North Pole to approximately the fiftieth GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 169 parallel, forced back life to the lower latitudes, and con- fined the bio-sphere to the smaller land-masses of the southern hemisphere and a girdle north of the equator. The sum total of life on the globe was greatly reduced at the height of glaciation, and since the retreat of the ice has probably never regained the abundance of the Middle Tertiary ; so that our period is probably one of relative impoverishment and faulty adjustment both of life to life and of life to physical environment. 1 The continent of North America contained a small vital area during the Later Cretaceous Period, when a notable encroachment of the sea submerged the Atlantic coastal plain, large sections of the Pacific coast, the Great Plains, Texas and the adjacent Gulf plain up the Mississippi Valley to the mouth of the Ohio. 2 The task of estimating the area supporting terrestrial Area and life which the earth presented at any given time is an im- . portant one, not only because the amount of life depends upon this area, but because every increase of available area tends to multiply conditions favorable to variation. Darwin shows that largeness of area, more than anything else, affords the best conditions for rapid and improved variation through natural selection ; because a large area supports a larger number of individuals in whom chance variations, advanta- geous in the struggle for existence, appear oftener than in a small group. This position is maintained also by the most recent evolutionists. 3 On purely geographical grounds, also, a large area stimu- lates differentiation by presenting a greater diversity of natural conditions, each of which tends to produce its appro- priate species or variety. 4 Consider the different environ- ments found in a vast and varied continent like Eurasia, which extends from the equator far beyond the Arctic Circle, as compared with a small land-mass like Australia, relatively monotonous in its geographic conditions; and observe how much farther evolution has progressed in the one than in the other, in point of animal forms, races and civilization. If we hold with Moritz Wagner and others that isolation in naturally defined regions, alternating with periods of migra- tion, offers the necessary condition for the rapid evolution 170 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA The struggle for space. Area an index of social and political develop- ment. of type forms, and thus go farther than Darwin, who regards isolation merely as a fortunate contributory circumstance, we find that for the evolution of mankind it is large areas like Eurasia which afford the greatest number and variety of these naturally segregated habitats, and at the same time the best opportunity for vast historical movements. Evolution needs room but finds the earth's surface limited. Everywhere old and new forms of life live side by side in deadly competition ; but the later improved variety multi- plies and spreads at the cost of less favored types. The struggle for existence means a struggle for space. 5 This is true of man and the lower animals. A superior people, invading the territory of its weaker savage neighbors, robs them of their land, forces them back into corners too small for their support, and continues to encroach even upon this meager possession, till the weaker finally loses the last rem- nant of its domain, is literally crowded off the earth, becomes extinct as the Tasmanians and so many Indian tribes have done. 6 The superiority of such expansionists consists prima- rily in their greater ability to appropriate, thorough!}- utilize and populate a territory. Hence this is the faculty by which they hasten the extinction of the weaker; and since this superiority is peculiar to the higher stages of civilization, the higher stages inevitably supplant the lower. The successive stages of social development savage, pastoral nomadic, agricultural, and industrial represent in- creasing density of population, increasing numerical strength of the social group, and finally increasing geographical area, resulting in a vastly enlarged social group or state. Increase in the population of a given land is accompanied by a decrease in the share which each individual can claim as his own. This progressive readjustment to a smaller proportion of land brings in its train the evolution of all economic and social processes, reacting again favorably on density of population and resulting eventually in the greatly increased social group and enlarged territory of the modern civilized state. Hence we may lay down the rule that change in areal relations, both of the individual to his decreasing quota of land, and of the state to its increasing quota of the earth's GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 171 surface is an important index of social and political evolu- tion. Therefore the rise and decline not only of peoples but of whole civilizations have depended upon their relations to area. Therefore problems of area, such as the expansion of a small territory, the economic and political mastery of a large one, dominate all history. Humanity's area of distribution and historical movement The Oikou- we call the Oikoumene. It forms a girdle around the earth mene - between the two polar regions, and embraces the Tropics, the Temperate Zones, and a part of the North Frigid, in all, five-sixths of the earth's surface. This area of distribution is unusually large. Few other living species so nearly per- meate the whole vital area, and many of these have reached their wide expansion only in the company of man. Only about 49,000,000 square miles (125,000,000 square kilo- meters) of the Oikoumene is land and therefore constitutes properly the habitat of man. But just as we cannot under- stand a nation from the study of its own country alone, but must take into consideration the wider area of its spreading activities, so we cannot understand mankind without includ- ing in his world not only his habitat but also the vastly larger sphere of his activities, which is almost identical with the earth itself. The most progressive peoples to-day find their scientific, economic, religious and political interests embrac- ing the earth. Mankind has in common with all other forms of life the Unity tendency toward expansion. The more adaptable and mobile of the an organism is, the wider the distribution which it attains and the greater the rapidity with which it displaces its weaker ^ . kin. In the most favored cases it embraces the whole vital area of the earth, leaving no space free for the development of diversity of forms, and itself showing everywhere only superficial distinctions. Mankind has achieved such wide dis- tribution. Before his persistent intrusions and his mobility, the earth has no longer any really segregated districts where a strongly divergent type of the man animal might develop. Hence mankind shows only superficial distinctions of hair, color, head-form and stature between its different groups. It has got beyond the point of forming species, and is restricted 172 Isolation and dif- ferentiation. to the slighter variations of races. Even these are few in comparison with the area of the earth's surface, and their list tends to decrease. The Guanches and Tasmanians have vanished, the Australians are on the road to extinction ; and when they shall have disappeared, there will be one variety the less in humanity. So the process of assimilation ad- vances, here by the simple elimination of weaker divergent types of men, there by amalgamation and absorption into the stock of the stronger. This unity of the human species has been achieved in spite of the fact that, owing to the three-fold predominance of the water surface of the globe, the land surface appears as detached fragments which rise as islands from the surround- ing ocean. Among these fragments we have every gradation in size, from the continuous continental mass of Iv.'ra-in- Africa with its 31,000,000 square miles, the Americas with 15,000,000, Australia with nearly 3,000,000, Madagascar with 230,000, and New Zealand with 104,000, down to Guam with its 199 square miles, Ascension with 58, Tristan da Cunha with 45, and the rocky islet of Helgoland with its scant 150 acres. All these down to the smallest constitute separate vital districts. Small, naturally defined areas, whether their boundaries are drawn by mountains, sea, or by both, always harbor small but markedly individual peoples, as also peculiar or endemic animal forms, whose differentiation varies with the degree of isolation. Such peoples can be found over and over again in islands, peninsulas, confined mountain valleys, or desert-rimmed oases. The cause lies in the barriers to ex- pansion and to accessions of population from without which confront such peoples on every side. Broad, uniform con- tinental areas, on the other hand, where nature has erected no such obstacles are the habitats of wide-spread peoples, monotonous in type. The long stretch of coastal lowlands encircling the Arctic Ocean and running back into the wide plains of North America and Eurasia show a remarkable uniformity of animal and plant forms 7 and a striking simi- larity of race through the Lapps, the Samoyedes of northern Russia, the various Mongolian tribes of Arctic Siberia to Ber- GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 173 ing Strait, and the Eskimo, that curiously transitional race, formerly classified as Mongolian and more recently as a divergent Indian stock; for the Eskimos are similar to the Siberians in stature, features, coloring, mode of life, in every- thing but head-form, though even the cephalic indices ap- proach on the opposite shores of Bering Sea. 8 Where geog- raphy draws no dividing line, ethnology finds it difficult to do so. Where the continental land-masses converge is found similarity or even identity of race, easy gradations from one type to another ; where they diverge most widely in the penin- sular extremities of South America, South Africa and Aus- tralia, they show the greatest dissimilarity in their native races, and a corresponding diversity in their animal life. 9 Geographical proximity combined with accessibility results in similarity of human and animal occupants, while a cor- responding dissimilarity is the attendant of remoteness or of segregation. Therefore, despite the distribution of mankind over the total habitable area of the earth, his penetration in- to its detached regions and hidden corners has maintained such variations as still exist in the human family. If the distribution of the several races be examined in the light of this conclusion, it becomes apparent that the races ** who have succeeded in appropriating only limited portions of the earth's surface, though each may be a marked variant of the human family, are characterized by few inner diversi- ties, either of physical features or culture. Their subdi- visions feel only in a slight degree the differentiating effects of geographic remoteness, which in a small area operates with weakened force; and they enjoy few of those diversities of environment which stimulate variation. They form close and distinct ethnic unities also because their scant numbers restrict the appearance of variations. The habitat of the negro race in Africa south of the Sahara, relatively small, limited in its zonal location almost wholly to the Tropics, poorly diversified both in relief and contour, has produced only a retarded and monotonous social development based upon tropical agriculture or a low type of pastoral life. The still smaller, still less varied habitat of the Aus- tralian race, again tropical or sub-tropical in location, has 174 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA Wide race distribution and inner diversities. Area and language. produced over its whole extent only one grade of civilization and that the lowest, one physical, mental and moral type. 10 The Mongoloid area of distribution, on the other hand, is so large that it necessarily includes a great range of climates and variety of geographic conditions. [Maps pages 103 and 225.] Representatives of this race, reflecting their diversified habitats, show many ethnic differentiations. They reveal also every stage and phase of cultural development from the industrialism of Japan, with its artistic and literary concomitants, to the savage economy and retarded intel- lectual life of the Chukches fisher tribes or the Giljak hunters of Sakhalin. The white race, identified primarily with Europe, that choice and diversified continent, comprised also a large area of southwestern Asia and the northern third of Africa. It thus extended from the Arctic Circle well within the Tropics. Its area included every variety of geo- graphic condition and originally every degree of cultural development; but the rapid expansion in recent centuries of the most advanced peoples of this race has made them the apostles of civilization to the whole world. It has also given them, through the occupation of Australia and the Americas, the widest distribution and the most varied habitats. As agents of the modern historical movement, however, they are subjected to all its assimilating effects, which tend to counter- act the diversities born of geographic segregation, and to raise all branches of the white race to one superior cosmopolitan type. On the other hand, the vast interna- tional division of labor and specialization of production, geographically based and entailed by advancing economic development, besides the differences of traditions and ideals reaching far back into an historic past and rooted in the land, will serve to maintain many subtle inner differences between even the most progressive nations. Hence the wide area which Darwin found to be most favor- able to improved variation and rapid evolution in animals, operates to the same end in human development, and its in- fluence becomes a law of anthropo-geography. It permeates the higher aspects of life. The wide, varied area occupied by the Germanic tribes of Europe permitted the evolution of the GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 175 many dialects which finally made the richness of modern Ger- man speech. English has gained in vocabulary and idiom with every expansion of its area. New territories mean to a people new pursuits, new relations, new wants ; and all these become reflected in their speech. Languages, like peoples, cease to grow with national stagnation. 11 To such stagnation movement or expansion is the surest antidote. America will in time make its contribution to the English tongue. The rich crop of slang that springs up on the frontier is not wholly to be deplored. The crudeness and vigor of cowboy speech are marks of youth : they are also promises of growth. Language can not live by dictionary alone. It tends to form new variants with every change of habitat. The French of the Canadian habitant has absorbed Indian and English words, and adapted old terms to new uses; 12 but it is other- wise a survival of seventeenth century French. Boer speech in South Africa shows the same thing absorption of new Kaffir and English words, coupled with marks of retardation due to isolation. Religion in the same way gains by wide dispersal. Christianity is one thing in St. Petersburg, an- other among the Copts of Cairo, another in Rome, an- other in London, and yet another in Boston. Buddhism takes on a different color in Ceylon, Tibet, China and Japan. In religion as in other phases of human devel- opment, differentiation must mean eventual enrichment, a larger content of the religious idea, to which each faith makes its contribution. The larger the area occupied by a race or people, other Large area geographic conditions being equal, the surer the guarantee a guaran- of their permanence, and the less the chance of their repres- e .,., .. . , , i . , racial or sion or annihilation. A broad geographic base means na tj ona i generally abundant command of the resources of life and penna- growth. Though for a growing people of wide possessions, nence. like the Russians, the significance of the land may not be obvious, it becomes apparent enough in national decline and decay; for these even in their incipiency betray themselves in a loss of territory. A people which, voluntarily or other- wise, renounces its hold upon its land is on the downward path. Nothing else could show so plainly the national 176 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA vitality of Japan as her tenacious purpose to get back Port Arthur taken from her by the Shimonoseki treaty in 1895. A people may decrease in numbers without serious consequences if it still retains its land ; for herein lies its resources by which it may again hope to grow. The re- curring loss of millions of lives in China from the wide- sweeping floods of the Hoangho is a passing episode, forgotten as soon as the mighty stream is re-embanked and the flooded plains reclaimed. The Civil War in the United States involved a temporary diminution of population and check to progress, but no lasting national weakness because no loss of territory. But the expulsion of the American Indians from their well-stocked hunting grounds in the Mississippi Valley and Atlantic plain to more restricted and barren lands in the far West, and the withdrawal of the Australian natives from the fertile coasts to the desert interior have meant racial renunciation of the sources of life. Hence a people who are conquered and dislodged from their territory, as were the ancient Britons by the Saxons, the Slavs from the land between the Elbe and the Niemen In the mediaeval Germans, and the Kaffirs in South Africa by the Dutch and English, the Ainos from Hondo by the Japanese, and the whole original Alpine race by the later coming Teutons from the fertile valleys and plains into the more barren highlands of western Europe, have little or no chance of regaining their own. When conquest results not in dislodgement, but only in the subjection of an undisturbed native population to a new ruling class, the vanquished retain their hold, only slightly impaired, perhaps, upon their strength-giving fields, recover themselves, and sooner or later conquer their conquerors either by absorption or revo- lution. This was the history of ancient Egypt with its Shepherd Kings, of England with its Norman lords, of Mexico and Peru with their Spanish victors. Weakness A large area throws around all the life forms which it sup- erf small ports the protection of its mere distances, which facilitate *** defense in competition with other forms, render attack diffi- cult, and afford room for retreat under pursuit. On tin.- other hand, the small area is easily compassed by the invaders, GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 177 and its inhabitants soon brought to bay. Since there is a general correspondence between size of area and number of inhabitants, where physical conditions and economic develop- ment are similar, a small area involves a further handicap of numerical weakness of population. Greece has always suffered from the small size of the peninsula and the further political dismemberment entailed by its geographic sub- divisions. Despite superior civilization and national heroism, it has fallen a victim to almost every invader. Belgium, Holland, Switzerland exist as distinct nations only on suf- ferance. Finland's history since 1900 shows that the day for the national existence of small peoples is passing. 13 The fragmentary political geography of the Danube basin gives the geographer the impression of an artist's crayon studies of details, destined later to be incorporated in a finished picture. Their small areas promise short-lived autonomy. The recent absorption of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria indicates the destiny of these Danubian states as fixed by the law of increasing territorial aggregates. What is true of states is true also of peoples. The ex- Protection tinction of the retarded "provisional peoples" of the earth of large progresses more rapidly in small groups than in large, and aie& to 11 i n 4-u 4.- ne Primitive in small islands more quickly than in continental areas. Of the twenty-one Indian stocks or families which have died out in the United States, fifteen belonged to the small bands once found in the Pacific coast states, and four more were similar fragments found on the lower Mississippi and its bayous. 14 [See map page 54.] The native Gaunches of Teneriffe Island disappeared long ago. The last Tasmanian died in 1876. New Zealand, whose area is four times that of Tas- mania, and therefore gives some respite before the encroach- ments of the whites, still harbors 47,835 Maoris, or little over one-third the native population of the island in 1840. 15 But these compete for the land with nearly one million English colonists, and in the limited area of the islands they will even- tually find no place of retreat before the relentless white ad- vance. To the Australians, on the other hand, much inferior to the Maoris, the larger area of their continent affords exten- 178 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA Contrast of large and small areas in bio-geo- graphy. sive deserts and steppes into which the natives have withdrawn and whither the whites do not care to follow. Hence mere area, robbed of every other favorable geographical circum- stance, has contributed to the survival of the 230,000 natives in Australia. Similarly the Arawaks were early wiped out on the island of Cuba and the Caribs on San Domingo and the smaller Antilles by the truculent methods of the Spanish conquerors, while both stocks survive on the continent of South America. Even the truculent methods of the Spanish conquerors could make little impression upon the relatively massive populations of Mexico and Peru, whose survival and latter-day recovery of independence can be ascribed largely though not solely to their ample territorial base. So the vast area of the United States and Canada has afforded a hinterland of asylum to the retreating Indians, whose mori- bund condition, especially in the United States, is betrayed by their scattered distribution in small, unfavorable localities. On the other hand, the vast extent of Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada, combined with the adverse climatic conditions of the region, will guarantee the northern Indians a longer survival. In Tierra del Fuego, the encroachments of sheep- farmers and gold-miners from Patagonia twenty years ago, by fencing off the land and killing off the wild guanaco, threatened the existence of this animal and of the Onas natives of the island. These, soon brought to bay in that natural enclosure, attacked the farmers, whose reprisals be- tween 1890 and 1900 reduced the number of the Onas from 2,000 to 800 souls. 16 The same law holds good in bio-geography : here, too, area gives strength and a small territorial foothold means weak- ness. The native flora and fauna of New Zealand seem involved in the same process of extinction as the native race. The Maoris themselves have observed this fact and applied the principle to their own obvious fate. They have seen hardy imported English grasses offering deadly competition to the indigenous vegetation ; the Norway rat, entering by European ships, extirpating the native variety; the Euro- pean house fly, purposely imported and distributed to destroy the noxious indigenous species. 17 The same unequal combat GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 179 between imported plants and animals, equipped by the fierce Iliads of continental areas, and the local flora and fauna has taken place on the little island of St. Helena, to the threat- ened destruction of the native forms. 18 The preponderant migration of animals from the northern to the southern hemisphere is attributed by Darwin to the greater extent of land in the north, whereby the northern types have existed in greater numbers and have been so per- fected through natural selection and competition, that they have surpassed the southern forms in dominating power and therefore have encroached successfully. 19 Also the races and nations of the northern continents have seriously invaded the southern land-masses and are still expanding. It is the largest continent, Eurasia, which has been the chief center of dispersal. The Temperate Zone of North America will always harbor Political a more powerful people than the corresponding zone of South America, because the latter continent begins to con- tract and tapers off to a point where the other at the northern Tropic begins to spread out. Therefore North America possesses more abundantly all the advantages accru- ing to a continent from a location in the Temperate Zone. The wide basis of the North Slavs in Russia and Siberia has given them a natural leadership in the whole Slav family, just as the broad unbroken area of ever expanding Prussia gave that state the ascendency in the German Empire over the geographically partitioned and politically dismembered surface of southern Germany. English domination of the United Kingdom is based not only upon race, location, geo- graphical features and resources, but also on the larger size of England. So in the United States, abolitionist states- men adopted the most effective means of fighting slavery when they limited its area by law, while permitting free states to go on multiplying in the new territory of the vast Northwest. In a peninsula political ascendency often falls to the broad base connecting it with the continent, because this part alone has the area to support a large population, and moreover commands a large hinterland, whence it continually draws 180 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA new and invigorating blood. The geographical basis of the Aryan and later the Mongol supremacy in India was the wick- zone of lowlands between the Indus and the Brahmaputra. [See map page 103.] The only ancient Greek state ever able to dominate the Balkan Peninsula was non-Hellenic Mace- donia, after it had extended its boundaries to the Euxine and the Adriatic. To-day a much larger area in this same penin- sular base harbors the widespread southern Slavs, who nu- merically and economically far outweigh Albanians and Greeks, and who could with ease achieve political domination over the small Turkish minority, were it not for the European fear of a Slavic Bosporus, and its union with Russia. The Cisalpine Gauls of the wide Po basin repeatedly threatened the existence of the smaller but more civilized Etruscan and Latin tribes. The latter, maturing their civilization under the concentrat- ing influences of a limited area, at last dominated the larger Celtic district to the north. But in the nineteenth century this district took the lead in the movement for a United Italy, and now exercises the strong influence in Italian affairs which belongs to it by reason of its superior area, location, and more vigorous race. [See map of Italy's population, Chap. XVI.] The broad territorial base of the Anglo-Saxon race, Slavs, Germans and Chinese promises a long ethnic life, whereas the narrow foothold of the Danes, Dutch, Greeks, and the Turks in Europe carries with it the persistent risk of conquest and absorption by a larger neighbor. Such a fate repeatedly threatens these people, but has thus far been warded off, now by the protection of an isolating environment, now by the diplomatic intervention of some not disinterested power. The scattered fragments of Osman stock in European Turkey, which constitute only about ten per cent, of the total popu- lation, and are almost lost in the surrounding mass of Slavs and Greeks, provide a poor guarantee for the duration of the race and their empire on European soil. On the other hand, the Osmani who are compactly spread over the whole interior of Asia Minor have a better prospect of national survival. Area and An important factor in the preservation of national con- atiire. sciousness and the spread of national influence is always a GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 181 national language and literature. This principle is recog- nized by the government of the Czar in its Russification of Finland, 20 Poland, and the German centers in the Baltic provinces, when it substitutes Russian for the local language in education, law courts and all public offices, and restricts the publication of local literature. The survival of a language and its literature is intimately connected with area and the population which that area can support. The extinction of small, weak peoples has its counterpart in the gradual elimi- nation of dialects and languages having restricted territorial sway, whose fate is foreshadowed by the unequal competition of their literatures with those of numerically stronger peo- ples. An author writing in a language like the Danish, intelligible to only a small public, can expect only small returns for his labor in either influence, fame, or fortune. The return may be so small that it is prohibitive. Hence we find the Danish Hans Christian Andersen and the Norwegian Ibsen writing in German, as do also many Scandinavia a scien- tists. Georg Brandes abandons his native Danish and seeks a larger public by making English the language of his books. The incentive to follow a literary .career, especially if it includes making a living, is relatively weak among a people of only two or three millions, but gains enormously among large and cultivated peoples, like the seventy million German- speaking folk of Europe, or the one hundred and thirty mil- lions of English speech scattered over the world. The common literature which represents the response to this incentive forms a bond of union among the various branches of these peoples, and may be eventually productive of political results. Growth has been the law of human societies since the birth Small geo- of man's gregarious instinct. It has manifested itself in g^P 1 " the formation of ever larger social groups, appropriating ever larger areas. It has registered itself geographically 80C i e ties. in the protrusion of ethnic boundaries, economically in more intensive utilization of the land, socially in increasing density of population, and politically in the formation of ever larger national territorial aggregates. The lowest stages of culture reveal small tribes, growing very slowly or at times not at all, disseminated over areas small in themselves but large for 182 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA Influence of small confined areas. the number of their inhabitants, hence sparsely populated. The size of these primitive holdings depends upon the natural food supply yielded by the region. They assume wide dimen- sions but support groups of only a few families on the chill rocky coasts of Tierra del Fuego or the sterile plains of central Australia; and they contract to smaller areas dotted with fairly populous villages in the fertile districts of the middle Congo or bordering the rich coast fishing grounds of southern Alaska and British Columbia. But always land is abundant, and is drawn upon in widening circles when the food supply becomes inadequate or precarious. 7 Where nature presents barriers to far-ranging food-quests, man is forced to advance from the natural to the artificial basis of subsistence; he leaves the chase for the sedentary life of agriculture. Extensive activities are replaced by in- tensive ones, wide dispersal of tribal energies by concentra- tion. The extensive forests and grassy plains of the Americas supported abundant animal life and therefore afforded condi- tions for the long survival of the hunting tribes; nature put no pressure upon man to coerce him to progress, except in the small mountain-walled valleys of Peru and Mexico, and in the restricted districts of isthmian Central America. Here game was soon exhausted. Agriculture became an increasing source of subsistence and was forced by limited area out of its migratory or essartage stage of development into the se- dentary. As fields become fixed in such enclosed areas, so do the cultivators. Here first population becomes relatively dense, and thereby necessitates more elaborate social and political organization in order to prevent inner friction. The geographically enclosed district has the further advantage that its inhabitants soon come to know it out to its boundaries, understand its possibilities, exploit to the utmost its resources, and because of the closeness of their relationship to it and to each other come to develop a con- scious national spirit. The population, since it cannot easily spread beyond the nature-set limits, increases in densi'v. The members of the compact society react constantly upon one another and exchange the elements of civilization. Thus the small territory is characterized by the early maturity of a GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 183 highly individualized civilization, which then, with inherent power of expansion, proceeds to overleap its narrow borders and conquer for itself a wide sphere of influence. Hand in hand with this process goes political concentration, which aids the subsequent expansion. Therefore islands, oases, slender coastal strips and mountain valleys repeatedly show us small peoples who, in their seclusion, have developed a tribal or national consciousness akin in its intensity to clan feeling. This national feeling is conspicuous in the English, Japanese, Swiss and Dutch, as it was in the ancient city-states of Greece. The accompanying civilization, once brought to maturity in its narrow breeding place, spreads under favor- able geographic conditions over a much larger space, which the accumulated race energy takes for its field of activity. The flower which thus early blooms may soon fade and decay ; nevertheless the geographically evolved national consciousness persists and retains a certain power of renewal. This has been demonstrated in the Italians and modern Greeks, in the Danes and the Icelanders. In the Jews it has resisted exile from their native land, complete political dissolution, and dispersal over the habitable world. Long and often as Italy had to submit to foreign dominion, the idea of the national unity of the peninsula was never lost. In vast unobstructed territories, on the other hand, the The pro- evil of wide, sparse dispersal is checked only by natural increase C8SS * of population and the impinging of one growing people upon another, which restricts the territory of either. When the boundary waste between the small scattered tribal groups has been occupied, encroachment from the side of the stronger follows; then comes war, incorporation of territory, amalga- mation of race and coalescence, or the extinction of the weaker. The larger people, commanding its larger area, expands numerically and territorially, and continues to throw out wider frontiers, till it meets insurmountable natural ob- stacles or the confines of a people strong as itself. After a pause, during which the existing area is outgrown and popu- lation begins to press harder upon the limits of subsistence, the weight of a nation is thrown against the barrier, be it physical or political. In consequence, the old boundaries are 184* GEOGRAPHICAL AREA enlarged, either by successful encroachment upon a neighbor, or, in case of defeat, by incorporation in the antagonist's territory. But even defeat brings participation in a larger geographic base, wider cooperation, a greater sum total of common national interests, and especially the protection of the larger social group. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State find compensation for the loss of independence by their incorporation in the British Empire, even if grad- ual absorption be the destiny of the Boer stock. Area Of adjacent areas equally advanced in civilization and and in density of population but of unequal size, the larger must growth. dominate because its people have the resistance and aggres- sive force inherent in the larger mass. This is the explanation of the absorption of so many colonies and conquerors by the native races, when no great cultural abyss or race an- tagonism separates the two. The long rule of the Scandi- navians in the Hebrides ended in their absorption by the local Gaelic stock, simply because their settlements were too small and the number of their women too few. The lowlands on the eastern coasts of Scotland accommodated larger bands of Norse, who even to-day can be distinguished from the neighboring Scotch of the Highlands ; but on the rugged western coast, where only small and widely separated deltas at the heads of the fiords offered a narrow foothold to the invaders, their scattered ethnic islands were soon inundated by the contiguous population. 21 The Teutonic elements, both English and Norwegian, which for centuries filtered into Ireland, have been swallowed up in the native Celtic stock, except where religious antagonisms served to keep the two apart. So the dominant Anglo-Saxon population of England was a solvent for the Norman French, and the densely packed humanity of China for their Manchu conquerors. On the other hand, extensive areas, like early North America and Australia, sparsely inhabited by small scattered groups who have only an attenuated connection with their soil and therefore only a feeble hold upon their land, cannot compete with small areas, if these have the dense and evenly distributed population which ensures a firm tenure of the GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 185 land. Small, geographically confined areas foster this com- pact and systematic occupation on the part of their inhabi- tants, since they put barriers in the way of precipitate and disintegrating expansion ; and this characteristic compensates in some degree and for a period at least for the weakness otherwise inherent in the narrow territorial base. Every race, people, and state has had the history of Historical progress from a small to a large area. All have been small ^ vaE in their youth. The bit of land covered by Roma Quadrata t j has given language, customs, laws, culture, and a faint strain areas, of Latin blood to nations now occupying half a million square miles of Europe. The Arab inundation, which flooded the vast domain of the Caliphs, traced back to that spring of ethnic and religious energy which welled up in the arid plain of Mecca and the Arabian oases. The world-wide maritime expansion of the English-speaking people had its starting point in the lowlands of the Elbe. The makers of empire in northern China were cradled in the small highland valley of the Wei River. The little principality of Moscow was the nucleus of the Russian Empire. Penetration into a people's remote past comes always upon some limited spot which has nurtured the young nation, and reveals the fact that territorial expansion is the incontestible feature of their history. This advance from small to large characterizes their political area, the scope of their trade relations, their spheres of activity, the size of their known world, and finally the sway of their religions. Every religion in its early stages of development bears the stamp of a narrow origin, traceable to the circumscribed habitat of the primitive social group, or back of that to the small circle of lands con- stituting the known world whence it sprang. First it is tribal, and makes a distinction between my God and thy God; but even when it has expanded to embody a universal system, it still retains vestigial forms of its narrow past. Jerusalem, Mecca and Rome remain the sacred goal of pilgrimages, while the vaster import of a monotheistic faith and the higher ethical teaching of the brotherhood of man have encircled the world. When religion, language and race have spread, in their wake comes the growing state. Everywhere the political area 186 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA Gradations in area and in develop- ment. tends gradually to embrace the whole linguistic area of which it forms a part, and finally the yet larger race area. Only the diplomacy of united Europe has availed to prevent France from absorbing French-speaking Belgium, or Russia from incorporating into her domain that vast Slav region extending from the Drave and Danube almost to the Gulf of Corinth, now parcelled out among seven different states, but bound to the Muscovite empire by ties of related speech, by race and religion. The detachment of the various Danubian princi- palities from the uncongenial dominion of the Turks, though a dismemberment of a large political territory and a seeming backward step, can be regarded only as a leisurely prelimin- ary for a new territorial alignment. History's movements are unhurried ; the backward step may prepare for the longer leap forward. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that the vigorous, reorganized German Empire will one day try to incorporate the Germanic areas found in Austria, Switzer- land and Holland. Throughout the life of any people, from its foetal period in some small locality to its well rounded adult era marked by the occupation and organization of a wide national terri- tory, gradations in area mark gradations of development. And this is true whether we consider the compass of their commercial exchanges, the scope of their maritime ventures, the extent of their linguistic area, the measure of their territorial ambitions, or the range of their intellectual inter- ests and human sympathies. From land to ethics, the rule holds good. Peoples in the lower stages of civilization have contracted spacial ideas, desire and need at a given time only a limited territory, though they may change that terri- tory often; they think in small linear terms, have a small horizon, a small circle of contact with others, a small range of influence, only tribal sympathies ; the}' have an exaggerated conception of their own size and importance, because their basis of comparison is fatally limited. With a mature, wide- spread people like the English or French, all this is different ; they have made the earth their own, so far as possible. Just because of this universal tendency towards the occupation of ever larger areas and the formation of vaster GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 187 political aggregates, in making a sociological or political estimate of different peoples, we should never lose sight of the fact that all racial and national characteristics which operate towards the absorption of more land and impel to political expansion are of fundamental value. A ship of state manned by such a crew has its sails set to catch the winds of the world. Territorial expansion is always preceded by an extension Prelimi- of the circle of influence which a people exerts through its nanea t( traders, its deep-sea fishermen, its picturesque marauders and more respectable missionaries, and earlier still by a widen- expans i n. ing of its mere geographical horizon through fortuitous or systematic exploration. The Northmen visited the coasts of Britain and France first as pirates, then as settlers. Norman and Breton fishermen were drawing in their nets on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland thirty years before Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence. Japanese fishing boats preceded Japanese colonists to the coasts of Yezo. Trading fleets were the fore- runners of the Greek colonies along the Black Sea and Medi- terranean, and of Phoenician settlements in North Africa, Sicily and Spain. It was in the wake of trapper and fur trader that English and American pioneer advanced across our continent to the Pacific; just as in French Canada Jesuit priest and voyageur opened the way for the settler. Re- ligious propaganda was yoked with greed of conquest in the campaigns of Cortez and Pizarro. Modern statesmen pushing a policy of expansion are alive to the diplomatic possibilities of missionaries endangered or their property destroyed. They find a still better asset to be realized on territorially in enterprising capitalists settled among a weaker people, by whom their property is threatened or overtaxed, or their trade interfered with. The British acquisition of Hongkong in 1842 followed a war with China to prevent the exclusion of the English opium trade from the Celestial Empire. The annexation of the Transvaal resulted from the expansion of English capitalists to the Rand mines, much as the advance of the United States flag to the Hawaiian Islands followed American sugar planters thither. American capital in the Caribbean states of South America has repeatedly 188 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA Signifi- cance of sphere of activity or influence. tried to embroil those countries with the United States gov- ernment; and its increasing presence in Cuba is undoubtedly ominous for the independence of the island, because with capital go men and influence. When the foreign investor is not a corporation but a government, the expanding commercial influence looks still more surely to tangible political results ; because such na- tional enterprises have at bottom a political motive, however much overlaid by an economic exterior. When the British government secured a working maj ority of the Suez Canal stock, it sealed the fate of Egypt to become ultimately a province of the British Empire. Russian railroads in Manchuria 'were the well-selected tool for the Russification and final annexation of the province. The weight of American national enterprise in the Panama Canal Zone sufficed to split off from the Colombian federation a peripheral state, whose detachment is obviously a preliminary for eventual incorporation into United States domain. The efforts of the German gov- ernment to secure from the Sultan of Turkey railroad con- cessions through Asia Minor for German capitalists has aroused jealousy in financial and political circles in St. Petersburg, and prompted a demand from the Russian Foreign Office upon Turkey for the privilege of constructing railroads through eastern Asia Minor. 22 Beyond the home of a people lies its sphere of influence or activities, which in the last analysis may be taken as a protest against the narrowness of the domestic habitat. It represents the larger area which the people wants and which in course of time it might advantageously occupy or annex. It embodies the effort to embrace more varied and generous natural conditions, whereby the struggle for subsistence may be made less hard. Finally, it is an expression of the law that for peoples and races the struggle for existence is at bottom a struggle for space. Geography sees various forms of the historical movement as the struggle for space in which humanity has forever been engaged. In this strug- gle the stronger peoples have absorbed ever larger portions of the earth's surface. Hence, through continual subjection to new conditions here or there and to a greater sum total of GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 189 various conditions, they gain in power by improved variation, as well as numerically by the enlargement of their geographic base. The Anglo-Saxon branch of the Teutonic stock has, by its phenomenal increase, overspread sections of whole continents, drawn from their varied soils nourishment for its finest efflorescence, and thereby has far out-grown the Germanic branch by which, at the start, it was overshadowed. .3,03 The fact that the British Empire comprises 28,615,000 square kilometers or exactly one-fifth of the total land area of the earth, and that the Russian Empire contains over one- seventh, are full of encouragement for Anglo-Saxon and Slav, but contain a warning to the other peoples of the world. The large area which misleads a primitive folk into exces- Nature of sive dispersion and the dissipation of their tribal powers, f offers to an advanced people, who in some circumscribed ^^ ^ habitat have learned the value of land, the freest conditions countries. for their development. A wide, unobstructed territory, occu- pied by a sparse population of wandering tribes capable of little resistance to conquest or encroachment, affords the most favorable conditions to an intruding superior race. Such conditions the Chinese found in Mongolia and Man- churia, the Russians in Siberia, and European colonists in the Americas, Australia and Africa. Almost unlimited space and undeveloped resources met their land hunger and their commercial ambition. Their numerical growth was rapid, both by the natural increase reflecting an abundant food supply, and by accessions from the home countries. Expan- sion advanced by strides. In contrast to this care-free, easy development in a new land, growth in old countries like Europe and the more civilized parts of Asia means a slow protrusion of the frontier, made at the cost of blood; it means either the absorption of the native people, because there are no unoccupied corners into which they can be driven, or the imposition upon them of an unwelcome rule exercised by alien officials. Witness the advance of the Russians into Poland and Finland, of the Germans into Poland and Alsace-Lorraine, of the Japanese into Korea, and of the English into crowded India. The rapid unfolding of the geographical horizon 190 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA Relation of ethnic to political expansion. in a young land communicates to an expanding people new springs of mobility, new motives for movement out and beyond the old confines, new goals holding out new and undreamt of benefits. Life becomes fresh, young, hope- ful. Old checks to natural increase of population are re- moved. Emigrant bands beat out new trails radiating from the old home. They go on individual initiative or state- directed enterprises; but no matter which, the manifold life in the far-away periphery reacts upon the center to vivify and rejuvenate it. The laws of the territorial growth of peoples and of states are in general the same. The main differences between the two lies in the fact that ethnic expansion, since it depends upon natural increase, is slow, steady, and among civilized peoples is subject to slight fluctuations; while the frontiers of a state, after a long period of permanence, can suddenly be advanced by conquest far beyond the ethnic boundaries, often, however, only to be as quickly lost again. Therefore the important law may be laid down, that the more closely the territorial growth of a state keeps pace with that of its people, and the more nearly the political area coincides with the ethnic, the greater is the strength and stability of the state. This is the explanation of the vigor and permanence of the early English colonies in America. The slow west- ward protrusion of their frontier of continuous settlement within the boundaries of the Allegheny Mountains formed a marked contrast to the wide sweep of French voyageur camp and lonely trading-station in the Canadian forests, and even more to the handful of priests and soldiers who for three centuries kept an unsteady hold upon the Spanish empire in the Western Hemisphere. The political advance of the United States across the continent from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, thence to the Rocky Mountains, and thence to the Pacific was always preceded by bands of enter- prising settlers, who planted themselves beyond the frontier and beckoned to the flag to follow. The great empires of antiquity were enlarged mechanically by conquest and an- nexation. They were mosaics, not growths. The cohesive power of a common ethnic bond was lacking; so was the GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 191 modern substitute for this to be found in close economic inter- dependence maintained by improved methods of communica- tion. Hence these empires soon broke up again along lines of old geographic and ethnic cleavage. For Rome, the cementing power of the Mediterranean and the fairly unified civilization which this enclosed sea had been evolving since the dawn of Cretan and Phanician trade, compensated in part for the lack of common speech and national ideals throughout the political domain. But the Empire proved in the end to be merely a mosaic, easily broken. The second point of difference between the expansion of Relation peoples and of states lies in their respective relation to the of people political frontier. This confines the state like a stockade, a fixing the territorial limits of its administrative functions ; K oun J arv but for the subjects of the state it is an imaginary line, powerless to check the range of their activities, except when a military or tariff war is going on. The state boundary, if it coincides with a strong natural barrier, may for decades or even centuries succeed in confining a growing people, if these, by intelligent economy, increase the productivity of the soil whose area they are unable to extend. Yet the time comes even for these when they must break through the bar- riers and secure more land, either by foreign conquest or colonization. The classic example of the confinement of a people within its political boundaries is the long isolation of Japan from 1624 to 1854. The pent-up forces there, accumulated, in a population which had doubled itself in the interval and which by hard schooling was made receptive to every improved economic method, manifest themselves in the insistent demand for more land which has permeated all the recent policy of Japan. But the history of Japan is exceptional. The rule is that the growing people slowly but continually overflow their political boundary, which then advances to cover the successive flood plains of the national inundation, or yet farther to anticipate the next rise. This has been the history of Germany in its progress eastward across the Elbe, the Oder, the Vistula and the Niemen. The dream of a greater empire embraces all the German-speaking people from Switzerland, Tyrol and Steiermark to those out- 192 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA lying groups in the Baltic provinces of Russia and the related offshoot in Holland. 23 [See map page 223.] Though political boundaries, especially where they coin- cide with natural barriers, may restrict the territorial growth of a people, on the other hand, political expansion is always a stimulus to racial expansion, because it opens up more land and makes the conditions of life easier for an increasing people, by relieving congestion in the older areas. More than this, it materially aids while guiding and focusing the out-going streams of population. Thus it keeps them con- centrated for the reinforcement of the nation in the form of colonies, and tends to reduce the political evil of indiscrim- inate emigration, by which the streams are dissipated and diverted to strengthen other nations. Witness the active internal colonization practiced by Germany in her Polish territory, 2 * by Russia in Siberia, in an effort to make the ethnic boundary hurry after and overtake the political frontier. Expansion Just as the development of a people and state is marked of civili- by advance from small to ever larger areas, so is that of a civilization. It may originate in a small district; but more mobile than humanity itself, it does not remain confined to one spot, but passes on from individual to individual and from people to people. Greece served only as a garden in which the flowers of Oriental and Egyptian civilization were temporarily transplanted. As soon as they were modified and adapted to their new conditions, their seed spread over all Europe. The narrow area of ancient Greece, which caused the early dissemination of its people over the Mediterranean basin, and thereby weakened the political force of the coun- try at home, was an important factor in the wide distribution of its culture. Commerce, colonization and war are vehicles of civilization, where favorable geographic conditions open the way for trade in the wake of the victorious army. The imposition of Roman dominion meant everywhere the gift of Roman civilization. The Crusaders brought back from Syria more than their scars and their trophies. Every Eu- ropean factory in China, every Hudson Bay Company post in the wilds of northern Canada, every Arab settlement in sav- GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 193 age Africa is surrounded by a sphere of trade; and this in turn is enclosed in a wider sphere of influence through which its civilization, though much diluted, has filtered. The higher the civilization, the wider the area which it masters. The manifold activities of a civilized people demand a large sphere of influence, and include, furthermore, improved means of communication which enable it to control such a sphere. Even a relatively low civilization may spread over a vast area if carried by a highly mobile people. Mohammedanism, which embodies a cultural system as well as a religion, found its vehicles of dispersal in the pastoral nomads occupying the arid land of northern Africa and western Asia, and thus spread from the Senegal River to Chinese Turkestan. It was carried by the maritime Arabs of Oman and Yemen to Malacca and Sumatra, where it was communicated to the sea- faring Malays. These island folk, who approximate the most highly civilized peoples in their nautical efficiency, distributed the meager elements of Mohammedan civilization over the Malay Archipelago. [See map of the Religions of the East- ern Hemisphere, in chapter XIV.] The larger the area which a civilized nation occupies, the Cultural more numerous are its points of contact with other peoples, advantages and the less likely is there to be a premature crystallization of _ & e its civilization from isolation. Extension of area on a large > area. scale means eventually extension of the seaboard and access to those multiform international relations which the ocean highway confers. The world wide expansion of the British Empire has given it at every outward step wider oceanic con- tact and eventually a cosmopolitan civilization. The same thing is true of the other great colonial empires of history, whether Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or French ; and even of the great continental empires, like Russia and the United States. The Russian advance across Siberia, like the American advance across the Rockies, meant access to the Pacific, and a modification of its civilization on those remote shores. A large area means varied vicinal locations and hence differentiation of civilization, at least along the 194- GEOGRAPHICAL AREA frontier. How rapidly the vivifying influences of this contact will penetrate into the bulk of the interior depends upon size, location as scattered or compact, and general geographic conditions like navigable rivers or mountains, which facilitate or bar intercourse with that interior. The Russian Empire has eleven different nations, speaking even more different languages, on its western and southern frontiers. Its long line of Asiatic contact will inevitably give to the European civilization transplanted hither in Russian colonies a new and perhaps not unfruitful development. The Siberian citi- zen of future centuries may compare favorably with his brother in Moscow. Japan, even while impressing its civiliza- tion upon the reluctant Koreans, will see itself modified by the contact and its culture differentiated by the transplant- ing ; but the content of Japanese civilization will be increased by every new variant thus formed. Politico- The larger the area brought under one political control, economic t ne J ess t ne handicap of internal friction and the greater itages. j^ s econom j c independence. Vast territory has enabled the United States to maintain with advantage a protective tariff, chiefly because the free trade within its own borders was ex- tensive. The natural law of the territorial growth of states and peoples means an extension of the areas in which peace and cooperation are preserved, a relative reduction of frontiers and of the military forces necessary to defend them, 25 diminution in the sum total of conflicts, and a wider removal of the border battle fields. In place of the continu- al warfare between petty tribes which prevailed in North America four hundred years ago, we have to-day the peaceful competition of the three great nations which have divided the continent among them. The political unification of the Mediterranean basin under the Roman Empire restricted wars to the remote land frontiers. The foreign wars of Russia, China, and the United States in the past century have been almost wholly confined to the outskirts of their big domains, merely scratching the rim and leaving the great interior sound and undisturbed. Russia's immense area is the mili- tary ally on which she can most surely count. The long road to Moscow converted Napoleon's victory into a defeat ; GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 195 and the resistless advance of the Japanese from Port Arthur to the Sungari River led only to a peace robbed of the chief fruits of victory. The numerous wars of the British Empire have been limited to this or that corner, and have scarcely affected the prosperity of the great remainder, so that their costs have been readily borne and their wounds rapidly healed. The territorial expansion of peoples and states is attended Political by an evolution of their spacial conceptions and ideals. area an ^ Primitive peoples, accustomed to dismemberment in small . tribal groups, bear all the marks of territorial contraction, horizon Their geographical horizon is usually fixed by the radius of a few days' march. Inter-tribal trade and intercourse reach only rudimentary development, under the prevailing condi- tions of mutual antagonism and isolation, and hence contri- bute little to the expansion of the horizon. Knowing only their little world, such primitive groups overestimate the size and importance of their own territory, and are incapable of controlling an extensive area. This is the testimony of all travellers who have observed native African states. Though the race or stock distribution may be wide, like that of the Athapascan and Algonquin Indians, and their war paths long, like the campaigns of the Iroquois against the Cherokees of the Tennessee River, yet the unit of tribal ter- ritory permanently occupied is never large. Small naturally defined regions, which take the lead in National historical development because they counteract the primitive estimates tendency towards excessive dispersal, are in danger of teach- ea * ing too well their lesson of concentration. In course of time geographic enclosure begins to betray its limitations. The extent of a people's territory influences their estimate of area per se, determines how far land shall be made the basis of their national purposes, fixes the territorial scale of their con- quests and their political expansion. This is a conspicuous psychological effect of a narrow local environment. A peo- ple embedded for centuries in a small district measure area with a short yardstick. The ancient Greeks devised a phil- osophic basis for the advantages of the small state, which is extolled in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. 26 Aristotle 196 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA Estimates of area in small maritime states. wanted it small enough "to be comprehended at one glance of the statesman's eye." Plato's ideal democracy, by rigid laws limiting the procreative period of women and men and providing for the death of children born out of this period or out of wedlock, restricted its free citizens to 5,040 heads of families, 2< all living within reach of the agora, ana all able to judge from personal knowledge of a candidate's fitness for office. This condition was possible only in dwarf commonwealths like the city-states of the Hellenic world. The failure of the Greeks to build up a political structure on a territorial scale commensurate with their cultural achieve- ments and with the wide sphere of their cultural influence can be ascribed chiefly to their inability to discard the con- tracted territorial ideas engendered by geographic and po- litical dismemberment. The little Judean plateau, which gave birth to a universal religion, clung with provincial bigotry to the narrow tribal creed and repudiated the larger faith of Christ, which found its appropriate field in Medi- terranean Europe. Maritime peoples of small geographic base have a charac- teristic method of expansion which reflects their low valuation of area. Their limited amount of arable soil necessitates reliance upon foreign sources of supply, which are secured by commerce. Hence they found trading stations or towns among alien peoples on distant coasts, selecting points like capes or inshore islets which can be easily defended and which at the same time command inland or maritime routes of trade. The prime geographic consideration is location, natural and vicinal. The area of the trading settlement is kept as small as possible to answer its immediate purpose, because it can be more easily defended. 2 Such were the colonies of the ancient Phoenicians and Greeks in the Medi- terranean, of the Medieval Arabs and the Portuguese on the east coast of Africa and in India. This method reached its ultimate expression in point of small area, seclusion, and local autonomy, perhaps, in the Hanse factories in Norway and Russia. 29 But all these widespread nuclei of expansion re- mained barren of permanent national result, because they were designed for a commercial end, and ignored the larger GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 197 national mission and surer economic base found in acquisition of territory. Hence they were short-lived, succumbing to attack or abandoned on the failure of local resources, which were ruthlessly exploited. That precocious development characteristic of small nat- Limitations urally defined areas shows its inherent weakness in the tend- * small * -;* i ency to accept the enclosed area as a nature-made standard e *"*oncGDtions of national territory. The earlier a state fixes its frontier without allowance for growth, the earlier comes the cessation of its development. Therefore the geographical nurseries of civilization were infected with germs of decay. Such was the history of Egypt, of Yemen, of Greece, Crete, and Phoenicia. These are the regions which, as Carl Ritter says, have given the whole fruit of their existence to the world for its future use, have conferred upon the world the trust which they once held, afterward to recede, as it were, from view. 30 They were great in the past, and now they belong to those immortal dead whose greatness has been , incor- porated in the world's life "the choir invisible" of the nations. The advance from a small, self-dependent community to Evolution interdependent relations with other peoples, then to ethnic * te ni- expansion or union of groups to form a state or empire is a ^ a . great turning point in any history. Thereby the clan or tribe discards the old paralyzing seclusion of the primitive society and the narrow habitat, and joins that march of ethnic, political and cultural progress which has covered larger and larger areas, and by increase of com- mon purpose has cemented together ever greater aggre- gates. Nothing is more significant in the history of the English in America than the rapid evolution of their spacial ideals, their abandonment of the small territorial conception brought with them from the mother country and embodied, for example, in that munificent land grant, fifty by a hun- dred miles in extent, of the first Virginia charter in 1606, and their progress to schemes of continental expansion. Every accession of territory to the Thirteen Colonies and to the Republic gave an impulse to growth. Expansion kept 198 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA pace with opportunity. Only in >in.ill and isolated New Eng- land did the contracted provincial point of view persist. It manifested itself in a narrow policy of concentration and curtailment, which acquiesced in the occlusion of the Mis- sissippi River to the Trans-Allegheny settlements by Spain in 1787, and which later opposed the purchase of the Louisiana territory 31 and the acquisition of the Philip- pines. All peoples who have achieved wide expansion have de- veloped in the process vast territorial policies. This is true of the pastoral nomads who in different epochs have inun- dated Europe, northern Africa and the peripheral lands of Asia, and of the great colonial nations who in a few decades have brought continents under their dominion. In nomadic hordes it is based upon habitual mobility and the possession of herds, which are at once incentive and means for extend- ing the geographical horizon : but it suffers from the evanes- cent character of nomadic political organization, and the tendency toward dismemberment bred in all pastoral life by dispersal over scattered grazing grounds. Hence the empires set up by nomad conquerors like the Saracens and Tartars soon fall apart. Colonial Among highly civilized agricultural and industrial peoples, cx P anslon * on the other hand, a vast territorial policy is at once cause and effect of national growth ; it is at once an innate tend- ency and a conscious purpose tenaciously followed. It makes use of trade and diplomacy, of scientific invention and technical improvement, to achieve its aims. It becomes an accepted mark of political vigor and an ideal even among peoples who have failed to enlarge their narrow base. The model of Russian expansion on the Pacific was quickly fol- lowed by awakened Japan, stirred out of her insular com- placence by the threat of Muscovite encroachment. Germany and Italy, each strengthened and enlarged as to national out- look by recent political unification, have elbowed their way into the crowded colonial field. The French, though not ex- pansionists as individuals, have an excellent capacity for collective action when directed by government. The officials whom Louis XIV sent to Canada in the seventeenth cen- GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 199 tury executed large schemes of empire reflecting the dilation of French frontiers in Europe. These ideals of expansion seem to have been communicated by the power of example, or the threat of danger in them, to the English colonists in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and later to Washington and Jefferson. The best type of colonial expansion is found among the The mind English-speaking people of America, Australia and South of colonials. Africa. Their spacial ideas are built on a big scale. Dis- tances do not daunt them. The man who could conceive a Cape-to-Cairo railroad, with all the schemes of territorial aggrandizement therein implied, had a mind that took con- tinents for its units of measure ; and he found a fitting mon- ument in a province of imperial proportions whereon was inscribed his name. Bryce tells us that in South Africa the social circle of "the best people" includes Pretoria, Johan- nesburg, Kimberley, Bloemfontein and Cape Town a social circle with a diameter of a thousand miles ! 32 The spirit of our western frontier, so long as there was a frontier, was the spirit of movement, of the conquest of space. It found its expression in the history of the Wilder- ness Road and the Oregon Trail. When the center of popu- lation in the United States still lingered on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, and the frontier of continuous settlement had not advanced beyond the present western boundary of Virginia and Pennsylvania, the spacious mind of Thomas Jef- ferson foresaw the Mississippi Valley as the inevitable and necessary possession of the American people, and looked upon the trade of the far-off Columbia River as a natural feeder of the Mississippi commerce. 33 Emerson's statement that the vast size of the United States is reflected in the big views of its people applies not only to political policy, which in the Monroe Doctrine for the first time in history has embraced a hemisphere ; nor is it confined to the big scale of their economic processes. Emerson had in mind rather their whole conception of national mission and national life, especially their legislation, 34 for which he antici- pated larger and more Catholic aims than obtain in Europe, hampered as it is by countless political and linguistic bound- 200 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA Colonials as road builders. aries, and barred thereby from any far-reaching unity of purpose and action. Canada, British South Africa, Australia and the United States, though widely separated, have in common a certain wide outlook upon life, a continental element in the national mind, bred in their people by their generous territories. The American recognizes his kinship of mind with these colonial Englishmen as something over and above mere kinship of race. It consists in their deep-seated common democracy, the democracy born in men who till fields and clear forests, not as plowmen and wood-cutters, but as makers of nations. It consists in identical interests and points of view in regard to identical problems growing out of the occupation and development of new and almost boundless territories. Race questions, paucity of labor, highways and railroads, immigra- tion, combinations of capital, excessive land holdings, and illegal appropriation of land on a large scale, are problems that meet them all. The monopolistic policy of the United States in regard to American soil as embodied in the Monroe Doctrine, and the expectation lurking in the mental back- ground of every American that his country may eventually embrace the northern continent, find their echo in Australia's plans for wider empire in the Pacific. The Commonwealth of Australia has succeeded in getting into its own hands the administration of British New Guinea (90,500 square miles.) It has also secured from the imperial government the unusual privilege of settling the relations between itself and the islands of the Pacific, because it regards the Pacific question as the one question of foreign policy in which its interests are profoundly involved. In the same way the British in South Africa, sparsely scattered though they are, feel an imperative need of further expansion, if their far-reaching schemes of commerce and empire are to be realized. The effort to annihilate space by improved means of com- munication has absorbed the best intellects and energies of expanding peoples. The ancient Roman, like the Incas of Peru, built highways over every part of the empire, undaunted by natural obstacles like the Alps and Andes. Modern ex- pansionists are railroad builders. Witness the long list of GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 201 strategic lines, constructed or subsidized by various gov- ernments during the past half century the Union Pacific, Central Pacific, Canadian Pacific, Trans-Siberian, Cairo- Khartoum, Cape Town-Zambesi, and now the proposed Trans- Saharan road, designed to unite the Mediterranean and Guinea colonies of French Africa. The equipment of the American roads, with their heavy rails, giant locomotives, and enormous freight cars, reveals adaptation to a commerce that covers long distances between strongly differentiated areas of production, and that reflects the vast enterprises of this continental country. The same story comes out in the ocean vessels which serve the trade of the Great Lakes, and in the acres of coal barges in a single fleet which are towed down the Ohio and Mississippi by one mammoth steel tug. The abundant natural resources awaiting development in Practical such big new countries give to the mind of the people an ^ ent * essentially practical bent. The rewards of labor are so great co om 8 ' that the stimulus to effort is irresistible. Economic ques- tions take precedence of all others, divide political parties, and consume a large portion of national legislation ; while purely political questions sink into the background. Civili- zation takes on a material stamp, becomes that "dollar civilization" which is the scorn of the placid, paralyzed Oriental or the old world European. The genius of colonials is essentially practical. Impatience of obstacles, short cuts aiming at quick returns, wastefulness of land, of forests, of fuel, of everything but labor, have long characterized Amer- ican activities. The problem of an inadequate labor supply at- tended the sudden accession of territory opened for Euro- pean occupation by the discovery of America, and caused a sud- den recrudescence of slavery, which as an industrial system had long been outgrown by Europe. It has also given im- mense stimulus to invention, and to the formation of labor unions, which in the newest colonial fields, like Australia and New Zealand, have dominated the government and given a Utopian stamp to legislation. Yet underlying and permeating this materialism is a youthful idealism. Transplanted to conditions of greater 202 GEOGRAPHICAL AREA opportunity, the race becomes rejuvenated, abandons out- grown customs and outworn standards, experiences an en- largement of vision and of hope, gathers courage and energy equal to its task, manages somehow to hitch its wagon to a star. NOTES TO CHAPTER VI 1. Chamberlain and Salisbury, Geology, Vol. Ill, pp. 483 485. New York, 1906. 2. Ibid., p. 137 and map p. 138. 3. Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. I, chap. IV, pp. 124-132; Vol. II, chap. XII, p. 134. New York, 1895. H. W. Conn, The Method of Evo- lution, p. 54. London and New York, 1900. 4. Ibid., pp. 194-197, 226-227, 239-242, 342-350. 5. Eatzel, Der Lebensraum, eine bio-geographische Studie, p. 51. Tubingen, 1901. 6. D. G. Brinton, Eaces and Peoples, pp. 271, 293-295. Philadelphia, 1901. 7. A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, pp. 57-61. London, 1894. 8. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 39, maps pp. 43, 78. New York, 1899. 9. Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XII, pp. 130-131. New York, 1895. 10. Richard Semon, In the Australian Bush, p. 211. London, 1899. 11. J. H. W. Stuckenburg, Sociology, Vol. I, p. 324. New York and London, 1903. 12. E. C. Semple, The Influences of Geographic Environment on the Lower St. Lawrence. Bulletin American Geographical Society, Vol. XXXVI, pp. 464-465. 1904. 13. E. Limedorfer, Finland's Plight, Forum, Vol. XXXII, pp. 85-93. 14. Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, p. 35. Washington, 1894. 15. A. R. Wallace, Australasia,' Vol. I, p. 454. London, 1893. 16. W. S. Barclay, Life in Terra del Fuego, The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 55, p. 97. January, 1904. 17. A. R. Wallace, Australasia, Vol. I, pp. 454-455. London, 1893. 18. Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XIII, p. 178. New York, 1895. 19. Ibid., Vol. II, chap. XII, p. 167-168. 20. Nesbit Bain, Finland and the Tsar, Fortnightly Review, Vol. 71, p. 735. E. Limedorfer, Finland's Plight, Forum, Vol. 32, pp. 85-93. 21. Archibald Geikie, The Scenery of Scotland, pp. 398-399. London, 1887. 22. Railways in Asia Minor, Littell's Living Age, Vol. 225, p. 196. 23. J. Ellis Barker, Modern Germany, pp. 38-66. London, 1907. 24. The Polish Danger in Prussia, Westminster Review, Vol. 155, p. 375. 25. Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, pp. 223-224. Leipzig, 1897. GEOGRAPHICAL AREA 203 26. Plato, Critias, 112. Aristotle, Politics, Book II, chap. VII; Book IV, chap. IV; Book VII, chap. IV. 27. Plato, De Legibus, Book V, chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11. 28. Eoscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, pp. 180-187. Stuttgart, 1899. 29. Blanqui, History of Political Economy, pp. 150-152. New York, 1880. 30. Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, p. 63. New York, 1865. 31. E. C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, pp. 42-43, 109, 110. Boston, 1903. 32. James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 405-6. New York, 1897. 33. P. L. Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. VIII. Letter to John Bacon, April 30, 1803 ; and Confidential Message to Congress on the Expedition to the Pacific, January 18, 1803. 34. Emerson, The Young American, in Nature Addresses and Lectures, pp. 369-371. Centenary Edition, Boston. CHAPTER VII The boundary zone in nature. GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES NATURE abhors fixed boundary lines and sudden transi- tions ; all her forces combine against them. Everywhere she keeps her borders melting, wavering, advancing, re- treating. If by some cataclysm sharp lines of demarcation are drawn, she straightway begins to blur them by creating intermediate forms, and thus establishes the boundary zone which characterizes the inanimate and animate world. A stratum of limestone or sandstone, when brought into contact with a glowing mass of igneous rock, undergoes various changes due to the penetrating heat of the volcanic outflow, so that its surface is metamorphosed as far as that heat reaches. The granite cliff slowly deposits at its base a rock- waste slope to soften the sudden transition from its perpen- dicular surface to the level plain at its feet. The line where a land-born river meets the sea tends to become a sandbar or a delta, created by the river-borne silt and the wash of the waves, a form intermediate between land and sea, bearing the stamp of each, fluid in its outlines, ever growing by the persistent accumulation of mud, though ever subject to inun- dation and destruction by the waters which made it. The alluvial coastal hems that edge all shallow seas are such border zones, reflecting in their flat, low surfaces the dead level of the ocean, in their composition the solid substance of the land ; but in the miniature waves imprinted on the sands and the billows of heaped-up boulders, the master workman of the deep leaves his mark. [See map page 243.] Under examination, even our familiar term coastline proves to be only an abstraction with no corresponding reality in nature. Everywhere, whether on margin of lake or gulf, the actual phenomenon is a coast zone, alternately covered and abandoned by the waters, varying in width from a few GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 205 inches to a few miles, according to the slope of the land, the range of the tide and the direction of the wind. It has one breadth at the minimum or neap tide, but increases often two or three fold at spring tide, when the distance between ebb and flood is at its maximum. At the mouth of Cook's Inlet on the southern Alaskan coast, where the range of tides is only eight feet, the zone is comparatively narrow, but widens rapidly towards the head of the inlet, where the tide rises twenty-three feet above the ebb line, and even to sixty- five feet under the influence of a heavy southwest storm. On flat coasts we are familiar with the wide frontier of salt marshes, that witness the border warfare of land and sea, alternate invasion and retreat. In low-shored estuaries like those of northern Brittany and northwestern Alaska, this amphibian girdle of the land expands to a width of four miles, while on precipitous coasts of tideless sea basins it contracts to a few inches. Hence this boundary zone changes with every impulse of the mobile sea and with every varying configuration of the shore. Movement and external conditions are the factors in its creation. They make some- thing that is only partially akin to the two contiguous forms. Here on their outer margins land and ocean compromise their physical differences, and this by a law which runs through animate and inanimate nature. Wherever one body moves in constant contact with another, it is subjected to modi- fying influences which differentiate its periphery from its in- terior, lend it a transitional character, make of it a penumbra between light and shadow. The modifying process goes on persistently with varying force, and creates a shifting, chang- ing border zone which, from its nature, cannot be delimited. For convenience' sake, we adopt the abstraction of a bound- ary line; but the reality behind this abstraction is the im- portant thing in anthropo-geography. All so-called boundary lines with which geography has to Gradations do have this same character, coastlines, river margins, ice . . . boundary or snow lines, limits of vegetation, boundaries of races or religions or civilizations, frontiers of states. They are all the same, stamped by the eternal flux of nature. Beyond the solid ice-pack which surrounds the North Pole is a wide 206 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES Oscillating boundaries of the habitable girdle of almost unbroken drift ice, and beyond this is an irregular concentric zone of scattered icebergs which varies in breadth with season, wind and local current ; a persistent de- crease in continuity from solid pack to open sea. The line of perpetual snow on high mountains advances or retreats from season to season, from year to year; it drops low on chilly northern slopes and recedes to higher altitudes on a southern exposure; sends down long icy tongues in dark gorges, and leaves outlying patches of old snow in shaded spots or be- neath a covering of rock waste far below the margin of the snow fields. In the struggle for existence in the vegetable world, the tree line pushes as far up the mountain as conditions of climate and soil will permit. Then comes a season of fiercer storms, intenser cold and invading ice upon the peaks. Havoc is wrought, and the forest drops back across a zone of border warfare for war belongs to borders leaving behind it here and there a dwarfed pine or gnarled and twisted juniper which has survived the onslaught of the enemy. Now these are stragglers in the retreat, but are destined later in milder years to serve as outposts in the advance of the forest to recover its lost ground. Here we have a border scene which is typical in nature the belt of unbroken forest, growing thinner and more stunted toward its upper edge, succeeded by a zone of scattered trees, which may form a cluster perhaps in some sheltered gulch where soil has col- lected and north winds are excluded, and higher still the whitened skeleton of a tree to show how far the forest once invaded the domain of the waste. The habitable area of the earth everywhere shows its bound- aries to be peripheral zones of varying width, now occupied and now deserted, protruding or receding according to ex- ternal conditions of climate and soil, and subject to seasonal change. The distribution of human life becomes sparser from the temperate regions toward the Arctic Circle, fore- shadowing the unpeopled wastes of the ice-fields beyond. The outward movement from the Tropics poleward halts where life conditions disappear, and there finds its boundary ; but as life conditions advance or retreat with the seasons, so does that GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 207 boundary. On the west coast of Greenland the Eskimo vil- lage of Etah, at about the seventy-eighth parallel, marks the northern limit of permanent or winter settlement ; but in sum- mer the Eskimo, in his kayak, follows the musk-ox and seal much farther north and there leaves his igloo to testify to the wide range of his poleward migration. Numerous relics of the Eskimo and their summer encampments have been found along Lady Franklin Bay in northern Grinnell Land (81 50' N. L.), but in the interior, on the outlet streams of Lake Hazen, explorers have discovered remains of habita- tions which had evidently, in previous ages, been perma- nently occupied. 1 The Murman Coast of the Kola Peninsula has in summer a large population of Russian fishermen and forty or more fishing stations : but when the catch is over at the end of August, and the Arctic winter approaches, the stations are closed, and the three thousand fishermen return to their permanent homes on the shores of the White Sea. 1 Farther east along this polar fringe of Russia, the little vil- lage of Charbarova, located on the Jugor Strait, is in- habited in summer by a number of Samoyedes, who pasture their reindeer over on Vaygats Island, and by some Rus- sians and Finns, who come from the White Sea towns to trade with the Samoyedes and incidentally to hunt and fish. But in the fall, when a new ice bridge across the Strait releases the reindeer from their enclosed pasture on the island, the Samo- yedes withdraw southward, and the merchants with their wares to Archangel and other points. This has gone on for centuries. 3 On the Briochov Islands at the head of the Yenisei estuary Nordenskiold found a small group of houses which formed a summer fishing post in 1875, but which was deserted by the end of August. 4 An altitude of about five thousand feet marks the limit of Altitude village life in the Alps; but during the three warm months of the year, the summer pastures at eight thousand feet or more are alive with herds and their keepers. The boundary line of human life moves up the mountains in the wake of spring and later hurries down again before the advance of winter. The Himalayan and Karakorum ranges show whole villages of temporary occupation, like the summer trading 208 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES "Wallace's Line" a typical boundary zone. Boundaries as limits of move- ments or expansion. town of Gartok at 15,000 feet on the caravan route from Leh to Lhassa, or Shahidula (3,285 meters or 10,925 feet) on the road between Leh and Yarkand ; s but the boundary of permanent habitation lies several thousand feet below. Comparable to these are the big hotels that serve summer stage-coach travel over the Alps and Rockies, but which are deserted when the first snow closes the passes. Here a zone of altitude, as in the polar regions a zone of latitude, marks the limits of the habitable area. The distribution of animals and races shows the limit of their movements or expansion. Any boundary defining the limits of such movements can not from its nature be fixed, and hence can not be a line. It is always a zone. Yet "Wallace's Line," dividing the Oriental from the Australian zoological realm, and running through Macassar Strait southward between Bali and Lombok, is a generally accepted dictum. The details of Wallace's investigation, however, reveal the fact that this boundary is not a line, but a zone of considerable and variable width, enclosing the line on either side with a marginal belt of mixed character. Though Celebes, lying to the east of Macassar Strait, is included in the Australian realm, it has lost so large a proportion of Australian types of animals, and contains so many Oriental types from the west, that Wallace finds it almost impossible to decide on which side of the line it belongs. 6 The Oriental admixture extends yet farther east over the Moluccas and Timor. Birds of Javan or Oriental origin, to the extent of thirty genera, have spread eastward well across Wallace's Line ; some of these stop short at Flores, and some reach even to Timor, 1 while Australian cockatoos, in turn, have been seen on the west coast of Bali but not in Java. Heilprin avoids the unscientific term line, because he finds his zoological realms divided by "transition regions," which are inter- mediate in animal types as they are in geographical location. 8 Wallace notes a similar "debatable land" in the Rajputana Desert east of the Indus, which is the border district between the Oriental and Ethiopian realms 9 Such boundaries mark the limits of that movement which is common to all animate things. Every living form spreads ft :: GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 209 until it meets natural conditions in which it can no longer survive, or until it is checked by the opposing expansion of some competing form. If there is a change either in the life conditions or in the strength of the competing forms, the boundary shifts. In the propitious climate of the Genial Period, plants and animals lived nearer to the North Pole than at present; then they fell back before the advance of the ice sheet. The restless surface of the ocean denies to man a dwelling place ; every century, however, the Dutch are pushing forward their northern boundary by reclamation of land from the sea ; but repeatedly they have had to drop back for a time when the water has again overwhelmed their hand-made territory. The boundaries of race and state which are subjected to Peoples greatest fluctuations are those determined by the resistance a8 of other peoples. The westward sweep of the Slavs prior to ! the eighth century carried them beyond the Elbe into contact with the Germans ; but as these increased in numbers, outgrew their narrow territories and inaugurated a counter-movement eastward, the Slavs began falling back to the Oder, to the Vistula, and finally to the Niemen. Though the Mohawk Val- ley opened an easy avenue of expansion westward for the early colonists of New York, the advance of settlements up this valley for several decades went on at only a snail's pace, because of the compact body of Iroquois tribes holding this territory. In the unoccupied land farther south between the Cumberland and Ohio rivers the frontier went forward with leaps and bounds, pushed on by the expanding power of the young Republic. [See map page 156.] Anything which increases the expanding force of a people the establishment of a more satisfactory government by which the national consciousness is developed, as in the Amer- ican and French revolutions, the prosecution of a successful war by which popular energies are released from an old restraint, mere increase of population, or an impulse com- municated by some hostile and irresistible force behind all are registered in an advance of the boundary of the people in question and a corresponding retrusion of their neighbor's frontier. 210 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES Boundary zone as index of growth or decline. Breadth of the boundary zone. The border district is the periphery of the growing or declining race or state. It runs the more irregularly, the greater are the variations in the external conditions as rep- resented by climate, soil, barriers, and natural openings, ac- cording as these facilitate or obstruct advance. When it is contiguous with the border of another state or race, the two form a zone in which ascendency from one side or the other is being established. The boundary fluctuates, for equilibrium of the contending forces is established rarely and for only short periods. The more aggressive people throws out across this debatable zone, along the lines of least resis- tance or greatest attraction, long streamers of occupation ; so that the frontier takes on the form of a fringe of settle- ment, whose interstices are occupied by a corresponding fringe of the displaced people. Such was its aspect in early colonial America, where population spread up every fertile river valley across a zone of Indian land ; and such it is in northern Russia to-day, where long narrow Slav bands run out from the area of continuous Slav settlement across a wide belt of Mongoloid territory to the shores of the White Sea and Arctic Ocean. 10 [See maps pages 103 and 225.] The border zone is further broadened by the formation of ethnic islands beyond the base line of continuous settlement, which then advances more or less rapidly, if expansion is un- checked, till it coalesces with these outposts, just as the forest line on the mountains may reach, under advantageous conditions, its farthest outlying tree. Such ethnic peninsulas and islands we see in the early western frontiers of the United States from 1790 to 1840, when that frontier was daily mov- ing westward. 11 [Sec map page 156.] The breadth of the frontier zone is indicative of the activ- ity of growth on the one side and the corresponding decline on the other, because extensive encroachment in the same de- gree disintegrates the territory of the neighbor at whose cost such encroachment is made. A straight, narrow race bound- ary, especially if it is nearly coincident with a political boundary, points to an equilibrium of forces which means, for the time being at least, a cessation of growth. Such bound- aries are found in old, thickly populated countries, while the ro GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES wide, ragged border zone belongs to new, and especially to colonial peoples. In the oldest and most densely populated seats of the Germans, where they are found in the Rhine Valley, the boundaries of race and empire are straight and simple; but the younger, eastern border, which for centuries has been steadily advancing at the cost of the unequally matched Slavs, has the ragged outline and sparse population of a true colonial frontier. Between two peoples who have had a long period of growth behind them, the oscillations of the boundary decrease in amplitude, as it were, and finally approach a state of rest. Each people tends to fill out its area evenly ; every advance in civilization, every increase of population, increases the stability of their tenure, and hence the equilibrium of the pressure upon the boundary. There- fore, in such countries, racial, linguistic and cultural bound- aries tend to become simpler and straighter. The growth is more apparent, or, in other words, the border zone is widest and most irregular, where a superior people intrudes upon the 'territory of an inferior race. Such ZQne ^ was the broad zone of thinly scattered farms and villages active ex- amid a prevailing wilderness and hostile Indian tribes pansion. which, in 1810 and 1820, surrounded our Trans- Allegheny area of continuous settlement in a one to two hundred mile wide girdle. Such has been the wide, mobile frontier of the Russian advance in Siberia and until recently in Manchuria, which aimed to include within a dotted line of widely sep- arated railway-guard stations, Cossack barracks, and penal colonies, the vast territory which later generations were fully to occupy. Similar, too, is the frontier of the Dutch and English settlements in South Africa, which has been pushed forward into the Kaffir country a broad belt of scattered cattle ranches and isolated mining hives, dropped down amid Kaffir hunting and grazing lands. Broader still was that shadowy belt of American occupation which for four decades immediately succeeding the purchase of Louisi- ana stretched in the form of isolated fur-stations, lonely trappers' camps, and shifting traders' rendezvous from the Mississippi to the western slope of the Rockies and the northern watershed of the Missouri, where it met the corre- GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES Economic factors in expanding frontiers. spending nebulous outskirts of the far-away Canadian state on the St. Lawrence River. The same process with the same geographical character has been going on in the Sahara, as the French since 1890 have been expanding southward from the foot of the Atlas Moun- tains in Algeria toward Timbuctoo at the cost of the nomad Tuaregs. Territory is first subdued and administered by the military till it is fully pacified. Then it is handed over to the civil government. Hence the advancing frontier consists of a military zone of administration, with a civil zone behind it, and a weaker wavering zone of exploration and scout work before it. 12 Lord Curzon in his Romanes lecture describes the northwest frontier of India as just such a three-ply border. The untouched resources of such new countries tempt to the widespread superficial exploitation, which finds its geo- graphical expression in a broad, dilating frontier. Here the man-dust which is to form the future political planet is thinly disseminated, swept outward by a centrifugal force. Furthermore, the absence of natural barriers which might block this movement, the presence of open plains and river highways to facilitate it, and the predominance of harsh con- ditions of climate or soil rendering necessary a savage, ex- tensive exploitation of the slender resources, often combine still further to widen the frontier zone. This was the case in French Canada and till recent decades in Siberia, where intense cold and abundant river highways stimulated the fur trade to the practical exclusion of all other activities, and substituted for the closely grouped, sedentary farmers with their growing families the wide-ranging trader with his Indian or Tunguse wife and his half-breed offspring. Under harsh climatic conditions, the fur trade alone afforded those large profits which every infant colony must command in order to survive; and the fur trade meant a wide frontier zone of scattered posts amid a prevailing wilderness. The French in particular, by the possession of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers, the greatest systems in America, were lured into the danger of excessive expansion, attenuated their ethnic element, and failed to raise the economic status of their wide border district, which could therefore offer only GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 213 slight resistance to the spread of solid English settlement. 13 Yet more recently, the chief weakness of the Russians in Siberia and Manchuria apart from the corruption of the national government was the weakness of a too remote and too sparsely populated frontier, and of a people whose inner development had not kept pace with their rate of expansion. Wasteful exploitation of a big territory is easier than the Value of economical development of a small district. This is one line barrier of least resistance which civilized man as well as savage boundanes instinctively follows, and which explains the tendency to- ward excessive expansion characteristic of all primitive and nascent peoples. For such peoples natural barriers which set bounds to this expansion are of vastly greater impor- tance than they are for mature or fully developed peoples. The reason is this : the boundary is only the expression of the outward movement or growth, which is nourished from the same stock of race energy as is the inner development. Either carried to an excess weakens or retards the other. If population begins to press upon the limits of subsistence, the acquisition of a new bit of territory obviates the necessity of applying more work and more intelligence to the old area, to make it yield subsistence for the growing number of mouths ; the stimulus to adopt better economic methods is lost. Therefore, natural boundaries drawn by mountain, sea and desert, serving as barriers to the easy appropria- tion of new territory, have for such peoples a far deeper significance than the mere determination of their political frontiers by physical features, or the benefit of protection. The land with the most effective geographical boundaries is a naturally defined region like Korea, Japan, China, Egypt, Italy, Spain, France or Great Britain a land char- acterized not only by exclusion from without through its encircling barriers, but also by the inclusion within itself of a certain compact group of geographic conditions, to whose combined influences the inhabitants are subjected and from which they cannot readily escape. This aspect is far more important than the mere protection which such boundaries afford. They are not absolutely necessary for the develop- ment of a people, but they give it an early start, accelerate 214 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES the process, and bring the people to an early maturity ; they stimulate the exploitation of all the local geographic advan- tages and resources, the formation of a vivid tribal or na- tional consciousness and purpose, and concentrate the national energies when the people is ready to overleap the old barriers. The early development of island and peninsula peoples and their attainment of a finished ethnic and political character are commonplaces of history. The stories of Egypt, Crete and Greece, of Great Britain and Japan, illus- trate the stimulus to maturity which emanates from such confining boundaries. The wall of the Appalachians nar- rowed the westward horizon of the early English colonies in America, guarded them against the excessive expansion which was undermining the French dominion in the interior of the continent, set a most wholesome limit to their aims, and thereby intensified their utilization of the narrow land between mountains and sea. France, with its limits of growth indi- cated by the Mediterranean, Pyrenees, Atlantic, Channel, Vosges, Jura and Western Alps, found its period of adoles- cence shortened and, like Great Britain, early reached its maturity. Nature itself set the goal of its territorial expan- sion, and by crystallizing the political ideal of the people, made that goal easier to reach, just as the dream of "United Italy" realized in 1870 had boon prefigured in contours drawn by Alpine range and Mediterranean shore-line. The sea The area which a race or people occupies is the resultant as the o f the expansive force within and the obstacles without, either 10 " e physical or human. Insurmountable physical obstacles are met where all life conditions disappear, as on the borders of the habitable world, where man is barred from the unpeopled wastes of polar ice-fields and unsustaining oceans. The frozen rim of arctic lands, the coastline of the continents, the outermost arable strip on the confines of the desert, the bar- ren or ice-capped ridge of high mountain range, are all such natural boundaries which set more or less effective limits to the movement of peoples and the territorial growth of states. The sea is the only absolute boundary, because it alone blocks the continuous, unbroken expansion of a people. When the Saxons of the lower Elbe spread to the island of GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 215 Britain, a zone of unpeopled sea separated their new settle- ments from their native villages on the mainland. Even the most pronounced land barriers, like the Himalayas and Hindu Kush, have their passways and favored spots for short summer habitation, where the people from the opposite slopes meet and mingle for a season. Sandy wastes are hospitable at times. When the spring rains on the mountains of Abys- sinia start a wave of moisture lapping over the edges of the Nubian desert, it is immediately followed by a tide of Arabs with their camels and herds, who make a wide zone of tem- porary occupation spread over the newly created grassland, but who retire in a few weeks before the desiccating heat of summer. 14 Nevertheless, all natural features of the earth's surface Natural which serve to check, retard or weaken the expansion of boundanes peoples, and therefore hold them apart, tend to become ^ e thnic racial or political boundaries ; and all present a zone-like g^^ political character. The wide ice-field of the Scandinavian Alps was boundaries an unpeopled waste long before the political boundary was drawn along it. "It has not in reality been a definite natural line that has divided Norway from her neighbour on the east ; it has been a band of desert land, up to hundreds of miles in width. So utterly desolate and apart from the area of con- tinuous habitation has this been, that the greater part of it, the district north of Trondhjem, was looked upon even as recently as the last century as a common district. Only nomadic Lapps wandered about in it, sometimes taxed by all three countries. A parcelling out of this desert common dis- trict was not made toward Russia until 1826. Toward Swe- den it was made in 1751. J}1 In former centuries the Bour- tanger Moor west of the River Ems used to be a natural desert borderland separating East and West Friesland, despite the similarity of race, speech and country on either side of it. It undoubtedly contributed to the division of Germany and the Netherlands along the present frontier line, which has been drawn the length of this moor for a hundred kilometers. 16 Primitive Any geographical feature which, like this, presents a prac- waste tically uninhabitable area, forms a scientific boundary, not boundaries. 816 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES only because it holds apart the two neighboring peoples and thereby reduces the contact and friction which might be provocative of hostilities, but also because it lends protection against attack. This motive, as also the zone character of all boundaries, comes out conspicuously in the artificial bor- der wastes surrounding primitive tribes and states in the lower status of civilization. The early German tribes de- populated their borders in a wide girdle, and in this wilder- ness permitted no neighbors to reside. The width of this zone indicated the valor and glory of the state, but was also valued as a means of protection against unexpected attack. 1 ' Cffisar learned that between the Suevi and Cherusci tribes dwell- ing near the Rhine "silvam essc ibi, infinita magnitudine quae appelletur Baeenis; hanc longe introrsus pertinere et pro nativo muro object am Cheruscos ab Siieris Suerosque ab Cheruscis injuriis incur sionibusque prohiberc" 1 The same device appears among the Huns. When Attila was pressing upon the frontier of the Eastern Empire in 448 A. D., his envoys sent to Constantinople demanded that the Romans should not cultivate a belt of territory, a hundred miles wide and three hundred miles long, south of the Danube, but main- tain this as a March. 19 When King Alfonso I. (751-764 A. D.) of mountain Asturias began the reconquest of Spain from the Saracens, he adopted the same method of holding the foe at arm's length. He seized Old Castile as far as the River Duoro, but the rest of the province south of that stream he converted into a waste boundary by transporting the Christians thence to the north side, and driving the Mo- hammedans yet farther southward. 20 Similarly Xenophon found that the Armenian side of the River Kentrites, which formed the boundary between the Armenian plains and the highlands of Karduchia, was unpeopled and destitute of vil- lages for a breadth of fifteen miles, from fear of the maraud- ing Kurds. 21 In the eastern Sudan, especially in that wide territory along the Nile-Congo watershed occupied by the Zandeh, Junker found the frontier wilderness a regular in- stitution owing to the exposure of the border districts in the perennial intertribal feuds. 22 The same testimony comes from Earth, 23 Boyd Alexander, 24 Speke, 25 and other explorers GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES in the Sudan and the neighboring parts of equatorial Africa. The vast and fertile region defined by the Ohio and Ten- Border nessee rivers, lay as a debatable border between the Algonquin wastes Indians of the north and the Appalachians of the south. Both claimed it, both used it for hunting, but neither dared dwell therein. 26 Similarly the Cherokees had no definite understanding with their savage neighbors as to the limits of their respective territories The effectiveness of their claim to any particular tract of country usually diminished with every increase of its distance from their villages. The con- sequence was that a considerable strip of territory between the settlements of two tribes, Cherokees and Creeks for in- stance, though claimed by both, was practically considered neutral ground and the common hunting ground of both. 27 The Creeks, whose most western villages from 1771 to 1798 were located along the Coosa and upper Alabama rivers, 28 were separated by 300 miles of wilderness from the Chicka- saws to the northwest, and by a 150-mile zone from the Choctaws. The most northern Choctaw towns, in turn, lay 160 miles to the south of the Chickasaw nation, whose com- pact settlements were located on the watershed between the western sources of the Tombigby and the head stream of the Yazoo. 29 The wide intervening zone of forest and canebrake was hunted upon by both nations. 30 Sometimes the border is preserved as a wilderness by for- mal agreement. A classic example of this case is found in the belt of untenanted land, fifty to ninety kilometers wide, which China and Korea once maintained as their boundary. No settler from either side was allowed to enter, and all travel across the border had to use a single passway, where three times annually a market was held. 31 On the Russo- Mongolian border south of Lake Baikal, the town of Kiakhta, which was established in 1688 as an entrepot of trade between the two countries, is occupied in its northern half by Russian factories and in its southern by the Mongolian-Chinese quar- ters, while between the two is a neutral space devoted to com- 3, Alien in- merce. trusions These border wastes do not always remain empty, however, - mto even when their integrity is respected by the two neighbors wastes. 218 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES Politico- economic significance of the waste boundary. whom they serve to divide ; alien races often intrude in- to their unoccupied reaches. The boundary wilderness between the Sudanese states of Wadai and Dar Fur harbors several semi-independent states whose insignificance is a guar- antee of their safety from conquest. 33 Similarly in the wide border district between the Creeks on the east and the Choc- taws on the west were found typical small, detached tribes the Chatots and Thomez of forty huts each on the Mobile River, the Tensas tribe with a hundred huts on the Tensas River, and the Mobilians near the confluence of the Tom- bigby and Alabama. 34 Along the desolate highland sepa- rating Norway and Sweden the nomadic Lapps, with their reindeer herds, have penetrated southward to 62 North Latitude, reinforcing the natural barrier by another barrier of alien race. From this point southward, the coniferous forests begin and continue the border waste in the form of a zone some sixty miles wide; this was unoccupied till about 1600, when into it slowly filtered an immigration of Finns, whose descendants to-day constitute an important part of the still thin population along the frontier to the heights back of Christiania. Only thirty miles from* the coast does the border zone between Norway and Sweden, peopled chiefly by intruding foreign stocks, Lapps and Finns, contract and finally merge into the denser Scandinavian settlements. 35 Where the border waste offers favorable conditions of life and the intruding race has reached a higher status of civili- zation, it multiplies in this unpeopled tract and soon spreads at the cost of its less advanced neighbors. The old No Man's Land between the Ohio and Tennessee was a line of least resistance for the expanding Colonies, who here poured in a tide of settlement between the northern and southern Indians, just as later other pioneers filtered into the vague border territory of weak tenure between the Choctaws and Creeks, and there on the Tombigby, Mobile and Tensas rivers, formed the nucleus of the State of Alabama. 36 This untenanted hem of territory surrounding so many savage and barbarous peoples reflects their superficial and unsystematic utilization of their soil, by reason of which the importance of the land itself and the proportion of popula- GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 219 tion to area are greatly reduced. It is a part of that un- economic and extravagant use of the land, that appropria- tion of wide territories by small tribal groups, which charac- terizes the lower stages of civilization, as opposed to the exploitation of every square foot for the support of a teem- ing humanity, which marks the most advanced states. Each stage puts its own valuation upon the land according to the return from it which each expects to get. The low valuation is expressed in the border wilderness, by which a third or even a half of the whole area is wasted; and also in the readiness with which savages often sell their best territory for a song. For the same reason they leave their boundaries undefined ; a mile nearer or farther, what does it matter? Moreover, their fitful or nomadic occupation of the land leads to oscil- lations of the frontiers with every attack from without and every variation of the tribal strength within. Their unstable states rarely last long enough in a given form or size to develop fixed boundaries ; hence, the vagueness as to the extent of tribal domains among all savage peoples, and the conflicting land claims which are the abiding source of war. Owing to these overlapping boundaries border districts claimed but not occupied the American colonists met with difficulties in their purchase of land from the Indians, often paying twice for the same strip. Even civilized peoples may adopt a waste boundary where Common the motive for protection is peculiarly strong, as in the half- boundary mile neutral zone of lowland which ties the rock of Gibraltar to Spain. On a sparsely populated frontier, where the abundance of land reduces its value, they may throw the boundary into the form of a common district, as in the vast, disputed Oregon country, accepted provisionally as a dis- trict of joint occupancy between the United States and Canada from 1818 to 1846, or that wide highland border which Norway so long shared with Russia and Sweden. In South America, where land is abundant and population sparse, this common boundary belt is not rare. It suggests a device giving that leeway for expansion desired by all growing states. By the treaty of 1866, the frontier between Chile and Bolivia crossed the Atacama desert at 24 220 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES South Latitude; but the zone between 23 and 25 was left under the common jurisdiction of the two states, for ex- ploitation of the guano deposits and mineral wealth. 37 A common border district on a much larger scale is found between Brazil and the eastern frontier of French Guiana. It includes a belt 185 miles (300 kilometers) wide between the Oyapok and Arawary rivers, and is left as a neutral district till its fate is decided by arbitration. 38 All these instances are only temporary phases in the evolution of a political frontier from wide, neutral border to the mathe- matically determined boundary line required by modern civ- ilized states. Tariff free Even when the boundary line has been surveyed and the zones. boundary pillars set up, the frontier is prone to assert its old zonal nature, simply because it marks the limits of human movements. Rarely, for instance, does a customs boundary coincide with a political frontier, even in the most advanced states of Europe, except on the coasts. The student of Baedecker finds a gap of several miles on the same railroad between the customs frontier of Germany and France, or France and Italy. Where the border district is formed by a high and rugged mountain range, the custom houses re- cede farther and farther from the common political line upon the ridge, and drop down the slope to convenient points, leaving between them a wide neutral tariff zone, like that in Haute Savoie along the massive Mont Blanc Range between France and Italy. Allied to this phase, yet differing from it, is the "Zona Libre" or Free Zone, 12 miles broad and 1,833 miles long, which forms the northern hem of Mexico from the Gulf to the Pacific. Here foreign goods pay only 18 1-2 per cent., formerly only 2 1-2 per cent., of the usual federal duties. Goods going on into the interior pay the rest of the tariff at the inner margin of the Zone. This arrangement was adopted in 1858 to establish some sort of commercial equilib- rium between the Mexican towns of the Rio Grande Valley, which were burdened by excessive taxation on internal trade, and the Texas towns across the river, which at this time en- joyed a specially low tariff. Consequently prices of food and GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 221 manufactured goods were twice or four times as high on the Mexican as on the American side. The result was persistent smuggling, extensive emigration from the southern to the northern bank, and the commercial decline of the frontier states of Mexico, till the Zona Libre adjusted the commercial discrepancy. 39 Since 1816 a tariff free zone a league wide has formed the border of French Savoy along the Canton and Lake of Geneva, thus uniting this canton by a free pass- way with the Swiss territory at the upper end of the lake. 40 When the political boundary has evolved by a system of Boundary contraction out of the wide waste zone to the nicely deter- zones f mined line, that line, nevertheless, is always encased, as it n * race ele- were, in a zone of contact wherein are mingled the elements of men t s . either side. The zone includes the peripheries of the two con- tiguous racial or national bodies, and in it each is modified and assimilated to the other. On its edges it is strongly marked by the characteristics of the adjacent sides, but its medial band shows a mingling of the two in ever-varying pro- portions ; it changes from day to day and shifts backward and forward, according as one side or the other exercises in it more potent economic, religious, racial, or political influ- ences. Its peripheral character comes out strongly in the mingling of contiguous ethnic elements found in every frontier dis- trict. Here is that zone of transitional form which we have seen prevails so widely in nature. The northern borderland of the United States is in no small degree Canadian, and the southern is strongly Mexican. In the Rio Grande counties of Texas, Mexicans constituted in 1890 from 27 to 55 per cent, of the total population, and they were distributed in con- siderable numbers also in the second tier of counties. A broad band of French and English Canadians overlaps the northern hem of United States territory from Maine to North Dakota. 41 In the New York and New England counties bor- dering on the old French province of Quebec, they constitute from 11 to 22 per cent, of the total population, except in two or three western counties of Maine which have evidently been mere passways for a tide of habitants moving on to more attractive conditions of life in the counties just to the Ethnic border zones in the Alps. The Slav- German boundary. south. 42 But even these large figures do not adequately represent the British-American element within our bound- aries, because they leave out of account the native-born of Canadian parents who have been crossing our borders for over a generation. If we turn to northern Italy, where a mountain barrier might have been expected to segregate the long-headed Mediterranean stock from the broad-headed Alpine stock, we find as a matter of fact that the ethnic type throughout the Po basin is markedly brachycephalic and becomes more pronounced along the northern boundary in the Alps, till it culminates in Piedmont along the frontier of France, where it becomes identical with the broad-headed Savoyards. 43 More than this, Proven9al French is spoken in the Dora Bal- tea Valley of Piedmont; and along the upper Dora Riparia and in the neighboring valleys of the Chisone and Pellice are the villages of the refugee Waldenses, who speak an idiom allied to the Provei^al. More than this, the whole Pied- montese Italian is characterized by its approach to the French, and the idiom of Turin sounds very much like Pro- ven9al. 44 To the north there is a similar exchange between Italy and Switzerland with the adjacent Austrian province of the Tyrol. In the rugged highlands of the Swiss Grisons bordering upon Italy, we find a pure Alpine stock, known to the ancients as the Rhaetians, speaking a degenerate Latin tongue called Romansch, which still persists also under the names of Ladino and Frioulian in the Alpine regions of the Tyrol and Italy. In fact, the map of linguistic bound- aries in the Grisons shows the dovetailing of German, Italian, and Romansch in a broad zone. 45 The traveller in the south- ern Tyrol becomes accustomed in the natives to the combina- tion of Italian coloring, German speech, and Alpine head form ; whereas, if on reaching Italy he visits the hills back of Vicenza, he finds the German settlements of Tredici and Sette Communi, where German customs, folklore, language, and German types of faces still persist, survivals from the days of German infiltration across the Brenner Pass. 48 Where Slavs and Teutons come together in Central Eu- rope, their race border is a zone lying approximately between 14 and 24 degrees East Longitude; it is crossed by alternate GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 223 7 7J Letto Lithuanians Germans |O0 00 SLAV-GERMAN BOUNDARY IN EUROPE. GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES Assimila- tion of culture in boundary zones. peninsulas of predominant Germans and Austrians from the one side, Czechs and Poles from the other, the whole spattered over by a sprinkling of the two elements. Rarely* and then only for short stretches, do political and ethnic boundaries coincide. The northern frontier hem of East Prussia lying between the River Niemen and the political line of demarca- tion is quite as much Lithuanian as German, while German stock dots the whole surface of the Baltic provinces of Russia as far as St. Petersburg. The eastern rim of the Kaiser's empire as far south as the Carpathians presents a broad band of the Polish race, averaging about fifty kilometers (30 miles) in width, sparsely sprinkled with German settle- ments; these are found farther east also as an ethnic archi- pelago dotting the wide Slav area of Poland. The enclosed basin of Bohemia, protected on three sides by mountain walls and readily accessible to the Slav stock at the sources of the Vistula, enabled the Czechs to penetrate far westward and there maintain themselves ; but in spite of encompassing mountains, the inner or Bohemian slopes of the Boehmer Wald, Erz, and Sudetes ranges constitute a broad girdle of almost solid German population. 47 In the Austrian provinces of Moravia and Silesia, which form the southeastward con- tinuation of this Slav-German boundary zone, 60 per cent, of the population are Czechs, 33 per cent, are German, and 7 per cent., found in the eastern part of Silesia, are Poles. 49 An ethnic map of the western Muscovite Empire in Europe shows a marked infiltration into White and Little Russia of West Slavs from Poland, and in the province of Bessarabia alternate areas of Russians and Roumanians. The latter in places form an unbroken ethnic expansion from the homj kingdom west of the Pruth, extending in solid bands as far as the Dniester, and throwing out ethnic islands between this stream and the Bug. In the northern provinces of Russia, in the broad zone shared by the aboriginal Finns and the later-coming Slavs, Wallace found villages in every stage of Russification. "In one everything seemed thoroughly Finnish ; the inhabitants had a reddish-olive skin, very high cheek bones, obliquely set eyes, and a peculiar costume ; none of the women and very few of the men could understand Russian and any Russian GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 225 Poles Swedes Magyars Russian German ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF EUSSIA. MONGOLOID: Kalmucks, Kirgrhis, Nograi, Tartars, Bashkirs, Voguls, Os- tiaks, Samoyedes. ZIEIAX: Mingled Mongoloid and Finnish. 226 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES Boundary zones of assimilation in Asia who visited the place was regarded as a foreigner. In the second, there were already some Russian inhabitants ; the others had lost something of their purely Finnish type, many of the men had discarded the old costume and spoke Russian fluently, and a Russian visitor was no longer shunned. In a third, the Finnish type was still further weakened; all the men spoke Russian, and nearly all the women understood it ; the old male costume had entirely disappeared and the old female was rapidly following it ; and intermarriage with the Russian population was no longer rare. In a fourth, inter- marriage had almost completely done its work, and the old Finnish element could be detected merely in certain peculiar- ities of physiognomy and accent." This amalgamation ex- tends to their religions prayers wholly pagan devoutly uttered under the shadow of a strange cross, next the Finn- ish god Yumak sharing honors equally with the Virgin, finally a Christianity pure in doctrine and outward forms except for the survival of old pagan ceremonies in connection with the dead. 49 At the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, this boundary zone of Russians and Finns meets the borderland of the Asiatic Mongols ; and here is found an intermingling of races, languages, religions, and customs scarcely to be equalled elsewhere. Finns are infused with Tartar as well as Russian blood, and Russians show Tartar as well as Finn- ish traits. The Bashkirs, who constitute an ethnic peninsula running from the solid Mongolian mass of Asia, show every type of the mongrel. 50 [See map page 225.] If we turn to Asia and examine the western race boundary of the expanding Chinese, we find that a wide belt of mingled ethnic elements, hybrid languages, and antagonistic civiliza- tions marks the transition from Chinese to Mongolian and Tibetan areas. The eastern and southern frontiers of Mon- golia, formerly marked by the Great Wall, are now difficult to define, owing to the steady encroachment of the agricul- tural Chinese on the fertile edges of the plateau, where they have converted the best-watered pastures of the Mongols into millet fields and vegetable gardens, leaving for the no- mad's herds the more sterile patches between. 51 Every line GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 227 of least resistance climatic, industrial, commercial sees the Chinese widening this transitional zone. He sprinkles his crops over the "Land of Grass," invades the trade of the caravan towns, sets up his fishing station on the great north- ern bend of the Hoangho in the Ordos country, three hun- dred miles beyond the Wall, to exploit the fishing neglected by the Mongols. 52 The well-watered regions of the Nan-Shan ranges has enabled him to drive a long, narrow ethnic wedge, represented by the westward projection of Kansu Province between Mongolia and Tibet, into the heart of the Central Plateau. [See map page 103.] Here the nomad Si Fan tribes dwell side by side with Chinese farmers, 53 who themselves show a strong infusion of the Mongolian and Tibetan blood to the north and south, and whose language is a medley of all three tongues. 54 In easternmost Tibet, in the elevated province of Minjak Boundary (2,600 meters or 8,500 feet), M. Hue found in 1846 a great ^nea of number of Chinese from the neighboring Sze-Chuan and Yun- U1 nan districts keeping shops and following the primary trades and agriculture. The language of the Tibetan natives showed the effect of foreign intercourse; it was not the pure speech of Lhassa, but was closely assimilated to the idiom of the neighboring Si Fan speech of Sze-Chuan and contained many Chinese expressions. He found also a modification of man- ners, customs, and costumes in this peripheral Tibet; the natives showed more of the polish, cunning, and covetousness of the Chinese, less of the rudeness, frankness, and strong religious feeling characteristic of the western plateau man. 55 Just across the political boundary in Chinese territory, the border zone of assimilation shows predominance of the Chinese element with a strong Tibetan admixture both in race and civilization. 56 Here Tibetan traders with their yak caravans are met on the roads or encamped in their tents by the hundred about the frontier towns, whither they have brought the wool, sheep, horses, hides and medicinal roots of the rough highland across that "wild borderland which is neither Chinese nor Tibetan." The Chinese population consists of hardy mountaineers, who eat millet and maize in- stead of rice. The prevailing architecture is Tibetan and 228 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES the priests on the highways are the red and yellow lamas from the Buddhist monasteries of the plateau. "The Coun- try is a cross between China and Tibet." Even the high wall of the Himalayas does not suffice to prevent similar exchanges of ethnic elements and culture between southern Tibet and northern India. Lhassa and Giamda harbor many emigrants from the neighboring Hima- layan state of Bhutan, allow them to monopolize the metal industry, in which they excel, and to practise undisturbed their Indian form of Buddhism. 58 The southern side of this zone of transition is occupied by a Tibetan stock of people inhabiting the Himalayan frontiers of India and practising the Hindu religion. 59 In the hill country of northern Bengal natives are to be seen with the Chinese queue hanging below a Hindu turban, or wearing the Hindu caste mark on their broad Mongolian faces. With these are mingled genuine Tibetans who have come across the border to work in the tea plantations of this region. 60 [See map page 102.] Relation The assimilation of culture within a boundary zone is in of ethnic some respects the result of race amalgamation, as, for in- stance, in costume, religion, manners and language ; but in similati economic points it is often the result of identical geographic influences to which both races are alike subjected. For ex- ample, scarcity of food on the arid plateau of Central Asia makes the Chinese of western Kansu eat butter and curds as freely as do the pastoral Mongols, though such a diet is ob- noxious to the purely agricultural Chinese of the lowlands. 61 The English pioneer in the Trans-Allegheny wilderness shared with the Indians an environment of trackless forests and sav- age neighbors ; he was forced to discard for a time many es- sentials of civilization, both material and moral. Despite a minimum of race intermixture, the men of the Cumberland and Kentucky settlements became assimilated to the life of the red man ; they borrowed his scalping knife and tomahawk, adopted his method of ambush and extermination in war; like him they lived in great part by the chase, dressed in furs and buckskin, and wore the noiseless moccasin. Here the mere fact of geographical location on a remote frontier, and of almost complete isolation from the centers of English life 229 on the Atlantic slope, and the further fact of persistent con- tact with a lower status of civilization, resulted in a temporary return to primitive methods of existence, till the settlements secured an increase of population adequate for higher indus- trial development and for defence. A race boundary involves almost inevitably a cultural boundary, often, too, a linguistic and religionary, occasion- ally a political boundary. The last three are subject to wide fluctuation, frequently overstepping all barriers of race and contrasted civilizations. Though one often accompanies another, it is necessary to distinguish the different kinds of boundaries and to estimate their relative importance in the history of a people or state. We may lay down the rule that the greater, more permanent, and deep-seated the con- trasts on the two sides of a border, the greater is its signifi- cance ; and that, on this basis, boundaries rank in importance, with few exceptions, in the following order: racial, cultural, linguistic, and political. The less marked the contrasts, in general, the more rapid and complete the process of assimi- lation in the belt of borderland. The significance of the border zone of assimilation for The political expansion lies in the fact that it prepares the way bounda ry for the advance of the state boundary from either side ; in it ,.^ . the sharp edge of racial and cultural antagonism is removed, expansion, or for this antagonism a new affinity may be substituted. The zone of American settlement, industry, and commerce which in 1836 projected beyond the political boundary of the Sabine River over the eastern part of Mexican Texas facilitated the later incorporation of the State into the Union, just as a few years earlier the Baton Rouge District of Spanish West Florida had gravitated to the United States by reason of the predominant American element there, and thus extended the boundary of Louisiana to the Pearl River. When the political boundary of Siberia was fixed at the Amur River, the Muscovite government began extending the border zone of assimilation far to the south of that stream by the systematic Russification of Manchuria, with a view to its ultimate annexation. Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace- Lorraine, by reason of their large German population, have 2130 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES Tendency toward defection along polit- ical fron- tiers. been readily incorporated into the German Empire. Only in Lorraine has a considerable French element retarded the process. The considerable sprinkling of Germans over the Baltic provinces of Russia and Poland west of the Vistula, and a certain Teutonic stamp of civilization which these dis- tricts have received, would greatly facilitate the eastward extension of the German Empire; while their common reli- gions, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, would help obliterate the old political fissure. Thus the borderland of a country, so markedly difFerentiated from its interior, per- forms a certain historical function, and becomes, as it were, an organ of the living, growing race or state. Location on a frontier involves remoteness from the center of national, cultural, and political .activities; these reach their greatest intensity in the core of the nation and exercise on Iv- an attenuated influence on the far-away borders, unless ex- cellent means of communication keep up a circulation of men, commodities, and ideas between center and periphery. For the frontier, therefore, the centripetal force is weakened ; the centrifugal is strengthened often by the attraction of some neighboring state or tribe, which has established bonds of marriage, trade, and friendly intercourse with the outlying community. Moreover, the mere infusion of foreign blood, customs, and ideas, especially a foreign religion, which is characteristic of a border zone, invades the national solidar- ity. Hence we find that a tendency to political defection con- stantly manifests itself along the periphery. A long reach weakens the arm of authority, especially where serious geo- graphical barriers intervene; hence border uprisings are usually successful, at least for a time. When accomplished, they involve that shrinkage of the frontiers which we have found to be the unmistakable symptom of national decline. This defection shows itself most promptly in conquered border tribes of different blood, who lack the bond of ethnic affinity, and whose remoteness emboldens them to throw off the political yoke. The decay of the Roman Empire, after its last display of energy under Trajan, was registered in the revolt of its peripheral districts beyond the Euphrates, Dan- ube, and Rhine, as also in the rapid Teutonization of eastern 231 Gaul, which here prepared the way for the assertion of inde- pendence. The border satraps of the ancient Persian Em- pire were constantly revolting, as the history of Asia Minor shows. Aragon, Old Castile, and Portugal were the first kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula to throw off Saracen dominion. Mountain ranges and weary stretches of desert roads enabled the rebellions in Chinese Turkestan and the border districts of Sungaria in 1863 to be maintained for several years. 62 A feeble grasp upon remote peripheral possessions is often Centrifugal further weakened by the resistance of an immigrant popula- tion from beyond the boundary, which brings with it new f ront j er ideas of government. This was the geographical history of the Texan revolt. A location on the far northern outskirts of Mexican territory, some twelve hundred miles from the capital, rendered impossible intelligent government control, the enforcement of the laws, and prompt defence against the Indians. Remoteness weakened the political cohesion. More than this, the American ethnic boundary lapped far over eastern Texas, forming that border zone of two-fold race which we have come to know. This alien stock, antagonistic to the national ideals emanating from the City of Mexico, dominant over the native population by reason of its intelli- gence, energy, and wealth, ruptured the feeble political bond and asserted the independence of Texas. Quite similar was the history of the "Independent State of Acre," which in 1899 grew up just within the Bolivian frontier under the leadership of Brazilian caoutchouc gatherers, resisted the collection of taxes by the Bolivian government, and four years later se- cured annexation to Brazil. 63 Even when no alien elements are present to weaken the race bond, if natural barriers intervene to obstruct and retard communications between center and periphery, the frontier community is likely to develop the spirit of defection, espe- cially if its local geographic, and hence social, conditions are markedly different from those of the governing center. This is the explanation of that demand for independent statehood which was rife in our Trans- Allegheny settlements from 1785 to 1795, and of that separatist movement which advocated 232 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES political alliance with either the British colonies to the north or the Spanish to the west, because these were nearer and offered easier access to the sea. f'A frontier location and an intervening mountain barrier were important factors in the Whisky Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, just as similar conditions later suggested the secession of the Pacific States from the Union. Disaffection from the government was mani- fested by the Trek Boers of early South Africa, "especially by those who dwelt in the outlying districts where the Gov- ernment had exerted and could exert little control." In 1795 the people of Graaf-Reinct, a frontier settlement of that time, revolted against the Dutch South African Company and set up a miniature republic. 64 The spirit *phe spirit of the colonial frontier is the spirit of freedom, the spirit of men who have traveled far, who are surcharged with energy, enterprise and self-reliance, often with impa- tience of restraint. A severe process of elimination culls out for the frontier a population strikingly differentiated from the citizens of the old inhabited centers. Then remoteness of location and abundance of opportunity proceed to empha- size the qualities which have squeezed through the sieve of natural and social selection. This is the type bred upon our own frontier, which, West beyond West, has crossed the con- tinent from the backwoods of the Allegheny Mountains to the Pacific. The Siberian frontier develops much the same type on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire. Here army officers find a compensation for their rough surrounding in the escape from the excessive bureaucracy of the capitals. Here is to be noted the independence, self-reliance and self- respect characteristic of other colonial frontiers. The Rus- sian of the Asiatic border is proud to call himself a Siberian : he is already differentiated in his own consciousness. The force of Moscow tradition and discipline is faint when it reaches him, it has traveled so far. Even the elaborate observances of the orthodox Greek Church tend to become simplified on the frontier. The question naturally arises whether in the Russian Empire, as in the United States, the political periphery will in time, react upon the center, infuse it with the spirit of progress and youth. 85 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 233 When to a border situation is added a geographic location Free bor- affording conditions of long-established isolation, this ten- dw states dency to maintain political autonomy becomes very pro- M P? nounced. This is the explanation of so many frontier moun- tain states that have retained complete or partial independ- ence, such as Nepal, Bhutan, the Asturias, which successfully withstood Saracen attack, and Montenegro, which has re- pelled alike Venetian, Servian, and Turkish dominion. Eu- rope especially has numerous examples of these unabsorbed border states, whose independence represents the equilibrium of the conflicting political attractions about them. But all these smallest fragments of political territory have either some commercial or semi-political union with one or another of their neighbors. The little independent principality of Liechtenstein, wedged in between Switzerland and the Tyrol, is included in the customs union of Austro-Hungary. The small, independent duchy of Luxemburg, which has been at- tached in turn to all the great states which have grown up along its borders, is included in the Zollverein of Germany. The republic of Andorra, far up in a lofty valley of the Pyrenees, which has maintained its freedom for a thousand years, acknowledges certain rights of suzerainty exercised by France and the Spanish bishopric of Urgel. 66 Oftentimes a state gains by recognizing this freedom-loving Guardians spirit of the frontier, and by turning it to account for na- * *^ e tional defence along an exposed boundary. In consequence of the long wars between Scotland and England, to the Scotch barons having estates near the Border were given the Wardenships of the Marches, offices of great power and dig- nity ; and their clans, accustomed only to the imperfect mili- tary organization demanded by the irregular but persistent hostilities of the time and place, developed a lawless spirit. Prohibited from agriculture by their exposed location, they left their fields waste, and lived by pillage and cattle-lifting from their English and even their Scotch neighbors. The valor of these southern clans, these "reivers of the Border," was the bulwark of Scotland against the English, but their mutinous spirit resisted the authority of the king and led them often to erect semi-independent principalities. 67 234 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES Border nomads as frontier police. China has fringed her western boundaries with quasi- independent tribes whose autonomy is assured and whose love of freedom is a guarantee of guerilla warfare against any invader from Central Asia. The Mantze tribes in the moun- tain borders of Sze-Chuan province have their own rulers and customs, and only pay tribute to China. 68 The highlands of Kansu are sprinkled with such independent tribes. Some- times a definite bargain is entered into a self-governing military organization and a yearly sum of money in return for defence of the frontier. The Mongol tribes of the Char- kar country or "Borderland" just outside the Great Wall northwest of Pekin constitute a paid army of the Emperor to guard the frontier against the Khalkhas of northern Mongolia, the tribe of Genghis Khan. 69 Similarly, semi- independent military communities for centuries made a con- tinuous line of barriers against the raids of the steppe nomads along the southern and southeastern frontiers of Rus- sia, from the Dnieper to the Ural rivers. There were the "Free Cossacks," located on the debatable ground between the fortified frontier of the agricultural steppe and maraud- ing Crimean Tartars. Nominally subjects of the Czar, they obeyed him when it suited them, and on provocation rose in open revolt. The Cossacks of the Dnieper, who to the mid- dle of the seventeenth century formed Poland's border de- fence against Tartar invasion, were jealous of any inter- ference with their freedom. They lent their sen-ices on occasions to the Sultan of Turkey, and even to the Crimean Khan; and finally, in 1681, attached themselves and their territory to Russia. 70 Here speaks that spirit of defection which is the natural product of the remoteness and inde- pendence of frontier life. The Russians also attached to themselves the Kalmucks located between the lower Volga and Don, and used them as a frontier defence against their Tartar and Kirghis neighbors. 71 In this case, as in that of the Cossacks and the Charkars of eastern Mongolia, we have a large body of men living in the same arid grassland, lead- ing the same pastoral life, and carrying on the same kind of warfare as the nomadic marauders whose pillaging, cattle- lifting raids they aim to suppress. The imperial orders to the GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 235 Charkars limit them strictly to the life of herdmen, with the purpose of maintaining their mobility and military efficiency. So in olden times, for the Don Cossacks agriculture was pro- hibited on pain of death, lest they should lose their taste for the live-stock booty of a punitive raid. A still earlier in- stance of this utilization of border nomads is found in the first century after Christ, when the Romans made the Ara- bian tribe of Beni Jafre, dwelling on the frontier of Syria, the warders of the eastern marches of the Empire. 72 The advancing frontier of an expanding people often car- Lawless ries them into a sparsely settled country where the unruly citizens members of society can with advantage be utilized as colon- e P rted to . . ... v j j ! j n i frontiers. ists. Arter centralized and civilized Russia began to en- croach with the plow upon the pastures of the steppe Cossacks, and finally suppressed these military republics, the more turbulent and obstinate remnants of them she col- onized along the Kuban and Terek rivers, to serve as bul- warks against the incursions of the Caucasus tribes and as the vanguard of the advance southward. 73 This is one principle underlying the transportation of criminals to the frontier. They serve to hold the new coun- try. There these waste elements of civilization are converted into a useful by-product. They may be only political rad- icals or religious dissenters : if so, so much the better colonial material. The Russian government formerly transported the rebellious sect of the Molokans or Unitarians to the out- skirts of the Empire, where the danger of contagion was re- duced. Hence they are to be found to-day scattered in the Volga province of Samara, on the border of the Kirghis steppe, in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Siberia, still faith- ful and still persecuted. 74 Since 1709 the Russian advance into Siberia has planted its milestones in settlements formed of prisoners of war, political exiles, and worse offenders. 75 Penal colonists located on the shores of Kamchatka helped build and man the crazy boats which set out for Alaska at the end of the eighteenth century. China settles its thieves and cheats among the villages of its own border provinces of Shensi 76 and Kansu ; but its worst criminals it transports far away to the Hi country on the western frontier of the 236 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES Drift of lawless ele- ments to the fron- tiers. Asylums beyond the border. Empire, where they have doubtless contributed to the spirit of revolt that has there manifested itself. 77 The abundance of opportunity and lack of competition in a new frontier community, its remoteness from the center of authority, and its imperfect civil government serve to at- tract thither the vicious, as well as the sturdy and enterprising. The society of the early Trans-Allegheny frontier included both elements. The lawless who drifted to the border formed gangs of horse thieves, highwaymen, and murderers, who called forth from the others the summary methods of lynch law. 78 North Carolina, which in its early history formed the southern frontier of Virginia, swarmed with ruffians who had fled thither to escape imprisonment or hanging, and whose general attitude was to resist all regular authority and especially to pay no taxes. 79 Similarly, that wide belt of mountain forest which forms the waste boundary between Korea and Manchuria is the resort of bandits, who have harried both sides of the border ever since this neutral district was established in the thirteenth century. 80 The frontier communities of the Russian Cossacks in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries were regular asylums for runaway serfs and peasants who were fleeing from taxation ; their hetmans were repeatedly fugitive criminals. The east- ern border of Russia formed by the Volga basin in 1775 was described as "an asylum for malcontents and vagabonds of all kinds, ruined nobles, disfrocked monks, military deserters, fugitive serfs, highwaymen, and Volga pirates" disorderly elements which contributed greatly to the insurrection led by the Ural Cossacks in that year. 81 "The Debatable Land," a tract between the Esk and Sark rivers, formerly claimed by both England and Scotland, was long the haunt of thieves, outlaws and vagabonds, as indeed was the whole Border, sub- ject as it was to the regular jurisdiction of neither side. 82 Just beyond the political boundary, where police author- ity comes to an end and where pursuit is cut short or re- tarded, the fleeing criminal finds his natural asylum. Hence all border districts tend to harbor undesirable refugees from the other side. Deserters and outlaws from China proper sprinkle the eastern districts of Mongolia. 83 Marauding GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 237 bands of Apaches and Sioux, after successful depredations on American ranches, for years fled across the line into Mex- ico and Canada before the hammering hoof-beats of Texas Ranger and United States cavalry, until a treaty with Mex- ico in 1882, authorizing such armed pursuit to cross the boundary, cut off at least one asylum. 84 Our country ex- changes other undesirable citizens with its northern and southern neighbors in cases where no extradition treaty pro- vides for their return ; and the borders of the individual states are crossed and recrossed by shifty gentlemen seek- ing to dodge the arm of the law. The fact that so many State boundaries fall in the Southern Appalachians, where illicit distilling and feud murders provide most of the cases on the docket, has materially retarded the suppression of these crimes by increasing the difficulty both of apprehending the offender and of subpoenaing the reluctant witness. Dissatisfied, oppressed, or persecuted members of a polit- Border ical community are prone to seek an asylum across the near- ref ug ees est border, where happier or freer conditions of life are mingling, promised. There they contribute to that mixture of race which characterizes every boundary zone, though as an em- bittered people they may also help to emphasize any existing political or religious antagonism. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was followed by an exodus of Hu- guenots from France to the Protestant states of Switzerland, the Palatinate of the Rhine, and Holland, as also across the Channel into southern England; just as in recent years the Slav borderland of eastern Germany has received a large immigration of Polish Jews from Russia. When the Polish king in 1571 executed the leader of the Dnieper Cossacks, thousands of these bold borderers left their country and joined the community of the Don; and in 1722 after the Dnieper community had been crushed by Peter the Great, a similar exodus took place across the southern boundary into the Crimea, whereby the Tartar horde was strengthened, just as a. few years before, during an unsuccessful revolt of the Don Cossacks, some two thousand of the malcontents crossed the southern frontier to the Kuban River in Circassia. 85 The establishment of American independence in 1783 saw an ex- 238 odus of loyalists from the United States into the contiguous districts of Ontario, New Brunswick, and Spanish Florida. Five years later discontent with the Federal Government for its dilatory opposition to the occlusion of the Mississippi and the lure of commercial betterment sent many citizens of the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths to the Spanish side of the Mississippi, 88 while the Natchez District on the east bank of the river contained a sprinkling of French who had become dissatisfied with Spanish rule in Louisiana and changed their domicile. These are some of the movements of individuals and groups which contribute to the blending of races along every fron- tier, and make of the boundary a variable zone, as opposed to the rigid artificial line in terms of which we speak. NOTES TO CHAPTER VII 1. A. W. Greely, Eeport of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, Vol. I, pp. 28-33, 236. Misc. Doc. No. 393. Washington, 1888. 2. A. P. Engelhardt, A Eussian Province of the North, pp. 123-130. Translated from the Russian. London, 1899. 3. Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, pp. 60-62. New York, 1882. 4. Ibid., pp. 146, 161. 5. Col. F. E. Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 194-199. London, 1904. 6. A. R. Wallace, Geographical Distribution of Animals, Vol. I, pp. 387-389, 426-431, 436-438. London, 1876. 7. Ibid., 409, 424. 8. A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, pp. 105-108. London, 1894. 9. A. R. Wallace, Geographical Distribution of Animals, Vol. I, pp. 313, 321-322. London, 1876. 10. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, ethno- graphical map. New York, 1893. 11. Eleventh Census of the United States, Population, Part I., maps mi pp. xviii-xxiii. 12. L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 64-68, 77. London, 1905. 13. Fully treated in E. C. Semple, American History and Its Geo- graphic Conditions, pp. 22-31. Boston, 1903. 14. Sir S. W. Baker, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, pp. 88, 128- 129, 135. Hartford, 1868. 15. Norway, Official Publication for the Paris Exhibition, pp. 3-4 and map. Christiania, 1900. GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 239 16. J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 297. London, 1903. 17. Csesar, Bella Gallico, Book IV, chap. 3 and Book VI, chap. 23. 18. Ibid., Book VI, chap. 10. 19. T. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, p. 56, note I. Ox- ford, 1892. 20. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. IV, p. 510. New York, 1902- 1906. 21. Grote, History of Greece, Vol. IX, chap. 70, pp. 99, 115. New York, 1859. 22. Dr. Wilhelm Junker, Travels in Africa, pp. 18, 45, 79, 87, 115, 117, 138, 191, 192, 200, 308, 312, 325, 332. Translated from the German. London, 1892. 23. H. Barth, Human Society in North Central Africa, Journal Royal Geographical Society, Vol. XXX, pp. 123-124. London, 1860. 24. Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 163-164. London, 1907. 25. John H. Speke, Discovery of the Sources of the Nile, pp. 74, 89, 91, 94, 95, 173, 176-177, 197. New York, 1868. 26. Theodore Eoosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 50, 70, 135. New York, 1895. 27. C. C. Koyce, The Cherokee Nations of Indians, p. 140. Fifth An- nual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, 1884. 28. Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 79-89, 113-115, 1851. Reprint, Birmingham, 1900. James Adair, History of the American In- dians, p. 257. London, 1775. 29. Ibid., pp. 252-3, 282. 30. Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 133-135. 1851. Reprint, Birmingham, 1900. 31. Archibald Little, The Far East, p. 249. Oxford, 1905. 32. M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I, p. 74. Translated from the French. Reprint, Chicago, 1898. 33. Nachtigal, Sahara und Sudan, Vol. I, pp. 102, 448; Vol. Ill, pp. 203-205, 314. Leipzig, 1889. Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, p. 170. London, 1907. 34. Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 118-119. 1851. Re- print, Birmingham, 1900. 35. Norway, Official Publication for the Paris Exhibition, pp. 5, 83-84. Christiania, 1900. 36. Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 416, 417, 461, 467. 1857. Reprint, Birmingham, 1900. 37. C. E. Akers, History of South America, 1854-1904, p. 435. New York, 1904. 38. H. R. Mill, International Geography, p. 883. New York, 1902. 39. Matias Romero, Mexico and the United States, pp. 433-441. New York, 1898. 40. E. Hertslet, The Map of Europe by Treaty, 1814-1875, Vol. I, pp. 422, 425, 426 ; Vol. II, p. 1430. 41. Eleventh Census of the United States, Population, Part I., map No. 10 and p. cxliii. 42. Ibid. Based on comparison of Tables 15 and 33 for the States mentioned. 43. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 250-253. New York, 1899. 240 GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 44. W. Deecke, Italy, pp. 325, 347, 349. Translated from the German. London, 1904. 45. Sydow-Wagner, Methodischer Schul-Atlas, Volker und Sprachen- Icarten, No. 13. Gotha, 1905. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 282- 284. New York, 1899. 46. Ibid., pp. 255-257. W. Deecke, Italy, p. 357. London, 1904. 47. Sydow-Wagner, Methodischer Schul-Atlas, Volker und Sprachen- Icarten No. 13. Gotha, 1905. 48. Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, p. 309. New York, 1902. 49. D. M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 151-155. New York, 1904. 50. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 362. New York, 1899. 51. Archibald Little, The Far East. Map p. 8 and pp. 171-172. Ox- ford, 1905. M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846. Vol. I, pp. 2-4, 21, 197-201, 284. Reprint, Chicago, 1898. 52. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 166-170. 53. Ibid., Vol II, p. 23. 54. Ibid., Vol. I, 312-313. 55. Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 319-322, 327. 56. M. Hue, Journey through the Chinese Empire, Vol. I, p. 36. New York, 1871. 57. Isabella Bird. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp. 70-71, 88, 91, 92, 104-109, 113, 117, 133, 134, 155, 194, 195. London, 1900. 58. M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. II, pp. 155-156, 264. Reprint, Chicago, 1898. 59. C. A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, pp. 60, 65-73, 205, 347-358. London, 1906. Statistical Atlas of India, pp. 61- 62, maps. Calcutta, 1895. Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. I, p. 295- 296. Oxford, 1907. 60. Eliza R. Scidmore, Winter India, pp. 106-108. New York, 1903. 61. M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I, pp. 312-313. Reprint, Chicago, 1898. 62. Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 174-175. New York, 1899. 63. Charles E. Akers, History of South America, 1854-1904, p. 562. New York, 1904. 64. James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 108-109. New York, 1897. 65. O. P. Crosby, Tibet and Turkestan, pp. 15-20. 66. H. R. Mill, International Geography, p. 378. New York, 1902. H. Spencer, A Visit to Andorra, Fortnightly Seview, Vol. 67, pp. 44-60. 1897. 67. Wm. Robertson, History of Scotland, pp. 19-20. New York, 1831. The Scotch Borderers, Littell's Living Age, Vol 40, p. 180. 68. Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp. 209-210. London, 1900. 69. M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I, pp. 41, 42, 97. Reprint, Chicago, 1898. 70. D. M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 352-356. New York, 1904. Article on Cossacks in Encyclopedia Britannica. 71. Pallas, Travels in Southern Russia, Vol. I, pp. 126-129; 442; Vol. II, pp. 330-331. London, 1812. GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES 72. G. Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, p. 9. New York, 1897. 73. D. M. Wallace, Russia, p. 358. New York, 1904. Walter K. Kelly, History of Eussia, Vol. II, pp. 394-395. London, 1881. 74. D. M. Wallace, Eussia, p. 298. New York, 1904. 75. Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 43, 53. New York, 1899. 76. Francis H. Nichol, Through Hidden Shensi, pp. 139-140. New York, 1902. 77. ii. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I, p. 23. Reprint, Chicago, 1898. 78. Theodore Eoosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 130-132. New York, 1895. 79. John Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, Vol. II, pp. 311, 315-321. Boston, 1897. 80. Archibald Little, The Far East, p. 249. Oxford, 1905. 81. Alfred Rambaud, History of Russia, Vol. II, pp. 45, 199-200. Boston, 1886. 82. Malcolm Lang, History of Scotland, Vol. I, pp. 42-43. London, 1800. The Scotch Borderland, Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. CCLX, p. 191. 1886. 83. Friedrich Ratel, History of Mankind, Vol. Ill, p. 175. London, 1896. 84. A. B. Hart, Foundations of American Foreign Policy, pp. 81-82. New York, 1901. 85. Alfred Rambaud, History of Russia, Vol. II, pp. 45, 50. Boston, 1886. 86. Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 366. Boston, 1899. CHAPTER VIII COAST PEOPLES The coast OF all geographical boundaries, the most important is that a zone of between land and sea. The coast, in its physical nature, is a transition. zone of transition between these two dominant forms of the earth's surface ; it bears the mark of their contending forces, varying in its width with every stronger onslaught of the unresting sea, and with every degree of passive resistance made by granite or sandy shore. So too in an anthropo- geographical sense, it is a zone of transition. Now the life- supporting forces of the land are weak in it, and it becomes merely the rim of the sea; for its inhabitants the sea means food, clothes, shelter, fuel, commerce, highway, and oppor- tunity. Now the coast is dominated by the exuberant forces of a productive soil, so that the ocean beyond is only a tur- bulent waste and a long-drawn barrier: the coast is the hem of the land. Neither influence can wholly exclude the other in this amphibian belt, for the coast remains the intermediary between the habitable expanse of the land and the inter- national highway of the sea. The break of the waves and the dash of the spray draw the line beyond which human dwellings cannot spread ; for these the shore is the outermost limit, as for ages also in the long infancy of the races, before the invention of boat and sail, it drew the absolute boundary to human expansion. In historical order, its first effect has been that of a barrier, and for the majority of peoples this it has remained; but with the development of navigation and the spread of human activities from the land over sea to other countries, it became the gateway both of land and sea at once the outlet for exploration, colonization, and trade, and the open door through which a continent or island receives contributions of men or races or ideas from transoceanic shores. Barrier and threshold: these are the roles which COAST PEOPLES blW IkttHU'J ft I COAST PEOPLES Width of coastal zones. The inner edge. coasts have always played in history. To-day we see tli.;u side by side. But in spite of the immense proportions as- sumed by transmarine intercourse, the fact remains that the greater part of the coasts of the earth are for their inhabi- tants only a barrier and not an outlet, or at best only a base for timorous ventures seaward that rarely lose sight of the shore. As intermediary belt between land and sea, the coast be- comes a peculiar habitat which leaves its mark upon its peo- ple. We speak of coast strips, coastal plains, "tidewater country," coast cities; of coast tribes, coast peoples, mari- time colonies ; and each word brings up a picture of a land or race or settlement permeated by the influences of the sea. The old term of "coastline" has no application to such an intermediary belt, for it is a zone of measurable width ; and this width varies with the relief of the land, the articulation of the coast according as it is uniform or complex, with the successive stages of civilization and the development of navi- gation among the people who inhabit it. Along highly articulated coasts, showing the interpenetra- tion of sea and land in a broad band of capes and islands separated by tidal channels and inlets, or on shores deeply incised by river estuaries, or on low shelving beaches which screen brackish lagoons and salt marshes behind sand reefs and dune ramparts, and which thus form an indeterminate boundary of alternate land and water, the zone character of the coast in a physical sense becomes conspicuous. In an anthropological sense the zone character is clearly indicated by the different uses of its inner and outer edge made by man in different localities and in different periods of history. The old German maritime cities of the North Sea and the Baltic were located on rivers from 6 to 60 miles from the open sea, always on the inner edge of the coastal belt. Though primarily trading towns, linked together once in the sove- reign confederacy of the Hanseatic League, they fixed their sites on the last spurs of firm ground running out into the soft, yielding alluvium, which was constantly exposed to in- undation. Land high enough to be above the ever threaten- ing flood of river and storm-driven tide on this flat coast, and COAST PEOPLES 245 solid enough to be built upon, could not be found immediately on the sea. The slight elevations of sandy "geest" or detrital spurs were limited in area and in time outgrown. Hence the older part of all these river towns, from Bremen to Konigs- berg, rests upon hills, while in every case the newer and lower part is built on piles or artificially raised ground on the alluvium. 1 So Utrecht, the Ultrajectum of the Romans, selected for its site a long raised spur running out from the solid ground of older and higher land into the water- soaked alluvium of the Netherlands. It was the most impor- tant town of all this region before the arts of civilization began the conquest by dike and ditch of the amphibian coastal belt which now comprises one-fourth of the area and holds one-half the population of the Netherlands. 2 So ancient London marked the solid ground at the inner edge of the tidal flats and desolate marshes which lined the Thames estuary, as the Roman Camulodunum and its successor Col- chester on its steep rise or dun overlooked the marshes of the Stour inlet. 3 Farther north about the Wash, which in Roman days extended far inland over an area of fens and tidal chan- nels, Cambridge on the River Cam, Huntingdon and Stajn- ford on the Nen, and Lincoln on the Witham all river sea- ports defined the firm inner edge of this wide low coast. In the same way the landward rim of the tidal waters and salt marshes of the Humber inlet was described by a semicircle of British and Roman towns Doncaster, Castleford, Tod- caster, and York. 4 On the flat or rolling West African coast- land, which lines the long shores of the Gulf of Guinea with a band 30 to 100 miles wide, the sandy, swampy tracts im- mediately on the sea are often left uninhabited; native popu- lation is distributed most frequently at the limit of deep water, and here at head of ship-navigation the trading towns are found. 5 While, on low coasts at any rate, the inner edge tends to Inner edge mark the limit of settlement advancing from the interior, * 8 he ad as the head of sea navigation on river and inlet it has also ot been the goal of immigrant settlers from oversea lands. The history of modern maritime colonization, especially in Amer- ica, shows that the aim of regular colonists, as opposed to 246 COAST PEOPLES Shifting of the mere traders, has been to penetrate as far as possible into the land while retaining communication with the sea, and thereby with the mother country. The small boats in use till the introduction of steam navigation fixed this line far inland and gave the coastal zone a greater breadth than it has at present, and a more regular contour. In colonial America this inner edge coincided with the "fall-line" of the Atlantic rivers, which was indicated by a series of seaport towns ; or with the inland limit of the tides, which on the St. Lawrence fell above Quebec, and on the Hudson just below Albany. With fhe recent increase in the size of vessels, two con- trary effects are noticed. In the vast majority of cases, inner edge. f ne inner edge, as marked by ports, moves seaward into deeper water, and the zone narrows. The days when almost every tobacco plantation in tidewater Virginia had its own wharf are long since past, and the leaf is now exported by way of Norfolk and Baltimore. Seville has lost practically all its sea trade to Cadiz, Rouen to Havre, and Dordrecht to Rotterdam. In other cases the zone preserves its original width by the creation of secondary ports on or near the outer edge, reserved only for the largest vessels, while the inner harbor, by dredging its channel, improves its communication with the sea. Thus arises the phenomenon of twin ports like Bremen and Bremerhaven, Dantzig and Neufahrwasser, Stet- tin and Swinemiinde, Bordeaux and Pauillac, London and Tilbury. Or the original harbor seeks to preserve its advan- tage by canalizing the shallow approach by river, lagoon, or bay, as St. Petersburg by the Pantiloff canal through the shallow reaches of Kronstadt Bay ; or Konigsberg by its ship canal, carried for 25 miles across the Frisches Huff to the Baltic; 6 or Nantes by the Loire ship canal, which in 1892 was built to regain for the old town the West Indian trade recently intercepted by the rising outer port of St. Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire estuary. 7 In northern latitudes, however, the outer ports on enclosed sea basins like the Baltic become dominant in the winter, when the inner ports are ice-bound. Otherwise the outer port sinks with every improvement in the channel between the inner port and the sea. Hamburg has so constantly deepened the Elbe passage COAST PEOPLES 247 that its outport of Cuxhavcn has had little chance to rise, and serves only as an emergency harbor ; while on the Weser, maritime leadership has oscillated between Bremen and Bre- merhaven. 8 So the whole German coast and the Russian Bal- tic have seen a more or less irregular shifting backward and forward of maritime importance between the inner and the outer edges. The width of the coast zone is not only prevented from Artificial contracting by dredging and canaling, but it is even in- extension creased. By deepening the channel, the chief port of the St. Lawrence River has been removed from Quebec 180 miles upstream to Montreal, and that of the Clyde from Port Glas- gow 16 miles to Glasgow itself, so that now the largest ocean steamers come to dock where fifty years ago children waded across the stream at ebb tide. Such artificial modifications, however, are rare, for they are made only where peculiarly rich resources or superior lines of communication with the hinterland justify the expenditures; but they find their logical conclusion in still farther extensions of sea navigation into the interior by means of ship canals, where previously no waterway existed. Instances are found in the Manchester ship canal and the Welland, which, by means of the St. Law- rence and the Great Lakes, makes Chicago accessible to ocean vessels. Though man distinguishes between sea and inland navigation in his definitions, in his practice he is bound by no formula and recognizes no fundamental difference where rivers, lakes, and canals are deep enough to admit his sea- going craft. Such deep landward protrusions of the head of marine navigation at certain favored points, as opposed to its recent coastward trend in most inlets and rivers, increase the ir- regularity of the inner edge of the coast zone by the marked discrepancy between its maximum and minimum width. They are limited, however, to a few highly civilized countries, and to a few points in those countries. But their presence testi- fies to the fact that the evolution of the coast zone with the development of civilization shows the persistent importance Quteredei of this inner edge. in original The outer edge finds its greatest significance, which is for settlement. e 248 COAST PEOPLES the most part ephemeral, in the earlier stages of navigation, maritime colonization, and in some cases of original settle- ment. But this importance persists only on steep coasts fur- nishing little or no level ground for cultivation and barred from interior hunting or grazing land ; on many coral and volcanic islands of the Pacific Ocean whose outer rim Kd.s the most fertile soil and furnishes the most abundant growth of coco palms, and whose limited area only half suffices to sup- port the population ; and in polar and sub-polar districts, where harsh climatic conditions set a low limit to economic Outer edge development. In all these regions the sea must provide most and food of the food of the inhabitants, who can therefore never lose supply. contact with its waters. In mountainous Tierra del Fuego, whose impenetrably forested slopes rise directly from the sea, with only here and there a scanty stretch of stony beach, the natives of the southern and western coasts keep close to the shore. The straits and channels yield them all their food, and are the highways for all their restless, hungry wander- ings. 8 The steep slopes and dense forests preclude travel by land, and force the wretched inhabitants to live as much in their canoes as in their huts. The Tlingit and Haida In- dians of the mountainous coast of southern Alaska locate their villages on some smooth sheltered beach, with their houses in a single row facing the water, and the ever-ready canoe drawn up on shore in front. They select their sites with a view to food supply, and to protection in case of at- tack. On the treeless shores of Kadiak Island and of the long narrow Alaska Peninsula near by, the Eskimo choose their village location for an accumulation of driftwood, for prox- imity to their food supply, and a landing-place for their kayaks and bidarkas. Hence they prefer a point of land or gravel spit extending out into the sea, or a sand reef M-JI.-I- rating a salt-water lagoon from the open sea. The Aleutian Islanders regard only accessibility to the shell-fish on the beach and their pelagic hunting and fishing; and this consid- eration has influenced the Eskimo tribes of the wide Kus- kokwin estuary to such an extent, that they place their huts only a few feet above ordinary high tide, where they are constantly exposed to overflow from the sea. 10 Only among COAST PEOPLES 249 the great tidal channels of the Yukon delta are they dis- tributed over the whole wide coastal zone, even to its inner edge. The coast Chukches of northeastern Siberia locate their tent villages on the sand ramparts between the Arctic Ocean and the freshwater lagoons which line this low tundra shore. Here they are conveniently situated for fishing and hunting marine animals, while protected against the summer inunda- tions of the Arctic rivers. 11 The whole western side of Green- land, from far northern Upernivik south to Cape Farewell, shows both Eskimo and Danish settlements almost without exception on projecting points of peninsulas or islands, where the stronger effect of the warm ocean current, as well as proximity to the food supply, serve to fix their habitations; although the remains of the old Norse settlements in general are found in sheltered valleys with summer vegetation, strik- ing off from the fiords some 20 miles back from the outer coast. 12 Caesar found that the ancient Veneti, an immigrant people of the southern coast of Brittany, built their towns on the points of capes and promontories, sites which gave them ready contact with the sea and protection against attack from the land side, because every rise of the tide submerged the intervening lowlands. 13 Here a sterile plateau hinter- land drove them for part of their subsistence to the water, and the continuous intertribal warfare of small primitive states to the sea-girt asylums of the capes. In the early history of navigation and exploration, strik- Outer edge ing features of this outer coast edge, like headlands and "* early capes, became important sea marks. The promontory of navi S ation - Mount Athos, rising 6,400 feet above the sea between the Hellespont and the Thessalian coast, and casting its shadow as far as the market-place of Lemnos, was a guiding point for mariners in the whole northern Aegean. 14 For the ancient Greeks Cape Malia was long the boundary stone to the un- known wastes of the western Mediterranean, just as later the Pillars of Hercules marked the portals to the mare tene- brosum of the stormy Atlantic. So the Sacred Promontory (Cape St. Vincent) of the Iberian Peninsula defined for Greeks and Romans the southwestern limit of the habitable 250 COAST PEOPLES Outer edge and piracy. world. 15 Centuries later the Portuguese marked their advance down the west coast of Africa, first by Cape Non, which so long said "No !" to the struggling mariner, then by Cape Bojador, and finally by Cape Verde. In coastwise navigation, minor headlands and inshore islands were points to steer by ; and in that early maritime colonization, which had chiefly a commercial aim, they formed the favorite spots for trading stations. The Phoeni- cians in their home country fixed their settlements by prefer- ence on small capes, like Sidon and Berytus, or on inshore islets, like Tyre and Aradus, 16 and for their colonies and trad- ing stations they chose similar sites, whether on the coast of Sicily, 17 Spain, or Morocco. 18 Carthage was located on a small hill-crowned cape projecting out into the Bay of Car- thage. The two promontories embracing this inlet were edged with settlements, especially the northern arm, which held Utica and Hippo, 19 the latter on the site of the modern French naval station of Bizerta. In this early Hellenic world, when Greek sea-power was in its infancy, owing to the fear of piracy, cities were placed a few miles back from the coast; but with the partial cessa- tion of this evil, sites on shore and peninsula were preferred as being more accessible to commerce, 20 and such of the older towns as were in comparatively easy reach of the seaboard established there each its own port. Thus we find the ancient urban pairs of Argos and Nauplia, Troezene and Pogon, Mycenae and Eiones, Corinth commanding its Aegean port of Cenchreae 8 miles away on the Saronic Gulf to catch the Asiatic trade, and connected by a walled thoroughfare a mile and a half long with Lechaeum, a second harbor on the Cor- inthian Gulf which served the Italian commerce. 21 In the same group belonged Athens and its Pirams, Megara and Pega 1 , Pergamus and Elaa? in western Asia Minor. 22 These ancient twin cities may be taken to mark the two borders of the const zone. Like the modern ones which we have considered above, their historical development has shown an advance from the inner toward the outer edge, though owing to different causes. However, the retired location of the Baltic and North Sea towns of Germany served as a partial protection against COAST PEOPLES 251 252 COAST PEOPLES Outer edge in coloni- zation. the pirates who, in the Middle Ages, scoured these coa f~. Lubeck, originally located nearer the sea than at present, and frequently demolished by them, was finally rebuilt far- ther inland up the Trave River. 24 Later the port of Trave- miinde grew up at the mouth of the little estuary. The early history of maritime colonization shows in gen- eral two geographic phases: first, the appropriation of the islet and headland outskirts of the seaboard, and later it may be much later an advance toward the inner edge of the coast, or yet farther into the interior. Progress from the earlier to the maturer phase depends upon the social and economic development of the colonizers, as reflected in their valuation of territorial area. The first phase, the out- come of a low estimate of the value of land, is best represented by the Phoenician and earliest Greek colonies, whose pur- poses were chiefly commercial, and who sought merely such readily accessible coastal points as furnished the best trading stations on the highway of the Mediterranean and the ad- jacent seas. The earlier Greek colonies, like those of the Triopium promontory forming the south-western angle of Asia Minor, Chalcidice, the Thracian Chersonesus, Calche- don, Byzantium, the Pontic Heraclea, and Sinope, were situ- ated on peninsulas or headlands, that would afford a con- venient anchor ground ; or, like Syracuse and Mitylene, on small inshore islets, which were soon outgrown, and from which the towns then spread to the mainland near by. The advantages of such sites lay in their accessibility to com- merce, and in their natural protection against the attack of strange or hostile mainland tribes. For a nation of mer- chants, satisfied with the large returns but also with the eph- emeral power of middlemen, these considerations sufficed. While the Phrenician trading posts in Africa dotted the outer rim of the coast, the inner edge of the zone was indicated by Libyan or Ethiopian towns, where the inhabitants of the in- terior bartered their ivory and skins for the products of Tyre. 25 So that commercial expansion of the Arabs down the east coast of Africa in the first and again in the tenth century seized upon the offshore islands of Zanzibar, Pemba, and Mafia, the small inshore islets like Mombasa and Lamu, COAST PEOPLES 253 and the whole outer rim of the coast from the equator south- ward to the Rovuma River. 20 The Sultan of Zanzibar, heir to this coastal strip, had not expanded it a decade ago, when he had to relinquish the long thread of his continental pos- sessions. But when a people has advanced to a higher conception Inland ad- of colonization as an outlet for national as well as commer- Vance * cial expansion, and when it sees that the permanent prosper- ity of both race and trade in the new locality depends upon the occupation of larger tracts of territory and the develop- ment of local resources as a basis for exchanges, their settle- ments spread from the outer rim of the coasts to its inner edge and yet beyond, if alluvial plains and river highways are present to tempt inland expansion. Such was the history of many later colonies of the Greeks 27 and Carthaginians, and especially of most modern colonial movements, for these have been dominated by a higher estimate of the value of land. After the long Atlantic journey, the outposts of the Amer- ican coast were welcome resting-places to the early European voyagers, but, owing to their restricted area and therefore limited productivity, they were soon abandoned, or became mere bases for inland expansion. The little island of Cutty- hunk, off southern Massachusetts, was the site of Gosnold's abortive attempt at colonization in 1602, like Raleigh's attempt on Roanoke Island in 1585, and the later one of Pop- ham on the eastern headland of Casco Bay. The Pilgrims paused at the extremity of Cape Cod, and again on Clark's Island, before fixing their settlement on Plymouth Bay. Mon- hegan Island, off the Maine coast, was the site of an early English trading post, which, however, lasted only from 1623 to 1626 ; 2S and the same dates fix the beginning and end of a fishing and trading station established on Cape Ann, and re- moved later to Salem harbor. The Swedes made their first settlement in America on Cape Henlopen, at the entrance of Delaware Bay ; but their next, only seven years later, they located well up the estuary of the Delaware River. Thus for the modern colonist the outer edge of the coast is merely the gateway of the land. From it he passes rapidly to the 25-4 COAST PEOPLES settlement of the interior, wherever fertile soil and abundant resources promise a due return upon his labor. Interpene- Since it is from the land, as the inhabited portion of the tration of earth's surface, that all maritime movements emanate, and land and ^ o j- ne land that all oversea migrations are directed, the re- ciprocal relations between land and sea are largely deter- mined by the decree of accessibility existing between the two. This depends primarily upon the articulation of a land-mass, whether it presents an unbroken contour like Africa and In- dia, or whether, like Europe and Norway, it drops a fringe of peninsulas and a shower of islands into the bordering ocean. Mere distance from the sea bars a country from its vivifying contact ; every protrusion of an ocean artery into the heart of a continent makes that heart feel the pulse of life on far-off, unseen shores. The Baltic inlet which makes a seaport of St. Petersburg 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) back from the western rim of Europe, brings Atlantic civiliza- tion to this half-Asiatic side of the continent. The solid front presented by the Iberian Peninsula and Africa to the Atlantic has a narrow crack at Gibraltar, whence the Medi- terranean penetrates inland 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers), and converts the western foot of the Caucasus and the roots of the Lebanon Mountains into a seaboard. By means of the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean runs northward 1,300 miles (2,200 kilometers) from Cape Comorin to meet the Indus delta ; and then turns westward 700 miles farther through the Oman and Persian gulfs to receive the boats from the Tigris and Euphrates. Such marine inlets create islands and peninsulas, which are characterized by proximity to the sea on all or many sides ; and in the interior of the continents they produce every degree of nearness, shading off into inac- cessible remoteness from the watery highway of the deep. The success with which such indentations open up the in- terior of the continents depends upon the length of the inlets and the size of the land-mass in question. Africa's huge area and unbroken contour combine to hold the sea at arm's length, Europe's deep-running inlets open that small contin- ent so effectively that Kazan, Russia's most eastern city of considerable size, is only 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) distant COAST PEOPLES 255 from the nearest White Sea, Baltic, and Azof ports. Asia, the largest of all the continents, despite a succession of big indentations that invade its periphery from Sinai peninsula to East Cape, has a vast inland area hopelessly far from the surrounding oceans. In order to determine the coast articulation of any coun- Ratio of try or continent, Carl Ritter and his followers divided area shoreline by shoreline, the latter a purely mathematical line represent- c ing the total contour length. By this method Europe's ratio is one linear mile of coast to 174 square miles of area, Aus- tralia's 1 : 224, Asia's 1 ; 490, and Africa's 1 : 700. This means that Europe's proportion of coast is three times that of Asia and four times that of Africa; that a country like Norway, with a shoreline of 12,000 miles traced in and out along the fiords and around the larger islands, 29 has only 10 square miles of area for every mile of seaboard, while Germany, with every detail of its littoral included in the measurement, has only 1,515 miles of shoreline and a ratio of one mile of coast to every 159 square miles of area. The criticism has been made against this method that it compares two unlike measures, square and linear, which more- over increase or decrease in markedly different degrees, ac- cording as larger or smaller units are used. But for the pur- poses of anthropo-geography the method is valid, inasmuch as it shows the amount of area dependent for its marine out- line upon each mile of littoral, A coast, like every other boundary, performs the important function of intermediary in the intercourse of a land with its neighbors ; hence the length of this sea boundary materially affects this function. Area and coastline are not dead mathematical quantities, but like organs of one body stand in close reciprocal activ- ity, and can be understood only in the light of their persistent mutual relations. The division of the area of a land by the length of its coastline yields a quotient which to the anthropo-geographer is not a dry figure, but an index to the possible relations between seaboard and interior. A comparison of some of these ratios will illustrate this fact. Germany's shoreline, traced in contour without including details, measures 787 miles; this is just one-fifth that of 256 COAST PEOPLES Criticism of this ormula. Accessi- oility of coasts from hinterland. Italy and two-fifths that of France, so that it is short. But since Germany's area is nearly twice Italy's and a little lar- ger than that of France, it has 267 square miles of territory for every mile of coast, while Italy has only 28 square miles, and France 106. Germany has towns that are 434 miles from the nearest seaboard, but in Italy the most inland point is only 148 miles from the Mediterranean. 30 If we turn now to the United States and adopt Mendenhall's estimate of its general or contour coastline as 5,705 miles, we find that our country has 530 square miles of area dependent for its out- let upon each mile of seaboard. This means that our coast has a heavy task imposed upon it, and that its commercial and political importance is correspondingly enhanced; that the extension of our Gulf of Mexico littoral by the purchase of Florida and the annexation of Texas were measures of self-preservation, and that the unbroken contour and moun- tain-walled face of our Pacific littoral is a serious national handicap. But this method is open to the legitimate and fundamental criticism that, starting from the conception of a coast as a mere line instead of a zone, it ignores all those features which belong to every littoral as a strip of the earth's sur- face location, geologic structure, relief, area, accessibility to the sea in front and to the land behind, all which vary from one part of the world's seaboard to another, and serve to differentiate the human history of every littoral. More- over, of all parts of the earth's surface, the coast as the hem of the sea and land, combining the characters of each, is most complex. It is the coast as a human habitat that pri- marily concerns anthropo-geography. A careful analy.Ms of the multifarious influences modifying one another in this mingled environment of land and water reveals an intricate interplay of geographic forces, varying from inland basin to marginal sea, from marginal sea to open ocean, and changing from one historical period to another an interplay so mer- curial that it could find only a most inadequate expression in the rigid mathematical formula of Carl Ritter. As the coast, then, is the border zone between the solid, inhabited land and the mobile, untenanted deep, two impor- COAST PEOPLES 257 tant factors in its history are the accessibility of its back country on the one hand, and the accessibility of the sea on the other. A littoral population barred from its hinterland by mountain range or steep plateau escarpment or desert tract feels little influence from the land; level or fertile soil is too' limited in amount to draw inland the growing people, inter- course is too difficult and infrequent, transportation too slow 1 and costly. Hence the inhabitants of such a coast are forced to look seaward for their racial and commercial expansion, even if a paucity of good harbors limits the accessibility of the sea ; they must lead a somewhat detached and independent existence, so far as the territory behind them is concerned. Here the coast, as a peripheral organ of the interior, as the outlet for its products, the market for its foreign exchanges, and the medium for intercourse with its maritime neighbors, sees its special function impaired. But it takes advantage of its isolation and the protection of a long sea boundary to detach itself politically from its hinterland, as the histories of Pho3- nicia, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, Dalmatia, the repub- lics of Amain", Venice, and Genoa, the county of Barcelona, and Portugal abundantly prove. At the same time it profits by its seaboard location to utilize the more varied fields of maritime enterprise before it, in lieu of the more or less for- bidden territory behind it. The height and width of the land- ward barrier, the number and practicability of the passways across it, and especially the value of the hinterland's products in relation to their bulk, determine the amount of intercourse between that hinterland and its mountain or desert barred littoral. The interior is most effectively cut off from the periphery, where a mountain range or a plateau escarpment traces the Mountain- inner line of the coastland, as in the province of Liguria in barred northern Italy, Dalmatia, the western or Malabar coast hinterlands ' of India, most parts of Africa, and long stretches of the Pacific littoral of the Americas. The highland that backs the Norwegian coast is crossed by only one railroad, that passing through the Trondhjem depression; and this barrier has served to keep Norway's historical connection with Swe- den far less intimate than with Denmark. The long inlet of 258 COAST PEOPLES Ahe Adriatic, bringing the sea well into the heart of Southern Europe, has seen nevertheless a relatively small maritime jlevelopment, owing to the wall of mountains that everywhere shuts out the hinterland of its coasts. The greatness of Ven- ice was intimately connected with the Brenner Pass over the Alps on the one hand, and the trade of the eastern Mediter- ranean on the other. Despite Austro-Hungary's crucial in- terest in the northeast corner of the Adriatic as a maritime outlet for this vast inland empire, and its herculean efforts at Trieste and Fiume to create harbors and to connect them by transmontane railroads with the valley of the Danube, the maritime development of this coast is still restricted, and much of Austria's trade goes out northward by German ports. 31 Farther south along the Dalmatian and Albanian coasts, the deep and sheltered bays between the half-submerged roots of the Dinaric Alps have developed only local importance, be- cause they lack practicable connection with the interior. This was their history too in early Greek and Roman days, for they found only scant support in the few caravans that ~i& crossed by the Roman road to Dyrrachium to exchange the merchandise of the Aegean for the products of the Ionian Isles. Spain has always suffered from the fact that her bare, arid, and unproductive tableland almost everywhere rises steeply from her fertile and densely populated coasts ; and therefore that the two have been unable to cooperate either for the production of a large maritime commerce or for national political unity. Here the diverse conditions of the littoral and the wall of the great central terrace of the coun- try have emphasized that tendency to defection that belongs to every periphery, and therefore necessitated a strong cen- tralized government to consolidate the restive maritime prov- inces with their diverse Galician, Basque, Catalonian, and Andalusian folk into one nation with the Castilians of the plateau. 32 Accessible Where mountain systems run out endwise into the sea, the hinterlands, longitudinal valleys with their drainage streams open natural highways from the interior to the coast. This structure has made the Atlantic side of the Iberian Peninsula far more open than its Mediterranean front, and therefore contributed COAST PEOPLES 259 to its leadership in maritime affairs since 1450. So from the shores of Thrace to the southern point of the Pelopon- nesus, all the valleys of Greece open out on the eastern or Asiatic side. Here every mountain-flanked bay has had its own small hinterland to draw upon, and every such interior has been accessible to the civilization of the Aegean ; here was concentrated the maritime and cultural life of Hellas. 33 The northern half of Andean Colombia, by way of the par- allel Atrato, Rio Cauco, and Magdalena valleys, has sup- ported the activities of its Caribbean littoral, and through these avenues has received such foreign influences as might penetrate to inland Bogota. In like manner, the mountain- ridged peninsula of Farther India keeps its interior in touch with its leading ports through its intermontane valleys of the Irawadi, Salwin, Menam, and Mekong rivers. Low coasts rising by easy gradients to wide plains, like those of northern France, Germany, southern Russia, and the Gulf seaboard of the United States, profit by an accessi- ble and extensive hinterland. Occasionally, however, this advantage is curtailed by a political boundary reinforced by a high protective tariff, as Holland, Belgium, and East Prussia 34 know to their sorrow. These low hems of the land, however, often meet physical obstructions to ready communications with the interior in the silted inlets, shallow lagoons, marshes, or mangrove swamps of the littoral itself. Here the larger drainage streams give access across this amphibian belt to the solid land behind. Where they flow into a tide-swept bay like the North Sea or the English Channel, they scour out their beds and preserve the connection between sea and land; 35 but de- bouchment into a tideless basin like the Caspian or the Gulf of Mexico, even for such mighty streams as the Volga and the Mississippi, sees the slow silting up of their mouths and the restriction of their agency in opening up the hinterland. Thus the character of the bordering sea may help to deter- mine the accessibility of the coast from the land side. Accessi- Its accessibility from the sea depends primarily upon its degree of articulation ; and this articulation depends upon f rom ^ whether the littoral belt has suffered elevation or subsidence, sea. 260 COAST PEOPLES When the inshore sea rests upon an upliftt- : bottom, the con- tour of the coast is smooth and unbroken, because most of the irregularities of surface have been overlaid by a deposit of waste from the land ; so it offers no harbor except here and there a silted river mouth, while it shelves off through a broad amphibian belt of tidal marsh, lagoon, and sand reef to a shallow sea. Such is the coast of New Jersey, most of the Gulf seaboard of the United States and Mexico, the Coro- mandel coast of India, and the long, low littoral of Upper Guinea. Such coasts harbor a population of fishermen liv- ing along the strands of their placid lagoons, 36 and stimulate a timid inshore navigation which sometimes develops to ex- tensive coastwise intercourse, where a network of lagoons and deltaic channels forms a long inshore passage, as in Up- per Guinea, but which fears the break of the surf outside. 87 The rivers draining these low uplifted lands are deflected from their straight path to the sea by coastwise deposits, and idly trail along for miles just inside the outer beach; or they are split up into numerous offshoots among the silt beds of a delta, to find their way by shallow, tortuous channels to the ocean, so that they abate their value as highways between sea and land. The silted mouths of the Nile excluded the larger vessels even of Augustus Caesar's time and admitted only their lighters, 38 just as to-day the lower Rufigi River loses much of its value to German East Africa because of its scant hospitality to vessels coming from the sea. Embayed The effect of subsidence, even on a low coastal plain, is to increase accessibility from the sea by flooding the previous river valleys and transforming them into a succession of long shallow inlets, alternating with low or hilly tongues of land. Such embayed coasts form our Atlantic seaboard from Dela- ware Bay, through Chesapeake Bay to Pamlico Sound, the North Sea face of England, the funnel-shaped "forden" or firths on the eastern side of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein, and the ragged sounds or "Bodden" that indent the Baltic shore of Germany from the Bay of Lubeck to the mouth of the Oder River. 39 Although the shallowness of the bordering sea and the sand-bars and sand reefs which characterize all flat coasts here also exclude the largest vessels, such coasts COAST PEOPLES 261 have nevertheless ample contact with both land and sea. They tend to develop, therefore, the activities appropriate to both. A fertile soil and abundant local resources, as in tidewater Maryland and Virginia, make the land more at- tractive than the sea; the inhabitants become farmers rather than sailors. On the other hand, an embayed coastland promising little return to the labor of tillage, but with abun- dant fisheries and a superior location for maritime trade, is sure to profit by the accessible sea, and achieve the predom- inant maritime activity which characterized the mediaeval Hanse Towns of northern Germany and colonial New England. Subsidence that brings the beat of the surf against the Maritime bolder reliefs of the land produces a ragged, indented coast, activity deep-water inlets penetrating far into the country, hilly or on 8t< mountainous tongues of land running far out into the sea coasts and breaking up into a swarm of islands and rocks, whose outer limits indicate approximately the old prediluvial line of shore. 40 Such are the fiord regions of Norway, southern Alaska, British Columbia, Greenland, and southern Chile ; the Rias or submerged river valley coast of northwestern Spain ; and the deeply sunken mountain flank of Dalmatia, whose every lateral valley has become a bay or a strait be- tween mainland and island. All these coasts are character- ized by a close succession of inlets, a limited amount of level country for settlement or cultivation, and in their rear a steep slope impeding communication with their hinterland. Inaccessibility from the land, a high degree of accessibility from the sea, and a paucity of local resources unite to thrust the inhabitants of such coasts out upon the deep, to make of them fishermen, seamen, and ocean carriers. The same result follows where no barrier on the land side exists, but where a granitic or glaciated soil in the interior discour- ages agriculture and landward expansion, as in Brittany, Maine, and Newfoundland. In all these the land repels and the sea attracts. Brittany furnishes one-fifth of all the sail- ors in France's merchant marine, 41 and its pelagic fishermen sweep the seas from Newfoundland to Iceland. Three-fifths of the maritime activity of the whole Austrian Empire is 262 COAST PEOPLES confined to the ragged coast of Dalrnatia, which Annabel to-day most of the sailors for the imperial marine, just as in Roman days it manned the Adriatic fleet of the Caesars. 42 The Haida, Tsimshean, and Tlingit Indians of the ragged western coast of British Columbia and southern Alaska spread their villages on the narrow tide-swept hem of the land, and subsist chiefly by the generosity of the deep. They are poor landsmen, but excellent boat-makers and seamen, venturing sometimes twenty-five miles out to sea to gather birds' eggs from the outermost fringe of rocks. Contrasted As areas of elevation or subsidence are, as a rule, exten- coastal sive, it follows that coasts usually present long stretches of smooth simple shoreline, or a long succession of alternating inlet and headland. Therefore different littoral belts show marked contrasts in their degree of accessibility to the sea, and their harbors appear in extensive groups of one type fiords, river estuaries, sand or coral reef lagoons, and em- bayed mountain roots. A sudden change in relief or in geo- logic history sees one of these types immediately succeeded by a long-drawn group of a different type. Such a contrast is found between the Baltic and North Sea ports of Denmark and Germany, the eastern and southern seaboards of Eng- land, the eastern and western sides of Scotland, and the Pacific littoral of North America north and south of Juan de Fuca Strait, attended by a contrasted history. A common morphological history, marked by mountain uplift, glaciation, and subsidence, has given an historical development similar in not a few respects to the fiord coasts of New England, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Alaskan "panhandle," and southern Chile. Large subsidence areas on the Mediterranean coasts from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Bosporus have in essential features duplicated each other's histories, just as the low infertile shores of the Baltic from Finland to the Skager Rack have had much in common in their past development. Where, however, a purely local subsidence, as in Kamerun Bay and Old Calabar on the elsewhere low monotonous stretch of the Upper Guinea coast, 43 or a single great river estu.-iry, as in the La Plata and the Columbia, affords a protected COAST PEOPLES 263 anchorage on an otherwise portless shore, such inlets assume increased importance. In the long unbroken reach of our Pacific seaboard, San Francisco Bay and the Columbia estu- ary are of inestimable value; while, by the treaty of 1848 with Mexico, the international boundary line was made to bend slightly south of west from the mouth of the Gila River to the coast, in order to include in the United States terri- tory the excellent harbor of San Diego. The mere nicks in the rim of Southwest Africa constituting Walfish Bay and Angra Pequena assume considerable value as trading sta tions and places of refuge along that 1,200-mile reach of inhospitable coast extending from Cape Town north to Great Fish Bay. 44 It is worthy of notice in passing that, though both of these small inlets lie within the territory of German Southwest Africa, Walfish Bay with 20 miles of coast on either side is a British possession, and that two tiny islets which commands the entrance to the harbor of Angra Pequena, also belong to Great Britain. On the uniform coast of East Africa, the single considerable indentation formed by Dela- goa Bay assumes immense importance, which, however, is due in part to the mineral wealth of its Transvaal hinterland. From this point northward for 35 degrees of latitude, a river mouth, like that fixing the site of Beira, or an inshore islet affording protected harborage, like that of Mombasa, serves as the single ocean gateway of a vast territory, and forms the terminus of a railroad proof of its importance. The maritime evolution of all amply embayed coasts, ex- Evolution cept in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions inimical to all historical of ports, development, shows in its highest stage the gradual elimina- tion of minor ports, and the concentration of maritime activ- ity in a few favored ones, which have the deepest and most capacious harbors and the best river, canal, or railroad con- nection with the interior. The earlier stages are marked by a multiplicity of ports, showing in general activity nearly similar in amount and in kind. England's merchant marine in the fourteenth century was distributed in a large group of small but important ports on the southern coast, all which, owing to their favorable location, were engaged in the French and Flemish trade; and in another group on the east coast, 264 COAST PEOPLES reaching from Hull to Colchester, which participated in the Flemish, Norwegian, and Baltic trade. 45 Most of these have now declined before the overpowering competition of a few such seaboard marts as London, Hull, and Southampton. The introduction of steam trawlers into the fishing fleets has in like manner led to the concentration of the fishermen in a few large ports with good railroad facilities, such as Aber- deen and Grimsby, while the fishing villages that fringed the whole eastern and southern coasts have been gradually de- populated. 46 So in colonial days, when New England was little more than a cordon of settlements along that rock- bound littoral, almost every inlet had its port actively engaged in coastwise and foreign commerce in the West Indies and the Guinea Coast, in cod and mackerel fisheries, in whaling and shipbuilding, and this with only slight local variations. This widespread homogeneity of maritime activity has been succeeded by strict localization and differ- entiation, and reduction from many to few ports. So, for the whole Atlantic seaboard of the United States, evolution of seaports has been marked by increase of size attended by decrease of numbers. Offshore A well dissected coast, giving ample contact with the sea, ul&ndB. often fails nevertheless to achieve historical importance, un- less outlying islands are present to ease the transition from inshore to pelagic navigation, and to tempt to wider mari- time enterprise. The long sweep of the European coast from northern Norway to Brittany has played out a significant part of its history in that procession of islands formed by Iceland, the Faroes, Shetland, Orkneys, Great Britain, Ire- land and the Channel Isles, whether it was the navigator of ancient Armorica steering his leather-sailed boat to the shores of Caesar's Britain, or the modern Breton fisherman pulling in his nets off the coasts of distant Iceland. The dim outline of mountainous Cyprus, seen against a far-away horizon from the slopes of Lebanon, beckoned the Phoenician ship-master thither to trade and to colonize, just as the early Etruscan merchants passed from their busy ironworks on the island of Elba over the narrow strait to visible Corsica. 47 It was on the eastern side of Greece, with its deep embayments, COAST PEOPLES 265 its valleys opening out to the Aegean, with its 483 islands scattered thickly as stars in the sky, and its Milky Way of the Cyclades leading to the deep, rich soils of the Asia Minor coast, with its sea-made contact with all the stimulating in- fluences and dangers emanating from the Asiatic littoral, that Hellenic history played its impressive drama. Here was developed the spirit of enterprise that carried colonies to far western Sicily and Italy, while the western or rear side had a confined succession of local events, scarce worthy the name of history. Neither mountain-walled Epirus nor Corcyra had an Hellenic settlement in 735 B. c., at a date when the eastern Greeks had reached the Ionian coast of the Aegean and had set up a lonely group of colonies even on the Bay of Naples. Turning to America, we find that the Antilles re- ceived their population from the only two tribes, first the Arawaks and later the Caribs, who ever reached the indented northern coast of South America between the Isthmus of Panama and the mouth of the Orinoco. Here the small islands of the Venezuelan coast, often in sight, lured these peoples of river and shore to open-sea navigation, and drew them first to the Windward Isles, then northward step by step or island by island, to Hayti and Cuba. 48 In all these instances, offshore islands tempt to expansion Offshore and thereby add to the historical importance of the near-by i^^ds as coast. Frequently, however, they achieve the same result by , ' offering advantageous footholds to enterprising voyagers ma i n i an( j. from remote lands, and become the medium for infusing life into hitherto dead coasts. The long monotonous littoral of East Africa from Cape Guadafui to the Cape of Good Hope, before the planting here of Portuguese way-stations on the road to India in the sixteenth century, was destitute of his- torical significance, except that stretch opposite the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, which Arab merchants in the tenth century appropriated as the basis for their slave and ivory trade. The East Indies and Ceylon have been so many offshore stations whence, first through the Portuguese, and later through the Dutch and English, European in- fluences percolated into southeastern Asia. Asia, with its island-strewn shores, has diffused its influences over a broad 266 COAST PEOPLES Previous habitat of coast- dwellers. zone of the western Pacific, and through the agency of its active restless Malays, even halfway across that ocean. In contrast, the western coast of the Americas, a stretch nearly 10,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutian chain, has seen its aboriginal inhabitants barred from seaward ex- pansion by the lack of offshore islands, and its entrance upon the historical stage delayed till recent times. In general it can be said that islandless seas attain a later historical development than those whose expanse is rendered less forbidding by hospitable fragments of land. This fac- tor, as well as its location remote from the old and stimulat- ing civilization of Syria and Asia Minor, operated to retard the development of the western Mediterranean long after the eastern basin had reached its zenith. Coast-dwelling peoples exhibit every degree of inti- macy with the water, from the amphibian life of many Malay tribes who love the wash of the waves beneath their pile- built villages, to the Nama Bushmen who inhabit the dune- walled coast of Southwest Africa, and know nothing of the sea. In the resulting nautical development the natural tal- ents and habits of the people are of immense influence ; but these in turn have been largely determined by the geograph- ical environment of their previous habitat, whether inland or coastal, and by the duration in time, as well as the degree and necessity, of their contact with the sea. The Phoenicians, who, according to their traditions as variously interpreted, came to the coast of Lebanon either from the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea, 49 brought to their favorable maritime location a different endowment from that of the land-trading Philis- tines, who moved up from the south to occupy the sand- choked shores of Palestine, 50 or from that of the Jews, bred to the grasslands of Mesopotamia and the gardens of Judea, who only at rare periods in their history forced their way to the sea. 81 The unindented coast stretching from Cape Car- mel south to the Nile delta never produced a maritime people and never achieved maritime importance, till a race of expe- rienced mariners like the Greeks planted their colonies and built their harbor moles on the shores of Sharon and Philis- tia. 62 So on the west face of Africa, from the Senegal south- COAST PEOPLES 267 ward along the whole Guinea Coast to Benguela, all evidences of kinship and tradition among the local tribes point to an origin on the interior plains and a recent migration sea- ward, 53 so that no previous schooling enabled them to exploit the numerous harbors along this littoral, as did later the sea- bred Portuguese and English. Not only the accessibility of the coast from the sea, but Habitability also its habitability enters as a factor into its historical * coasts importance. A sandy desert coast, like that of Southwest f . . . m maritime Africa and much of the Peruvian littoral, or a sterile moun- development tain face, like that of Lower California, excludes the people of the country from the sea. Saldanha Bay, the one good natural harbor on the west coast of Cape Colony, is worthless even to the enterprising English, because it has no supply of fresh water. 54 The slowness of the ancient Egyptians to take the short step forward from river to marine navigation can undoubtedly be traced to the fact that the sour swamps, barren sand-dunes, and pestilential marshes on the seaward side of the Nile delta must have always been sparsely popu- lated as they are to-day, 55 and that a broad stretch of sandy waste formed their Red Sea littoral. On the other hand, where the hem of the continents is fer- tile enough to support a dense population, a large number of people are brought into contact with the sea, even where no elaborate articulation lengthens the shoreline. When this teeming humanity of a garden littoral is barred from land- ward expansion by desert or mountain, or by the already overcrowded population of its own hinterland, it wells over the brim of its home country, no matter how large, and over- flows to other lands across the seas. The congested popula- tion of the fertile and indented coast of southern China, though not strictly speaking a sea-faring people, found an outlet for their redundant humanity and their commerce in the tropical Sunda Islands. By the sixth century their trad- ing junks were doing an active business in the harbors of Java, Sumatra, and Malacca ; they had even reached Ceylon and the Persian Gulf, and a little later were visiting the great focal market of Aden at the entrance of the Red Sea. 56 A strong infusion of Chinese blood improved the Malay stock 268 COAST PEOPLES in the Sunda Islands, and later in North Borneo and certain of the Philippines, whither their traders and emigrants turned in the fourteenth century, when ilu-y found their op- portunities curtailed in the archipelago to the south by the spread of Islam. 57 Now the "yellow peril" threatens the whole circle of these islands from Luzon to Sumatra. Similarly India, first from its eastern, Inter from its west- ern coast, sent a stream of traders, Buddhist priests, and col- onists to the Sunda Islands, and especially to Java, as early as the fifth century of our era, whence Indian civilization, religion, and elements of the Sanskrit tongue spread to Bor- neo, Sumatra, Bali, Lombok, and even to some smaller islands among the Molucca group. 58 The Hindus became the dominant commercial nation of the Indian Ocean long before the great development of Arabian sea power, and later shared the trade of the East African coast with the merchants of Oman and Yemen. 5J) To-day they form a considerable mer- cantile class in the ports of Mascat, Aden, Zanzibar, Pemba, and Natal. On the coasts of large fertile areas like China and India, however, maritime activity comes not as an early, but as an eventual development, assumes not a dominant, but an inci- dental historical importance. The coastlands appearing development, early on the maritime stage of history, and playing a bril- liant part in the drama of the sea, have been habitable, but their tillable fields have been limited either in fertility, as in New England, or in amount, as in Greece, or in both respects, as in Norway. But if blessed with advantageous location for international trade and many or even a few fairly good har- bors, such coasts tend to develop wide maritime dominion and colonial expansion. 60 Great fertility in a narrow coastal bolt barred from the interior serves to concentrate and energize the maritime ac- tivities of the nation. The -20-mile wide plain stretching along the foot of the Lebanon range from Antioch to Cape Carmel is even now the garden of Syria. 01 In ancient Phoe- nician days its abundant crops and vines supported luxuriant cities and a teeming population, which sailed and traded and colonized to the Atlantic outskirts of Europe and Africa. Geograph- ic con- ditions for brilliant maritime COAST PEOPLES 269 Moreover, their maritime ventures had a wide sweep as early as 1100 B. c. Quite similar to the Phoenician littoral and almost duplicating its history, is the Oman seaboard of east- ern Arabia. Here again a fertile coastal plain sprinkled with its "hundred villages," edged with a few tolerable har- bors, and backed by a high mountain wall with an expanse of desert beyond, produced a race of bold and skilful navi- gators, 62 who in the Middle Ages used their location between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea to make themselves the dominant maritime power of the Indian ocean. With them maritime expansion was typically wide in its sweep and rapid in its development. Even before Mohammed's time they had reached India ; but under the energizing influences of Islam, by 758 they had established a flourishing trade with China, for which they set up way stations or staple-points in Canton and the Sunda Islands. 63 First as voyagers and merchants, then as colonists, they came, bringing their wares and their religion to these distant shores. Marco Polo, visit- ing Sumatra in 1260, tells us the coast population was "Saracen," but this was probably more in religion than in blood. 64 Oman ventures, seconded by those of Yemen, reached as far south as east. The trading stations of Ma- disha and Barawa were established on the Somali coast of East Africa in 908, and Kilwa 750 miles further south in 925. In the seventeenth century the Oman Arabs dislodged the intruding Portuguese from all this coast belt down to the present northern boundary of Portuguese East Africa. Even so late as 1850 their capital, Mascat, sent out fine merchant- men that did an extensive carrying trade, and might be seen loading in the ports of British India, in Singapore, Java, and Mauritius. Brittany's active part in the maritime history of France Soil of is