Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
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The redundant population of crowded western and southern Europe also seek these sparsely inhabited Tropics, but they come heavily handicapped by the necessity of acclimatization. They leave their homes from Trondhjem and Stockholm in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, where the mean annual temperatures vary from 5° to 17° C, (41° to 63° F.), to seek the Torrid Zone which averages 25° C. or 77° F. over most of its territory. The effects of a tropical climate are due to intense heat, to its long duration without the respite conferred by a bracing winter season, and its combination with the high degree of humidity prevailing over most of the Torrid Zone. These are conditions advantageous to plant life, but hardly favorable to human development. They produce certain derangements in the physiological functions of heart, liver, kidneys and organs of reproduction. Bodily temperature rises, while susceptibility to disease and rate of mortality show an increase ominous for white colonization. The general effect is intense enervation; this starts a craving for stimulants and induces habits of alcoholism which are accountable for many bodily ills usually attributed to direct climatic influences. Transfer to the Tropics tends to relax the mental and moral fiber, induces indolence, self-indulgences and various excesses which lower the physical tone.1435 The social control of public opinion in the new environment is weak, while temptation, due to both climatic and social causes, is peculiarly strong. The presence of an inferior, more or less servile native population, relaxes both conscience and physical energy just when both need a tonic. The result is general enervation, deterioration both as economic and political agents.
This is the effect of climate which has had the most far-reaching and persistent historical consequences. Our study of the historical movements of peoples in the northern hemisphere revealed a steady influx from colder into tropical and sub-tropical lands, followed always by enervation and loss of national efficiency, due partly to the debilitating heat of the new habitat, partly to its easier conditions of living, whether the intruders came as conquerors and appropriated the fat of the land, or as immigrant colonists who dropped into slack methods of agriculture, because rain and sun and soil made their reluctant labor scarcely necessary. Everywhere in the Tropics the enervating effects of heat, moisture, and abundance make not only the natives averse to steady work, but start the energetic European immigrant down the same easy descent to Avernus. Passing over the deterioration of the Aryans in India, the Persians in Mesopotamia, and the Vandals in Africa, we find that modern instances show the transformation to be very rapid. The French who since 1715 have occupied the islands of Réunion and Mauritius have lost much of their thrift and energy, though their new homes lie just within the southern tropic, and are blessed with an oceanic climate. Yet the volunteer troops sent by Réunion to aid in the recent subjugation of the Hovas in Madagascar proved to be utterly useless.1436 The Spaniards who come to-day to Mexico have great energy, born of their former hard conditions of life in Spain. But their children are reared in a country whose mean annual temperature, even on the plateau, exceeds that of Spain by 10°C. (or 18°F.), a difference equal to that between Mobile and New York, or Madrid and Christiania. Hence they are less energetic and vigorous, while the third generation are typical Mexicans in their easy-going way of life.1437 The Germans who recently have colonized southern Brazil in great numbers show a similar deterioration under similar increase of mean annual temperature, combined with somewhat greater humidity, which intensifies the debilitating effects of the heat. An investigation made in 1900 by the International Harvester Company of America revealed the fact that the German farmer in the State of Santa Catharina rarely cultivated over one acre of grain.1438 Much of the iron in the blood and conscience of the New England missionary stock which went to Hawaii two generations ago has been dissolved out by the warm rain and balmy air of the islands.
In all these instances the white race has been successfully transplanted. It has domiciled itself on the borders of the Tropics and has propagated its kind, though it has abated some of the vigorous qualities which characterized it in its temperate fatherland. In the real Tropics like India, Cochin China, the Malay Archipelago, and Central Africa, the whole perplexing and urgent problem of European colonization turns on the difficulty or impossibility of acclimatization; and this in turn affects the whole economic, ethnic and political destiny of present colonial holdings. If acclimatization is impossible, the alternative is an imported ruling class, constantly invalided and as constantly renewed, aided by a similar commercial body acting as superintendents of labor; the whole machine of government and economic exploitation is supported by a permanent servile native population, doing the preeminently tropical work of agriculture, which is so fatal to the white man in a torrid climate. This means that the conquering white race of the Temperate Zone is to be excluded by adverse climatic conditions from the productive but undeveloped Tropics, unless it consents to hybridization, like the Spaniards and Portuguese of tropical America. In that national struggle for existence which is a struggle for space, it means an added advantage for the Mediterranean peoples, that they are more tolerant of a torrid climate than the blond Teutons, whose disability in this regard is pronounced; it means that the aptitude of the Chinese for a wide range of climatic accommodation, from the Arctic circle to the equator, lends color to "the yellow peril."
In contrast to the monotonous extremes of climate in the hot and cold zones, temperate lands are characterized by the intermediate degrees of annual temperature and marked seasonal diversity which are so favorable to human development. In Arctic lands labor is paralyzed by cold as it is by heat in the enervating and overproductive Tropics. In one, the growing season is too short and ill-favored; in the other, too long to stimulate man to sustained industry. Hence the Temperate Zones, whose climate avoids both these extremes and abounds in contrasts, whose summers are productive enough to supply food for the winter, and whose winters give both motive and energy for the summer's work, are richer in cultural possibilities and hence in historical importance.
The advantage of the Temperate Zone is not only its moderate and adequate allowance of heat, but its contrast of seasons. Beyond the range of a vertical sun, grades of temperature change rapidly from latitude to latitude and from summer to winter. The seasons bring variety of activities, which sharply react upon one another. Manufactures were in their origin chiefly winter industries, as they still are in small isolated communities. The modern factory system flourishes best in cooler parts of the Temperate Zone, where the agricultural demands of the summer, spreading over a shorter period, leave a longer time for winter work, and where that once long winter of the Glacial Period, by the scouring action of the ice cap, has reduced the fertile area of the northern fields. The factory system is also favored, as Heinrich von Treitschke maintains, by the predominance of cool or cold weather, which facilitates the concentration of numerous workmen in large buildings, and renders possible long labor hours the year round,1439 —conditions unthinkable in a warm climate. The iron and steel industries which have grown up about Birmingham, Alabama, find that the long hot summers and mild winters reduce the efficiency of their skilled labor imported from the North.
The length of the seasons is of conspicuous importance. It determines, for instance, whether a given climate permits continuous field work with summer and winter crops, whether field work is possible at all, and how long it is interrupted by excessive cold. Buckle maintains that climate not only enervates or invigorates man, but affects also the constancy of his work and his capacity for sustained labor throughout the year. He considers "that no people living in a very northern latitude have ever possessed that steady and unflinching industry for which the inhabitants of temperate regions are remarkable" and assigns as a reason "that the severity of the weather, and, at some seasons, the deficiency of light, render it impossible for the people to continue their usual out-of-door employments." The result of this he finds to be desultory habits of work, which help to make the national character fitful and capricious. He cites in illustration of his principle the people of the Scandinavian and Iberian peninsulas, whom he finds marked "by a certain instability and fickleness of character," owing to the fact that in Norway and Sweden agricultural labor experiences long interruptions, due to the severity of the winter and the shortness of the days; in Spain and Portugal owing to the heat and drought of summer.1440 The extreme continental climate of northern of Russia with its violent contrast of the seasons, its severe and protracted winters, enables Leroy-Beaulieu to make a safer application of this principle to the empire of the Czars, which, unlike Scandinavia, feels no ameliorating effect from the mild Atlantic winds and commands no alternative industries like dairy farming, fisheries, and maritime trade.1441 Hence Leroy-Beaulieu attributes the unsystematic, desultory habits of work prevailing among the northern peasants to the long intermission of labor in winter, and to the alternation of a short period of intense activity with a long period of enforced idleness. He finds them resembling southern peoples in their capacity for sudden spurts of energy rather than sustained effort, thinks them benumbed by the sloth of the far north, which is not unlike the sloth of the south.1442
The dominant continental and central location of Russia enables its climatic extremes to operate with little check. The peripheral location of Scandinavia in the path of the Atlantic winds modifies its climate to a mild oceanic type, and its dominant maritime situation gives its people the manifold resources of a typical coast land. Hence Buckle's estimate of national character in the Scandinavian Peninsula has little basis as to fact or cause. Irregularity of agricultural labor does not mean here cessation of all labor, and hence does not produce the far-reaching effect ascribed to it. Only about one-third of the Norwegian population is engaged in agriculture. The restriction of its arable and meadow land to 3 per cent. of the whole territory, and the fact that a large proportion of the people are employed in shipping and the fisheries,1443 are due to several geographic factors besides climate. The same thing is true of Sweden in a modified degree.
Caution should be exercised in drawing conclusions from climate alone or from only one phase of its influence. The duration and intensity of the seasons affects not only the manner of work, but the whole mode of life of a people. On the Yukon, in Iceland, and the high mountain valleys of the Alps, winter puts a check not only upon out-of-door labor, but upon all public or community life. Intercourse stops or is greatly restricted. The outside world drops away. In Iceland, the law courts are in session only in summer when the roads by sea and land are open. In the Kentucky mountains the district schools close before Christmas, when the roads become impassable from rain and snow; the summer is the gala time for funeral services, for only then can the preacher or "circuit-rider" reach the graves made in the winter. Therefore the funerals
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